Archive for December, 2007

Let’s stop planting sterile churches!

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

I came across this great article by Carol Davis, entitled Let’s Stop Planting Sterile Churches, via Guy Muse’s blog.  In it, Carol talks about the difference between church growth and church reproduction.  In Manila, Philippines, she noticed that some churches were planted quickly, always produced their own leadership, were never dependent on outside funds, and always reproduced.  Other churches, by contrast, were planted slowly, were dependent on outside help, never reproduced, and could never produce their own leadership.  Why is this so?  I’ll let you read her article for the answers.  It’s not too lengthy, and well worth the time.

Here are a couple of excerpts:

Now I have a very simple mind. I knew that anything that was alive was reproducing. It is a natural thing for trees and plants to drop their seeds and spontaneously spring up. We don’t try to have babies, we try to not have babies. In fact, if an organism does not reproduce, we say it is sick, dead or sterile…

…The second thing Charles told me was, “I never do anything that a one-week-old Christian can’t do. If I preached like I did in my home church they would think they couldn’t carry the gospel until they had my skills, my abilities, my training. If I prayed like I did in my home church they would think they couldn’t talk with God until they had words and phrases like mine. I don’t bring a worship leader because if I did they would think they couldn’t worship God until they had someone trained.

“Everything they see me do, they can do. Sometimes I don’t get back to the area for several weeks. But since they didn’t know they couldn’t do it, they went and told their cousin in another area and they already had another group started.”

That’s simplicity. We have made things so complex and required so much training…

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How to make disciples – the simple way (part 2)

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007

You can read Part 1 of this post here.

Okay, so in the first post on this subject, we established that, according to the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20), making disciples boils down to baptizing them and teaching them all that Jesus commands us.  We should find our curriculum for discipleship, then, by looking in the Gospels for the commands Jesus gave His disciples.  Remember, the earliest disciples did not have the New Testament; therefore, we should be able to find all essential material for discipleship without having to go to the Epistles.  I do not say this to devalue the complete Word of God in any way, but if Jesus told his disciples to teach new disciples all He had commanded them, this must be able to be done without the aid of the written New Testament.

Let’s look at seven major commands Jesus gave His disciples that we should be passing along as we teach others:

  1. Repent, Believe, Be Baptized, and Receive the Holy Spirit (Mark 1:15; John 3:16; Matthew 28:18-20; John 20:22; Luke 24:46-49)
    Repentance and belief are essential for entering into the Kingdom of God.  If you look at the messages preached by John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, Paul, and others in the New Testament, you will find that they always preached a message of repentance.  As seen in Mark 1:15 and elsewhere, we are also commanded to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.  Jesus told His disciples in John 20:22 to receive the Holy Spirit, and He told them to wait in Jerusalem until they had been clothed with power from on high.  The importance of the Holy Spirit in the life of the disciple is confirmed through the early Church in Acts.
  2. Baptize New Believers (Matthew 28:18-20)
    Fundamental to being a disciple is making other disciples.  If I am not making new disciples, I cannot rightly say that I am a disciple of Jesus.  In making new disciples, we are to baptize those who are responding to Christ in repentance and belief.
  3. Make Disciples of Jesus (Matthew 28:18-20)
    The second part of making new disciples is to teach them everything Jesus commanded us, which would mean teaching them to obey these same commands that we are trying to obey.
  4. Love (Matthew 22:34-40)
    Jesus said that love for God and love for others was the essence of the Law and the Prophets.  In many other places in the Gospels and throughout Scripture, we are given more precise instructions as to what loving God and loving others looks like.
  5. Pray (Matthew 6:5-13)
    Jesus gives basic instructions on prayer in Matthew Chapter 6.  His model prayer found here gives us direction on what kinds of things should be the subject of our prayers.
  6. Break Bread (Matthew 26:26-29)
    At the Last Supper, Jesus gave His disciples an observance that was to be passed down through the generations.
  7. Give (Matthew 6:1-4)
    Jesus commanded His disciples to give, and this is emphasized in many places in Scripture outside of the Gospels, as well.  It’s worth noting that the kind of giving most talked about in the New Testament is giving to those in need.  (As opposed to building buildings, paying local church leaders, etc.)

Okay, so there is our curriculum for discipleship.  Notice how everything listed above comes out of the Gospels.  In fact, if you only had one book of the Bible with which to disciple a new believer to maturity, you could do quite well with Matthew.  Again, this is not to say we should not be teaching disciples other things from Scripture, but we need to get back to majoring in the basics.  Who cares if someone can debate all kinds of difficult doctrines, if they are not obeying the seven basic commands given above?

So what do you think?  Are you able and willing to go make disciples according to the pattern Jesus gave?  It’s not easy, but it is simple.

Note: Thanks to Rob and Anne Thiessen and George Patterson for the material that I am borrowing this list of commands from.  You can download their excellent set of Bible studies for evangelism and discipleship based on Old and New Testament stories and the seven commands of Christ by clicking here.

Posted in Church Planting and Discipleship | 11 Comments »

Random thoughts from the Houston airport

Monday, December 17th, 2007

It’s been, what, a week and a half since I’ve posted?  That’s kind of the way the past couple of weeks have been; I’ve been really busy.  They have also been a couple of the most difficult weeks in recent memory.  I’ll try and explain more in another post.

I’m quickly realizing that I don’t have nearly enough time to blog all the things that I want to blog.  I’d say I have a couple of good ideas a day of things I would like to share, but too many other priorities keep me from writing the posts I would like to.  It’s kind of hard to decide which posts to write.  The ones I most want to write are often ones that would take more time, so it’s easy to just write the posts I can get up more quickly.

I’m traveling right now…our family just flew up to the U.S. this morning from Mexico City.  Erin and the girls are now driving to see some friends in Texas, while I’m getting ready to fly to Tampa, FL and drive back a minivan we bought.  We spent the last couple of days in Mexico City just relaxing and seeing some things.  It was pretty cool.  I took a few good photos, but then realized that we did not bring the computer cable for the camera.  So I guess it’ll be a few days before I can get photos on the blog…

Then I was planning on taking some photos of my road trip from Tampa back to Houston, but I just realized I forgot to get the camera from Erin.  Rats!  A picture is worth a thousand words, and it seems I’m having trouble sitting down to write a thousand words about all the different things we’ve seen.

Stinkin’ Broncos.  I hate it when I have to wait a whole nother offseason for a shot at a return to glory.  As a Bronco fan, you start the season so hopeful, and then this…It’s especially painful as I’m sitting here in Houston, the city where just a few days ago they had their playoff hopes dashed.  I just got caught up reading Andrew Mason’s blog, the editor of the Broncos news, so that didn’t help.  Reading the fans’ comments, it looks like everyone is pretty optimistic about next season, and I am too, but that’s just the problem–I was optimistic about this season, too.  The offseason just seems so long when your team hasn’t lived up to expectations…

About the expression ‘a whole nother’…How on earth are you supposed to write that?  I say it all the time, but it sure looks bad when its written.

Well, it looks like that’s about all the random thoughts I can fit in for now, because we’ll be boarding in a few minutes.  So until the next one, I’m signing off.

Maybe next season, Broncos…yeah, next season will be better…Cutler will be an All-Pro, we won’t have so many injuries, we’ll fill in holes in the offensive line, a couple good new players on defense, maybe the defensive line will finally be good like we say every year.  Oh, and hopefully special teams won’t be so atrocious.  Yep, next year will be better!  Just over seven months until training camp starts…

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Trimester Spanish evaluations

Friday, December 7th, 2007

Spouses and apprentices included, we have 13 people on our GFM staff right now.  Language learning is always one of the biggest challenges for any cross-cultural missionary, and it certainly doesn’t happen by accident.  We have recognized the need to take an active role in the language learning of our staff.  Over the past several years, we have been developing ways to help them learn Spanish and to hold them accountable for doing so.

In the past year, this led to the development of periodic Spanish evaluations.  Each staff member is evaluated once every 4 months, until he or she has reached Level 3 or higher on the LAMP language/culture scale.  The idea behind the evaluations is to give us a regular check of each team member’s Spanish ability.  Based on that check, we then develop a Spanish learning plan for the coming four months for each staff member.  The Spanish plan is tailored to help them in the areas they most need to work on.

So today we had our trimester evaluations.  Each staff member did several exercises and was graded on them by the Spanish committee.  The Spanish committee was made up of Grant and Jenn Haynes (our directors), a local Mexican woman, and a gal from our missionary training school who is Mexican and speaks fluent Spanish.  The exercises were as follows:

  • Read aloud a couple of pages from a book in Spanish.
  • Give a 5-minute sermonette on one or two of the main commands that Christ gave.
  • Translate, line by line, a monologue given in English into Spanish.
  • Describe, in English, a dialogue in Spanish between the two Mexican women.
  • Dialogue with the local Mexican woman, answering questions she asks.
  • Do a written evaluation, consisting of translating English sentences in to Spanish.

Through the above exercises, each staff member is evaluated in 5 areas: Extent of vocabulary, grammar, accent, fluidity, and listening comprehension.  The Spanish committee scores the person on a 1 to 10 scale in each of the 5 areas.  This gives us a somewhat objective record that we can compare from test to test to see what sort of progress the staff member is making.  So goals are set according to the evaluations, accountability is based on the goals, and progress is measured through the ongoing evaluations.

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What really happened to John James of the Newsboys

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

I, like so many Newsboys fans, was really disappointed years ago when they announced that lead singer John James was leaving the band.  At the time, the public was told that he was leaving for a preaching ministry in Australia.  Well, that wasn’t exactly the truth.  In fact, it was apparently a flat-out lie.

On the stage, John James was enjoying incredible fame and success, but behind the scenes, his life had fallen apart.  I came across this article as it was mentioned in the YouTube comments for the video that’s in my previous post.  It’s a great read.  In the interview, James gives an extremely honest account of his hard fall, the near destruction of his life, and the subsequent work of restoration God has done in his life in the years since.  It’s powerful.

It kind of makes you sick or maybe ticks you off to realize the money-making machine the Christian music industry has become.  It’s amazing the pressure that puts on artists like John James to keep hidden problems of the magnitude of those he was having.  We have that problem throughout the Church, though.  Right Ted Haggard, and all the rest of us who have hidden sin at one time or another because of the shame that confessing it would bring?  I have a lot of respect for John James for coming clean and sharing the truth about what happened and the powerful testimony of what God has done in his life.

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Old school Newsboys

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Those who know me well know that I’ve been a pretty big Newsboys fan for a number of years now.  Most people started getting on the Newsboys bandwagon around the time of the Not Ashamed album or the Going Public album (with the song “Shine”), if not later.  What not everyone knows is that they actually released three albums before Not Ashamed: Read All About It, Hell Is for Wimps, and Boys Will Be Boyz.  And I’ve also heard that even before those they released an album in Australia that never came out in the U.S., called Revenge of the Wombat, or something similar.  I’m not positive about that one, though.

I was poking around on YouTube, really hoping to find one of their rap songs off of Boys Will Be Boyz.  If you haven’t heard the Newsboys try and rap, it’s hilarious!  I didn’t find any of their rap, but I did find a good old school song called “Kingdom Man” off of Boys Will Be Boyz.  Yes, that was Peter Furler on the drums back in those days.  This was when John James was still the lead singer, for those who remember him.

YouTube Preview Image

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Books are dead

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

I’ve started reading quite a few business and marketing blogs lately.  I’m not exactly sure why they interest me so much, but they do.  John Moore of Brand Autopsy put me onto an interesting post by Joe Wikert where he reviews Jeff Gomez’s book Print is Dead.  (I know, publishing a book about the death of books is a bit ironic, huh?)

To state the obvious, our modes of communication are changing.  Books are going to be around for a long time, but they will not continue to have the same importance they have had as a communication medium, especially with the younger generations.  Some worried parents commented on Joe’s post, insisting that reading is important and that we should still teach and encourage kids to read books.  I agree with this, but when it comes to propogating ideas, books are no longer going to be the central avenue by which that dissemination takes place.

When there are ideas worth spreading – and I think there are plenty in the mission world right now – we are going to have to find ways other than books to spread those ideas.  Books are a one-way form of communication where the author speaks and the readers listen.  They cost money and are limited in supply.  More and more, people prefer the two-way communication and discussion that is possible through electronic and other means.  That’s what I like about blogs – comments allow a discussion to take place, and blog posts break ideas down into bite-sized chunks.  Let’s face it – these days we’re rarely capable of assimilating information in large doses.

As a blogger, I can start a conversation, receive feedback from others, and present new information as my ideas evolve.  I used to think I would possibly publish a book one day, but now I’m not sure.  I might just stick to blogging.  At any rate, if the ideas I have don’t catch on and start to spread through this blog first, then they’re hardly worth the time and money it would take to put them into book form.

Revolutionaries in the mission world, start using more innovative means of communication!  I have searched for blogs by a number of authors I would like to hear from, but I haven’t found much.  These are authors who, judging by the print material they publish, are finding time to write.  I would like to see more of them enter the blogosphere so that the rest of us could better interact with them.

What do you think, readers?  Do you agree with the above assessments?  If so, drop a comment and join in the conversation!  If you don’t agree, I suppose you’ll be too busy reading a book to comment…

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Winning the league soccer championship

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

I joined a local soccer team back in May.  This has proven to be one of the better ways I’ve found to develop good friendships with non-Christians.  It is also meeting my need for exercise and outdoor activity.  It’s always nice when you can kill two birds with one stone.  (Really, we’re trying to do a better job of killing multiple birds with one stone in everything we do.  Church planting is a lifestyle, not a job.  As we work, eat, shop, and play, we try to plant seeds of the gospel and make disciples wherever we go.)

My team was a new team that was forming for the season that just finished.  We ended up doing really well and making a run through the playoffs at the end of the season.  Yesterday, we played for the league championship and won.  The game was tied 1-1 at the end of regulation (I scored our goal on a header), and then it was still tied 1-1 after 30 minutes of overtime, so it had to be decided in a penalty kick shootout.  We won the shootout 4-2.  I got to be one of our team’s 5 shooters and scored on my shot.

The way soccer works, there are usually several leagues.  At the end of each season, the best couple of teams from each league move up to the league above them, and the bottom two teams in each league move down.  This keeps the competition good in each league and makes the top one a really tough one.

There are 3 leagues in our town, and we had to start at the bottom one since we were a new team.  Since we won the championship, we now get to move up to the second league at the start of the next season, which will be underway soon.

Below are some photos Erin took of me playing yesterday.  They didn’t turn out great because of the distance, but oh well.

Me getting ready to cross the ball (below):

Here I’m just about to put in what would have been the winning goal in overtime, but I was barely offsides:

This is me making my penalty kick during the shootout at the end of the game:

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Erin is 28!

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Well, after my recent musings about turning 28, I’m glad that I’m no longer the only 28-year-old in the family.  Erin just had her 28th birthday on Saturday.  We celebrated with pizza and a movie the night before her birthday, and dinner and shoe shopping in town the night of her birthday.  Instead of a cake, Erin wanted flan, which is a delicious, custard-like Mexican dessert with caramel sauce.

Erin’s birthday

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