A great article from Penelope Trunk about self-discipline.  Great ideas and a good point about how important this is.

It’s on my heart because I am really beginning to recognize that self-discipline is not just critical for your own personal walk with Jesus, but if you want to do anything of note in life, it indispensible.

Like the President says.

Thanks to Team Pyro I read through an article on the coming collapse of evangelicalism.  There is much truth there but also a lot of pessimism.  I still hold out hope that the picture will not come to pass with that much failure.

Two things from the article and where it intersects with myself.

We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

I do not question this in the slightest.  The failure I see here has come from the home, though.  It has come through disengaged parents who bought into the concept that children need to be given the freedom to choose their own path, with regards to their faith.  There is a difference between giving your child the freedom to inquire and question, and refusing to teach your child the truth.  If you let your own faith in Jesus just be “an option” to your child, you are doing not just a disservice, but you are blindfolding that child and pushing him into a furnace.  He may find his way back out the door before he burns to a cinder, but the odds aren’t good.  If Jesus isn’t the way, the truth and the life for your child, then how can you claim he is yours?

After thinking about what I wrote, maybe I can blame the church after all.  The church failed to teach parents to disciple their kids.  That is a failure of the church.  They failed to communicate to parents the essentiality of passing on their faith to their children – to “Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” (Deut 11:18-19).  How could we miss teaching this to parents?  How did we allow parents to abdicate their roles as their family’s spiritual leaders?

I myself am a product of that.  I am 34 years old and only recently have I really begun to be equipped to really share with someone that faith that I have.  Only recently have I begun to understand why church isn’t just an option for a Sunday morning.  Only recently have I really begun to realize that the Bible isn’t just something to read, but it is LIFE.  What have all these realizations done?  They have spurred me to live my faith in a way that others might call vocationally, but dang it, we ALL need to be living this way!  Our church isn’t can’t be just a few leaders actually following God and the rest just following the leaders.  We need to grasp hold of the treasure we have been given!

A third point – the phrase “…a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”  Take out the young part.  It is the young and old who have fallen into this trap of relying on their emotions as their guide instead of their will.  Through many many books, lessons, and sermons, I have been convinced that love and marriage is not about “falling for someone” and then living in that passion for the rest of your days.  Deciding to marry on that basis is folly and the reason why marriages are failing left, right and centre.  Ever since culture accepted the premise of emotion as the basis for marriage, marriages have been falling apart.  The truth is that love is a choice.  Entering into marriage with a decision and not an emotion lends stability to the marriage, and insulates it against the ebb and flow of emotion, which is fickle and we all know it.

We’ve taught this and I think that most people in the church get that.  But what many, especially the young, but also those who perhaps have experienced major spiritual and emotional highs with their faith, have fallen into this exact same trap with regards to their faith.  Faith is a decision that is not based on emotion, not based on an act of God.  It is based upon your deciding to believe in the cross, in Jesus’ atonement, death and resurrection, and all that comes from that.  If you base your faith in even small part upon the experience of God, or of emotion related to God, then when that goes, you conclude your faith is gone, or diminished somehow.  That means when you do something “spiritual” like praying or singing a worship song and don’t feel anything, you question whether it is all fake because the emotion isn’t there.  How fragile is that?  Where is the bedrock of your faith?  If it is an emotion, then it is here and gone like a breath.  That is not the faith that the Bible describes.  When the Bible speaks of faith, it speaks of a volitional decision.  “…As for me and my house, we WILL serve the Lord.” (Josh 24:15b) Our Lord gave us all a choice – that was why he made us – so that we could choose to love and serve him.  If our choice is based on how we feel then there is nothing to keep it from blowing away.

I’ve gone on pretty long here.  I’ll save the other piece of the article for later.

I connected with a church planter out in Chicago, who is a bit of a marketing whiz.  He has built a website called “Eat Jesus.com” where church planters and church leaders contribute articles based on the theme of how to be “self-feeding” Christians.  I have been asked to contribute articles there, and I am excited to be involved.  Check it out – subscribe, and learn.

It’s a great idea – too many Christians these days only eat “pablum” – spoon-fed Scripture by their pastor every Sunday, with a midweek snack, maybe, if they are involved in some kind of small group or larger group like Young Adults or Youth or Singles or Young Marrieds or Old Timers or MOPS or Men’s Ministry or Women’s Ministry… you get the picture.

Tell me: how healthy are you if you are only fed a bowl of pablum twice a week?  You’d be pretty anemic and starving to death.  Tell me: how often do you need to be eating physical food to nourish your physical body?  Twice?  Three times a day?  More?  Now tell me – if God made our physical bodies to need food regularly – like multiple times a day, how healthy will we be spiritually, if we only feed  spiritually twice a week? Now you get the idea of how important it is that we as Christians become self-feeding.  Our pastors cannot feed us as often as we need to be spiritually healthy.  If we are wondering why our spiritual life seems barren or fruitless, we need look no further than our feeding habits.  A starving, emaciated faith does not produce much fruit.

Jesus said in John 6:53-58, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.   Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.   Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.  Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.   This is the bread that came down from heaven.  Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.” He is speaking about spiritual nourishment.  It doesn’t get plainer than that.  Eatjesus.com and live.

(Crossposted to Confessions of a Shiftless Mind.)

Matt Sweetman was challenged by Ed Stetzer’s words cautioning about the creation of a new way of doing church rather than actually reaching new people with the Gospel.  I’ve wrestled with this from the first, when we came onboard with Community of Hope to help launch this new church plant.  How much should we be prioritizing and seeking Christians to join us in this enterprise?  How much should we be focusing on straight out evangelism, and where is the balance with discipleship?  When have we turned too inwards to reach out?  These tensions are the bane of all churches – part of the problem with North America’s churches in general has come from answering these questions incorrectly, or refusing to even ask these questions.

On the ground, there is a recognition that to start something you need something.  Life does not come from nothing – it comes from a seed.  A church plant needs a core – a seed to synthesize and reproduce.  When Philip and Beth came to Surrey to begin Community of Hope, they had no seed – they needed a seed.  They recognized that it is hard for people to visualize the community that was to come unless there already was a microcosm visible that they could use and model.  Our first core group was that model.  But it needed to be bigger.  But let me step back for a second.

You can, as a pioneering church planter, seek to start that core using new converts.  You could bring people to Jesus, lead them to salvation, then disciple them to the point where they are good models of the type of Christian you want your church to be filled with.  It takes much time and energy for this to happen.  But looking around inside and outside of churches, I think the pragmatic has to recognize that even though the Reformation sought to do away with the Augustinian idea of the invisible church – a church of true believers within the larger church which may or may not include the saved – it is nonetheless still true right up until today.  Even Jesus said that not everyone who cries, “Lord, Lord” will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The longer I serve in church the more I realize that there is more to this walk than the simple saved/unsaved dichotomy.  There is also the whole scale of sanctification that people work through as they work out their salvation with fear and trembling.  To characterize, there are mountains of people, in solid, evangelical churches, who feel no need to pursue instruction – to continue their discipleship and deepen their walk with God, outside the occasional shopping trip to the Christian Bookstore and the purchase of “Your Best Life Now” or “The Purpose Driven Live” which will then collect dust on their bookshelf whilst they read one of  Barack Obama’s biographies or the latest sequel to “Twilight“.  There are still more who are content to simply come on Sunday, listen to the sermon, sing a couple of songs, and go home and watch the football game sunday afternoon without any conception of the importance of service, in the sense of the one they claim to follow, who “came not be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many“.  These people, too, need a church plant to revitalize, activate, and engage in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Who are these people?  They are legion.  And they are wasting space in our churches – swelling the numbers and making leaders feel like successes, when in fact they are presiding over the dead.  The church is to be a light in this world, not a weekend social club, or at best a religious Elks community service club.  When people aren’t discipled properly, they think a stunted, dwarfed faith is complete and healthy and that is just sad.  I fully agree that the church is there to proclaim the Gospel to the lost, but the Great Commission says to make disciples, and if there are people who have a knowledge of Christ, and may even claim to be saved, but are not exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit, are living as the world does, and do not follow Jesus with more than lip service, then they need our church plant too.

So a church plant must seek to share the gospel with the lost AND teach his disciples to die to themselves and follow Jesus.  A withered, weak vine will produce few fruit, but a strong, healthy, vibrant vine will produce abundantly.  Keeping a vineyard is not just about planting seeds, it is about pruning, watering, harvesting, and protecting the living vines that grow as well as the new sprouts you seek to start.

That is what I think has been happening largely at our church plant.  Initially we found ourselves meeting many people who you might call nominal Christians.  We ourselves, the core team, was in many ways nominal.  We were stunted and immature.  We have spent a lot of time and resources in maturing and growing in health.  When we were unhealthy and stunted, we produced little fruit.  But as we mature, we will produce more and more.  That is why I expect great things at our church this year.

I am excited, because when we go to plant our own church, we hope to take a cutting from a healthy vineyard.  We pray that we ourselves are part of that cutting.  Starting a new church with a healthy, vibrant core should allow us to start quicker and reach more people for Jesus sooner than even Community of Hope has – not because we are better, but because we will benefit from all the nurturing and all the nourishment that Community of Hope is providing us now.  That too is very exciting.

Mondays are definitely becoming a debriefing day for me.  It gives me a chance to reflect on all that went on Sunday – and the way we do church up here, a LOT happens on Sundays.

The discipleship class I teach is proceeding really fast.  I feel like anytime I have less than 4 people in the class, the material moves so quickly.  Of course, it helps when the people in the class are both highly in agreement and/or highly experienced in this environment.  I am letting them talk but the talk goes off subject so quickly, and feels unproductive.  Do I keep trying to hit the brakes and threaten derailment?  Or do I let us go at the pace that’s comfortable, and possibly get done early?

Another thought that occurred to me is that we parallel my class with a class for people who need a better understanding of their own faith.  Both lead to membership, but I don’t see where the material I cover gets treatment in a Gospel of John study.  I am wondering if perhaps it might make sense to run a mini version of my class after the Discovery class wraps, to make sure they are understanding how we are organized and why.  It might ease transition to membership for people new to their faith.

Last night was exciting on a number of levels.  It did not go as planned at all, from a human perspective, but God was doing some neat things.

First, we were trying to launch a new pre-preschool evening chidren’s program.  That made quite a few parents happy.  However, I had to get my nursery people rejigged to keep that working.  I had a leader lined up but they needed some help so I spent a large amount of time making sure everything was going smoothly and babies were happy.

This took me out of the picture for the opening ceremonies, but I am glad my directors stepped up and got it done.  We handed out handbooks and vests/shirts to the kids – I think they were thrilled.  Then, I was supposed to to a large group message.  I had everything ready: some props, the message printed out.  Then I realized I couldn’t put down the baby boy I was carrying around.  So, thanks God for preparing me to hand this one off!  I had Shane, the T&T Director, step up and run with the ball.  He did great.

Cheryl was there last night, helping with an autistic boy, and she wound up in the Sparks room where Ken (our new Sparks Director) was a little lost.  By the time I came up, she had everything under control and moving while Ken got up to speed.

The new handbooks and vests got all the kids worked up and they really took their efforts to another level, now that they could see more of what they were working for.

We were short some people, but it all got done.  I found myself pretty much circulating around complimenting people on how well they were doing.    Now that’s the kind of job I can handle!

All in all, a very successful day.  No question in my mind a day that would have completely hit the fan without God covering bases I didn’t even know needed covering.  Yay God!

It’s not a review yet… I’m not finished reading it yet.

But I will say this: This book is changing the way I think.  That is rare.

I find it’s influencing everything I think about church – why we do what we do, why there are problems, what the solution is, what a Christian should look like.  It is changing me not so much away from what I thought before, but changing me by bringing clarity to thoughts that were already flowing in the came direction.  It is digging a channel for my thoughts that were already flowing across the land in that direction.

Quote:

We have developed an entire generation of dependent consumers waiting for their leaders to spoonfeed them the Bible verse of the week, rather than an army of Kingdom agents ready to transform our culture by the power of the Gospel. (p. 154)

I was saying to a friend of mine yesterday, the reason we have programs at our church is because the people of our church are not really mature followers of Christ.  If we were, we would be out doing the things our programs accomplish as part of the very fabric of our lives, reflecting the aims and the mission of Jesus here on earth.  We would be feeding the poor, teaching the Word, making disciples, meeting for fellowship with one another – all without direction because Jesus is our King.

I know this is a perfect world scenario, and we are dealing with fallen humanity with hurts that go deep.  Serious help may be needed for some people to get them moving forward in the right direction.  Also, people generally have an expectation about what church looks like, so for their comfort, we do need to give the appearance of something familiar so as not to be a “stumbling block”.  But in my opinion we should be working towards weaning the people of our church off the “program mentality”.  That in the end, the only program we offer would be that entry point that “looks like church” to give new people something to grasp onto, then work on discipling them into a place where they are followers of Christ, not of Paul, or Apollos, or Warren or Driscoll.