Archive for September, 2008

What discipleship is not

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

As I have been learning more the past year and a half about what good discipleship is, I’m also learning what it is not:

It is not a class

The end goal of discipleship must always be obedience. In Matthew 28:20, Jesus says that discipleship is “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (emphasis mine). James 1:22-25 underscores the importance of doing the word, not just listening to it. “Discipleship” that focuses only on gaining knowledge and correct doctrine with little practical application is not true Jesus-style discipleship at all.

It is not control

Jesus did not make all his disciples’ decisions for them. Disciples must be free to act according to their own volition and, sometimes, to mess up. Failure can be a great teacher. Disciplers who don’t give their disciples room to err may be stunting the growth of those under their care. Overcontrol can cause a disciple to have an unhealthy level of dependency on his/her discipler.

It is not a 12-week program

Discipleship is ongoing. Because the goal of discipleship is obedience to Christ, and because obedience to Christ takes a lifetime to live out, no believer ever graduates from needing discipleship.

It is not an activity to be performed by an elite few

Jesus commanded His disciples to make disciples, so if you’re a disciple you must be making new ones.

Is there anything you would add to this list? Who are you discipling, and who is discipling you?

Posted in Church Planting and Discipleship | 3 Comments »

16 questions to see if you’re living a wasteful life

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Check out these questions shared by Jaeson Ma from the book Happy Are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom by Thomas Dubay.

How to Know if You are Wasting Your Life

Read the below questions from Happy Are Your Poor and check your heart to see if you are living a superfluous & wasteful life?

1. By what standards do I determine what is necessary?
2. Do I collect unneeded things? Do I hoard possessions?
3. May I, on Gospel principles, buy clothes at the dictates of fashion designers in Paris and New York? Am I a slave to fashion? Do I live in other people’s minds? Why really do I have all the clothes I have: shirts, blouses, suits, dresses, shoes, gloves?
4. Am I an inveterate nibbler? Do I eat because I am bored? Do the weight charts convict me of superfluity in eating and drinking? Do I take second helpings simply for the pleasure they afford?
5. Do I keep unneeded books and papers and periodicals and notes?
6. Do I retain two or three identical items (clocks, watches, scarves)of which I really need only one?
7. Do I spend money on trinkets an unnecessary conveniences?
8. In the winter, do we keep our thermostat at a setting higher than health experts advise: 68 degrees?
9. When I think of my needs, do I also think of the far more drastic needs of the teeming millions in the third world?
10. Do I need the traveling I do more than the poor need food and clothing and medical care?
11. Am I right in contributing to the billions of dollars spent each year on cosmetics? How much of this can be called necessary?
12. Is smoking necessary for me?
13. Is drinking necessary for me?
14. Do I need to examine exactly what I mean by saying to myself, “I need this”?
15. Can I honestly say that all I use or possess is used or possessed for the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31)? Would He be given more glory by some other use?
16. Do I in the pauline sense “mind the things above, not those on earth” (Col 3:1-2) (pg 112)

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Could any of these ideas work for your church?

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Guy Muse, one of my favorite bloggers, is a missionary to Ecuador who is currently on home assignment in the U.S. He recently shared some thoughts he has since being reimmersed in traditional North American churches after a long time away. I thought he had some interesting ideas that someone just might be crazy enough to try. Here is some of what he said:

After now sitting through three months of worship services and Sunday School classes in half a dozen different churches, what follows are a few observations coming from someone who has long been out of practice of “going to church” as is commonly practiced here in America.

Sunday Morning Sermon. Instead of preaching 30-45 minutes and then everyone going home and promptly forgetting all/most of what has been so conscientiously prepared, why not share a reduced 15-20 minute message and spend the balance of time allowing interaction by the congregation? This personal interaction with the message would bear far more fruit than simply listening to a good man preach. Depending upon the size of the church and seating layout, this could be done in several different ways:

1) The pastor could end with a few key questions that get at the heart of what he was trying to share. As people begin to respond back to the pastor a dialog could ensue amongst all those present. The pastor could facilitate the discussion as several share their wisdom and understanding from their rich experience.

2) People could be encouraged to break up into small groups and share with one another what they sense God is saying to them through what has been shared through the Word.

3) Ask people to share how they intend on applying what they have learned from the Word. What specific actions is the Spirit of God impressing upon them in response to the message? Wouldn’t 10-15 minutes praying for one another and applying the message with their individual situations have a more meaningful impact than simply one person doing all the talking?

It is strange that week after week so much effort has gone in to preparing good Biblical messages, only to be concluded with an invitation which usually has nothing to do with what has been preached. Sometimes 2-3 people will go forward during the invitation, but rarely does it have anything to do with the preceding 30-45 minutes. Why is the bulk of time given to one brother speaking week after week while the remaining 99% just sit and listen? Is church primarily about the message preached by the pastor? What happened to the exhortation by the writer of Hebrews, And let us consider one another, to incitement of love and of good works, not forsaking the assembling together of ourselves, as is the custom of some, but exhorting, and by so much more as you see the Day drawing near?

Read on to hear his reflections on the offering, Sunday School, singing and praise, and prayer.

Posted in Church Life | No Comments »

The lessons I learned this summer

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

It would seem God has decided to use these few months as a refining time in my life. This has been neither something I was looking for nor something that has been particularly pleasant, but I am very grateful to Him for the results. In fact, at this point I’m beginning to embrace it. And the process is continuing.

Here is some of what God has shown me:

For a person who likes leadership and has viewed it as a strength of mine, it was disconcerting to realize my entire leadership style needed to change. In a sense, I can say I am beginning to learn true leadership for the first time. Leadership is influence, and one does not need a position of authority in order to positively influence others. What I knew how to do before was to manage. Managers, when in a position of authority, are able to use external controls to keep people doing what they should be doing. Take away the authority and controls, and a manager can no longer influence others effectively.

Leaders, on the other hand, influence others on a deeper level by inspiring them to do the right thing. This they are able to do sans external controls.

Example: I have been overseeing a handful of church planting apprentices who are learning Spanish. We use a good language learning program that is hard work but beneficial, and I really believe in it. I took on new apprentices who I did not know well at all, laid down all the rules about who they could talk to, where they could go, and what they had to do, and then cut them loose. They were frustrated by the level of control I exerted, and within months some of them were ready to give up and go home. I came to see that they had not bought into the system because I had tried to force them to do the right thing by giving them rules, rather than inspiring them with the way their sacrifices would pay off.

This was the first big thing God showed me, that I need to influence people through inspiration rather than rules. Interestingly, I have known all this in my head for some time. I have read leadership books, talked leadership theory, and listened to some of the best leadership speakers around. I could have given the right answers on any classroom test on leadership. I am living proof that you haven’t really learned something until you apply it to your life.

The next thing God showed me was the reason I want to control people. The reason I prefer control is that I often do not trust people, and the reason I do not trust them is I do not have adequate relationships with them. The reason I do not have adequate relationships, I realized, is I have not left time in my life for this. I have packed my schedule full of tasks, trying to make every little thing happen “for the ministry”, which left me very little people time. I suspect many of the things I have been running ragged trying to accomplish the last couple of years were things God never intended for me to be doing.

I am having to repent of controlling people, not trusting people, not having close relationships with people, and not making time for people. Each domino caused another to fall. This repentance is very much a process, because I am having to break very engrained patterns in my life. First and foremost, I want to have closer relationships with others. It’s all about people, after all. In the context of these relationships I will be a more effective leader. People are influenced by those they trust, but no one trusts someone they don’t know. I now see how trusting others and inspiring them is a much more loving and respectful way to treat them.

I am a few weeks into a process of trying to reorganize my life, get rid of unecessary tasks and demands on my time, and dedicate more of my best time to people. It’s not easy, and I’ve suffered setbacks. One disappointing realization is that I think some of the people closest to me will be among the last ones to feel the effects of my change. I am encouraged, though, by a few positive steps I’ve taken so far. If you were to take a moment to pray for me in all of this, I would sure appreciate it.

God is really good, though. This was a blind spot in my life, and He has been gracious enough and patient enough to show it to me and get me on the road to change.

Posted in Leadership, Personal Reflections | No Comments »

Testimony from Student Church Planting Experience (CPX)

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

This is old, but it was too cool not to share. Jaeson Ma blogged about the Student CPX, a month-long training that took place this summer to equip college students to plant churches on their campuses. Here is an excerpt from his post:

When we first got there we found out the dormitory we were staying at had a horrible history. Over 700 Native American children were starved to death with disease/famine in the basement in relationship to the American government nearly 70 years ago. The first day, our student missionaries were getting sick, doubting their purpose there, others were hearing voices in the hallways and some even encountered evil spirits in the dormitory. We knew it would be a spiritual battle between light and darkness. We had to come in an opposite spirit of faith, hope and love. So we set up a 24-7 prayer room in the dormitory and began prayer watches on the campus…

Keep reading on Jaeson’s blog to hear the outcome.

College students, watch for another Student CPX next summer! If they do one, the only good excuse for not going is that you’re coming to do a summer internship with GFM :)

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Mexican Independence Day

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Last Tuesday, September 16, was Mexico’s independence day. The fun begins on September 15, when cities have a large nighttime celebration with fireworks. This is capped by the grito (which means the “yell”, basically), usually at midnight, where a leader yells things like, “Viva México!” and “Viva la independencia!”, and the crowd responds by yelling, “Viva!”

The entire month of September is a patriotic month in Mexico, filled with different activities. Here are a few photos from the past couple of months and the night of the grito:

(By the way, my camera phone isn’t so impressive at night…well, or anytime, for that matter.)

These are from the daily flag lowering ceremony that was taking place at our central town park, which is right in front of our main government building

And a few photos from the “clock square” the night of the grito…the whole place was done up in green, white, and red lights with flags, banners, and a 30-foot firework tower. It was pretty sweet; I wish more of it came through in the photos. Thousands of people were downtown for the event, which lasted past midnight.

This is the firework tower, which had parts that spun and colorful flames that spelled out things like, “Viva México!”

Posted in Mexico, Photos | No Comments »

Follow-up to ‘Changes on the horizon for GFM’

Friday, September 19th, 2008

In my last post, I described a couple of strategic discussions GFM staff would be having on our annual staff retreat. Here is the current result of the questions we asked and the subsequent discussions:

How can GFM more effectively disciple those who are part of our body?
We’re not making any large shifts in response to this question, but some positive incremental changes are taking place. Most significantly, our staff has a greater focus this year on the need for good discipleship in the context of relationships. I think we are gradually realizing that programs don’t necessarily produce good disciples, discipleship does. This doesn’t mean that programs can’t produce good disciples, but in order to do so they must incorporate effective relational discipleship.

In the long run, we would like to see every person who is a student, staff member, or apprentice with GFM being discipled in a one-on-one relationship with someone else. This is difficult for us right now, because some of those who would be good disciplers are tied up with other responsibilities (such as learning Spanish), and we are stretched thin overall. For this year, we figured out who is available to disciple others, and then we encouraged each staff member and apprentice to 1) seek out a relationship with someone who will commit to discipling them and/or 2) to set up a regular accountability group with two or three people. We have all done this, and the result is that far more focused discipleship will be taking place this year.

What should be the relationship between the long-term (church planting) and the short-term (mission trips, summer internships, etc.) work?
The outcome of this discussion was interesting. We are now realizing that, with our current strategy, it’s difficult for every mission trip we host to significantly augment the long-term church planting work. Mission trip outreaches in our town are able to serve people in practical ways and help the image of our Mexican non-profit organization, but we are worried that hosting so many trips in our town could also begin to hurt the work due to the presence of so many foreigners year after year. Mission trip outreaches here are able to make new contacts for our church planting team (CPT), but we are also seeing that our CPT is really busy with the relationships they already have and not able to effectively follow up on very many new contacts.

What we are now going to try and do is let the church planting work play a greater role in deciding what outreaches happen on mission trips. If the CPT says a certain outreach in our town would help them, that’s what the mission trip team will do. If CPT doesn’t really need anything at the time of the outreach, then we will take the mission trip team to a village in our area, rather than increasing the foreign presence in our town without providing a definite benefit to the church planting work. We love exposing people to mission work through mission trips, and in the villages they will be able to serve in practical ways while having a more neutral impact on the long-term work. We have plenty of experience taking mission trip teams to villages, because for years that’s always what we did with them. We find that some mission trip teams are happy to serve GFM by helping out with different projects at our base, so we are planning on making that more of an option as well.

Here are the different types of mission trips that may now happen with GFM:

  1. CPT asks for an outreach in our town, so the mission trip team digs a well or puts on a medical clinic or teaches an English class or does anything that the CPT requests.
  2. The team goes out to a village and coordinates with the government to provide some kind of service there. Such outreaches could include things like providing a medical clinic, teaching an English class, or putting on a community health program for kids. Though it is no secret we are Christians, these outreaches would be done under the name of our Mexican non-profit organization, rather than under the name of a church or mission group.
  3. The team goes out to a village and comes under the authority of a Christian church there, serving them in any way they request.
  4. The team stays at our GFM base and helps out with any work projects we may have going on at the time.

As always, all mission trips will continue to include two days of training at our base on the front end of the trip, and a debrief day at the end of the trip. We hope these new options will allow us to continue to expose people to mission work among the least-reached, while also more effectively serving the needs of the long-term work.

Posted in Global Frontier Missions | 2 Comments »