Basics In Place

I remember a brief exchange I had with King Arthur Sido.

In it I was buzzed up with some article about church planting and that kind of thing. In essence King Arthur’s response was that it was more important to be about the business of sharing the gospel and making disciples as Jesus taught than prioritise on other catchy church plant and church growth gimmicks. At the time I shrugged off what King Arthur was saying because the article looked like the real deal and worth considering carefully. It probably was worth considering, but it’s something that I can remember more about King Arthur’s comments, than the article. Among other things in 2017, I have grown to appreciate just how important it is to get the basics right and take it from there.

For example, there’s no point in making big wishes about big things until you can show yourself faithful in the small things. Some want to save the world and can’t save themselves. Some dream of preaching to millions and struggle to preach to themselves in the mirror. Some clamour for a big church, but haven’t got in the simple habit of sharing the gospel, building relationships, making disciples and seeing what comes from that. Some want a great church and don’t invest in simple one to one relationships where a lot of the one-anothers commended in scripture are put into practice.

I heard the story of a hard worker supporting a school as a teaching assistant and the school went around its business, but never got round to communicating with all the staff basic developments in the school life. Unsurprisingly they didn’t do well in external governmental inspections and part of that was down to the lack of basic effective communication with all staff. This worker was alienated on a day to day basis and only kept going for the sake of the children, but could see that even this could only go so far before the children suffered too, all because the basics were not covered.

It would be a massive shame come the final day if our response to Jesus for all that we did was to miss out just because we didn’t get the basics done. We didn’t love the ones close to us, we didn’t share good news with those in our circles of influence, we didn’t invest in relationships and practice disciple-making, we didn’t activate whatever it was God placed in us to be a blessing to others. We didn’t do those things, but we were expecting change on a mass scale.

It’s why it’s worth just getting some of the basic essentials in place and see where grow from there.

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden