Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Discipleship

  • Psalm 119:14 – I Have to Be Joyful Too?

    Psalm 119:14 – I Have to Be Joyful Too?

    In the way of your testimonies I rejoice
    As over great wealth.

    Teachers and preachers often say that Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, was moving the law inside and making it of the heart. And that is certainly a theme of that sermon.

    But the fact is that the heart was always the object of the law. We are the ones who tend to look at the statutes, the regulations in modern terms, as the point of the law. It’s a simple path. We look at the law, and we do what we can to do what it says to do. So the point becomes the list of regulations for our lives. Aren’t these regulations wonderful? Shouldn’t we be happy about them?

    Isn’t that what this Psalm is about?

    Let me quote my friend and Energion author Bob MacDonald in the series he has just started on Psalm 119:

    Overall, Psalm 119 is a restful adoration of God and God’s promises.

    Have you thought of it like that?

    I commend his series to you, especially if you are musical. He does studies of the music of the Bible. There is great value in looking at these passages from different perspectives. I try to read a number of these as I meditate on the passage.

    “Restful” and “joy” both represent something internal, a response to the law (remember Torah/instruction), and not an external assent.

    And the Psalmist rejoices.

    I want to quote another one of my Energion authors, Deborah Roeger, author of The Power of Obedience:

    Before we conclude this lesson, we have some personal work to do. We have established that as God’s covenant people we are tailor-made by Him to live by His wisdom not our own! If we would lay down our right to live life on our terms – if we would turn to Him in submission, letting Him rule and reign as the perfect Creator and Lord of life in every aspect of our life – we would then joyfully know by experience what it means to know Him. If there is any area of your life that you have been holding back from Him, would you be willing right now to drop to your knees, bow your heart and your head before Him in complete surrender? Life will never be the same! And praise God for that!

    Deborah L. Roeger, The Power of Obedience, 43.

    This is a conclusion to an extensive lesson, but just on that one paragraph, do you think the Psalmist might well agree?

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Christian Education Should Be Broad and Deep

    Christian Education Should Be Broad and Deep

    Christian education programs in churches are often the least well-thought-out elements of church life.

    Many may think I’m exaggerating or being unfair. I didn’t get this from a survey, so I can’t point you to statistics, but I am drawing on many years of experience with Sunday School and other programs, so while these are observations, and may be somewhat based on anecdotes, those anecdotes are numerous, and they are first hand.

    Here are some of the things I have noticed:

    1. Use of repetitive curriculum.
    2. A lack of goals.
    3. Willingness to interrupt Christian education programs for almost any other activity.
    4. Lack of teacher training.
    5. Lack of discipleship in action in & for church leadership.
    6. Failure to highlight and open up ministry opportunities for every member.
    7. Narrowness.

    Let me expand on each of these just a bit.

    Use of Repetitive Curriculum

    I have been in Sunday School classes that were using standard denominational and/or interdenominational curriculum materials for decades. Often, seen independently, these materials were not bad. The problem was that they did not nurture growth as they continued to discuss the same topics at the same level.

    I have seen comparisons of time in Sunday School (and even more in my Seventh-day Adventist days, Sabbath School) vs college or seminary classes. The idea was that the members should be happy that they were getting such a wonderful education.

    But if a student spend 30 years studying the same set of subjects at precisely the same level in a college, that would be considered time wasted. I don’t mean that we don’t need to review basic doctrines and theological ideas.

    We also need to grow.

    A Lack of Goals

    This is another way to look at the first point. What is the goal of your class or small group? Do you hope to grow? Do you hope to be a better witness? Do you hope to learn anything new?

    Or is your Christian education program, whatever form it takes, designed to make you feel good that you have attended Sunday School all your life, or that you are frequently at church like a good person?

    These goals need not be academic. It is good to learn more about doctrines, but what about learning how a church functions? Or even better how is should function as a part of the body of Christ? What about learning how to express your faith “with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15 NIV)?

    I have yet to attend a church that wasn’t scrambling for leadership in various programs. Here’s the question: Were you preparing church members to lead? Were you recognizing potential leaders and tailoring your educational activity, whether one-on-one, small group, or the whole congregation to help them develop and use their potential?

    Willingness to Interrupt

    This is a pet peeve of mine, and I’ve encountered it in every church I have ever attended. I don’t recall Sunday School classes being interrupted for things that were useless. This is not about denigrating the interrupting activities.

    But, and it’s a big one, I’ve seen small group activities, including Sunday School, most easily put aside for any other activity of the church. It’s possible that leaders recognize that their Christian education programs have no goals and are just marking time, so they can be put aside without harming the day-to-day life of the church.

    That should be a very big red flag! If you can easily put aside your Christian education programs, they are probably not set up to actually serve our Lord and His body.

    Lack of Teacher Training

    I have observed this in two ways. First, we tend not to have any idea of how we would prepare someone to be a teacher in the church. Second, we tend to throw anyone into the mix at just about any time.

    A third observation would be that we often don’t recognize capabilities that members bring into the church. A public school teacher may well be prepared to contribute to your children’s or youth programs. (On the other hand, they may prefer not to do what they do during the week, and may have other talents.)

    We can err by falling into the ditch on either side. We can create a set of requirements that are a barrier to entry for new members. On the other hand, we can entrust the education of the congregation to the unprepared.

    I recall early in my experience with the United Methodist Church the pastor invited me to preach. He knew I have an MA in religion and read the Bible in their original languages. He had talked to me quite extensively and was satisfied with my doctrinal integrity. A member involved in the United Methodist lay speaking program objected strenuously to me being allowed to speak when I had not completed the certification program.

    I had no objection to taking that program and thought it would be very useful in becoming acclimatized in Methodism. I was disappointed. As a program it was a program. One checked boxes. I still found it valuable for the people I met and a number of teachers who were gifted and helpful. But to this one leader, it was a box that needed to be checked.

    Lack of Discipleship in Action in & for Church Leadership

    Truly learning to do requires doing. This is true in your daily life and work. It’s true in the church.

    Everyone who is in leadership should have one or more people they are training and/or mentoring in their own skills and gifts. I see church after church losing long-time leaders, and lacking trained replacements.

    Note that mentoring is not just letting someone follow you around, or talking to that person occasionally. It is allowing someone to learn the job and potentially–indeed hopefully–become better than you are at that particular activity.

    The church should never have a shallow bench.

    And if you think that’s hard, read the gospel again. Watch Jesus work with his students: Disciples.

    Failure to Highlight and Open Up Ministry Opportunities to Every Member

    There are people who see things that need to be done and have the initiative to jump in and just take over. There are other people who are willing to serve, but need someone to point out what is needed.

    The first class of people tend to think the second class are lazy and wonder why they don’t just find something to do and get active already!

    People won’t always recognize ways in which they can serve. Indeed, if they are isolated from the small group which is active in leadership, they may never have the opportunity to know. They many not even know who to ask.

    I’ve heard by an 80-20 and a 90-10 rule, the latter being the pessimist’s view. Twenty percent of the people do 80% of the work. This is presented as a form of condemnation of the 80%. They’re just pew sitters.

    But if you are part of the 20%, and I’m pointing fingers at myself here, you are also part of the problem. You are letting this happen! You should not be participating in denying that 80% their blessing of service.

    Hard?

    Jesus. Disciples. Boom!

    Narrowness

    Here’s where I annoy the most people.

    Our Christian education needs to prepare people to be the salt of the earth. Salt needs taste, or “savor” as the KJV has it in the beatitudes. Salt has identity (its saltiness) and witness (what it does when spread out in food, etc).

    We need identity and witness.

    An educational program that just prepares people to repeat your church’s doctrinal views accurately is not adequate. Neither is one that prepares people to be evangelists of your church building, property, form of organization, or human traditions.

    People need to know stuff. Lots of stuff. Stuff about all the stuff.

    Some people were worried when I invited a Calvinist to address our Wesleyan/Methodist young people. I’d be worried if I tried to bring them up on just what I believe but not to understand how other Christians understand various beliefs.

    Oh, about that Calvinist teacher? He preached Christ and Him crucified. I was glad I invited him.

    Summary: Discipleship

    The critical element here is discipleship. “Imitate me as I imitate Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1 my translation). It can be frightening, especially if you’re honest with yourself about your success at imitating Christ.

    It’s still God’s ordained idea.

    And that answers all of the points. Set our standards high: He did. Be willing to do the hard work: He did. Make the building of disciples our priority: He did.

    That’s church.

  • Why I Stopped Carrying My Greek NT to Church and then Started Again

    Why I Stopped Carrying My Greek NT to Church and then Started Again

    There’s an article on For the Church, in which Dr. Andrew King tells students: “Don’t Take Your Greek or Hebrew Bible to Corporate Worship.”

    There are a number of good points in the article, such as the note that if you are not comfortable with the languages, working on them during a sermon may be distracting. It is also important not to suggest to those who do not read the Bible in its original languages that they are less than you, or somehow unable to read and understand their Bibles. Be cautioned by the issues raised here. But I have a slightly different view.

    When I was studying biblical languages as majors both for my undergraduate and MA degrees, I very quickly started carrying my Greek and Hebrew Bibles to church. Since I went well beyond the couple of semesters or the couple of years that many seminary students study, I became quite capable of following the scriptures in a sermon or in a Sunday School lesson with little difficulty.

    During the time that I was a student this presented little difficulty. As far as I could tell, very few people ever noticed. I never became self-conscious about it. I didn’t really care to have people notice, but it was the way in which I enjoyed studying the Bible.

    For me, it became a problem when I was working and teaching in churches, though I was not a pastor. I have written before about not using Greek and Hebrew as part of your sermon. I avoid using the biblical languages as an explanation for something I’m going to say in a sermon. The reason is that I don’t want to suggest that I, an individual student, have discovered something that nobody in all the many translations into the English language, have managed to convey. I have found that a good presentation of the context of the passage, linguistic, literary, historical, and cultural, can convey pretty much anything you need to convey.

    So one of my reasons for no longer carrying my Greek and Hebrew Bibles to church was to avoid the suggestion that one must know the biblical languages in order to read and benefit from the Bible.

    The second was that certain preachers who knew me would try to bring me into Greek or Hebrew comments by saying things like “as Henry would know.” It was annoying, drew attention away from the point the preacher was making, and highlighted me when I had no part in presenting the message.

    So I stopped taking those Bibles to church. It seemed easier and less likely to cause trouble.

    One experience with a very close friend and mentor who is a pastor (though now retired) set me thinking in different ways. I was sitting in a classroom in the church reading my Greek New Testament when he walked in.

    He said, “I am so awed with the way you can read and understand those languages. I just can’t imagine doing it myself.”

    I thought for a minute and said (and I think this was the Holy Spirit helping me), “I’m just so awed by the way you can sit down with a couple and help them heal their marriage. I just can’t imagine doing it myself.”

    Now you might think this is a good reason not to let people know I read Greek and Hebrew by carrying the Bibles with me, but I have come to see it in the opposite way.

    We all have gifts. I personally believe that all gifts are spiritual when they are used as God calls us to use them. We shouldn’t privilege any gift over another. God has gifted me with the ability to read and make use of languages in my study. I’m not a specialist. I don’t work in this field, though I occasionally teach classes in church. But I’m not an academic. I stopped after my MA degree. Nonetheless, I can read substantial amounts of scripture, such as sitting down to read an entire book in a day or so.

    This doesn’t make me a better person than anyone else. It doesn’t make me more spiritual. It doesn’t make me more intelligent. I have a gift that I’m called to use in service to God.

    I have yet to find anyone in the church who is not gifted in some way. The pastor who was one of my mentors had quite a number of gifts that inspired a sense of awe in me. In all the years I knew him, I sometimes disagreed, but I never thought he was not using those gifts for God.

    My wife has an extraordinary gift for organizing difficult tasks and getting different people to work together to accomplish them. I absolutely am unable to understand how she does it.

    Reading biblical languages is not a greater gift than any other. It gives me certain options for study. It doesn’t make me better, nor does it mean I always have the right answer for a biblical question.

    So what I do now is go out of my way to affirm everyone’s gifts, while going ahead and using what works best for me in study. I have had many excellent opportunities to affirm the gifts of others and how they apply to Bible study, church leadership, and ministry.

    There is a danger of pride, but there is in anything we do. Our pride can come out it so many ways. There is also a danger of misleading, but you won’t have solved that by leaving your Greek or Hebrew Bible home.

    But there is also a tendency of some to forget the benefits we all gain from those who engage in a scholarly study of the Bible, from those who study archaeology, to anthropology, business management, human relations, and yes, languages and linguistics.

    You don’t need to hide your gift. Use it responsibly to build the body.

    Oh, and yes, if it’s distracting you from the sermon leave it out. And don’t use it in preaching. Let it deepen your study and then preach in the appropriate language for your congregation.

  • Slippery Slopes

    Slippery Slopes

    There are a few terms that are quite true and yet misleading in many actual uses. I like to cite “Christians aren’t perfect; just forgiven.” Precisely true, but in common use very likely an excuse for ordinary bad behavior. Whatever the intent, it ends up sounding like, “I’m a Christian, so I can do whatever I want to. If you question my actions, nobody’s perfect.” They’re not perfect; you’re not perfect. In this case, however, the true statement is being used as a bad excuse.

    Or there’s the great “I’m an adult, so I’m not offended by your political views.” Just so! An adult will not be offended by the political views of others. Disagree, yes. Be offended, not so much. Though I’ll confess that some political (and religious, for that matter) views are quite offensive. But in practice this line is most frequently used by people who want to behave in an offensive manner. When someone objects, they have the passive-aggressive response. “Adults wouldn’t get offended.” So of course you’re not an adult because you get offended when they behave like toddlers. It’s true you shouldn’t get offended. What good does it do? But they’re really using it as an excuse, and as a way to manipulate you.

    And then there are slipperly slopes. Slippery slopes are real. That’s because one idea leads to another. In fact, unless you start learning, you live your life on slippery slopes.

    My particular brand of moderate, or passionate moderate as I like to call myself, celebrates being all across the slopes of various ideas. I like to identify the extremes on any particular idea or topic and then find all the ground between. Where is the best place to be? If the correct place to be is poised on the slippery slope, that’s where I want to be.

    But “slippery slope” is more commonly used as a scare tactic against certain ideas. It is quite true, for example, some some people have gone from conservative Christianity, through moderate or mainline Christianity, then progressive Christianity, and then to atheism. It’s a slippery slope. Once you start thinking, it’s hard to be certain where you’ll go. It’s also true that many people have reacted badly to their conservative or fundamentalist upbringing and have then jumped straight to atheism.

    Others have turned to Christian faith and then gotten narrower and narrower and harsher and harsher and ended up as dangerous cultists.

    Yet others have turned to Jesus and slid right down the slippery slope to living a life of sacrifice and commitment to Jesus. Some of these have ended up doing mission work on the street.

    I have named none of these, but there numbers are quite substantial.

    You live in a world filled with slippery slopes. It’s not only likely you’ll make mistakes and find yourself sliding somewhere you don’t want to go. It’s likely someone else has taken a step similar to one you’ve just taken and then continued on to somewhere you don’t want to go.

    My suggestion would be to always remember where you have been, and to always consider the foundations of what you believe. That will help you measure your movement and decide whether you really want the changes taking place or not.

    Or, alternatively, you can anchor yourself where you are, and live in fear of the slippery slopes all around. It’s not all that likely you’ll be right or safe.

    You might even avoid slipping into some beautiful new truths!

    Beware of the fear of slippery slopes.

  • Underlying Principles for Christian Education and Discipleship

    Underlying Principles for Christian Education and Discipleship

    Chalk rubbed out on blackboard

    … and with that pretentious title.

    Actually, last night I talked on the Energion Tuesday Night Hangout (I’ll embed the video at the end as well) about Christian education and how one might go about choosing curriculum.

    My sister, Betty Rae, asked me a question via e-mail this morning, and I thought it was so on point that I would post her comments and my response here. What am I actually up to at Energion Publications? For those who wonder, yes, my sister and I communicate like this quite a bit.

    From her comments:

    I have been trying to understand what is the purpose or goal you have in what you are doing.  I think I may have glimpsed something tonight.  Please tell me if I am right.

    The early NT church consisted of home gatherings.  They had no center of worship, like the Jerusalem Temple.  So All that was Christian centered in these small groups.  Luther calls them “small companies;”  Ellen White, “little companies.”  So if there is a difficulty with the church at large, the church may be preserved in the “small study groups,” as you are calling them.  I saw in your presentation that you are encouraging the preservation of the individuality of individuals and groups.  Your presentation tonight holds great significance as I see it.  By leaving the groups free, even to making them free not to use your materials, room is left for the working of the Holy Spirit.  Hopefully, the small groups will follow that example, and also leave the individuals in their groups free.

    The time will come, however, if there is religious oppression, that small groups will be suppressed; as an example, “The Conventicle Act” in England, for disobeying of which John Bunyan spent 12 years in prison.  During times of religious revival and opposition, believers were forced to meet in small groups, even outdoors in forests and mountains, for which they were severely punished if they were caught. John Wesley was forced, even to preach out of doors, when denied access to the churches.  The Advent Movement believers met in small groups after they were thrown out of the churches, coming together in camp meetings.

    On an individual basis, churches in this country have already persecuted and tried to suppress small groups, calling them “cults.” (The devil will always mix his counterfeit in with the true.  Fear of being called a “cult” has discouraged the “small group.”)  One thing that drew disapproval was the groups’ using of materials “unauthorized” by the denomination, which you addressed tonight in your presentation.  Your work may be small, but who hath despised the day of small things!

    Here’s my response:

    One of my fundamental beliefs is that spiritual choices made through duress, emotional manipulation, or spinning data are of no positive benefit and are indeed destructive. Thomas Aquinas and I are not even playing on the same ball field on this one!

    I carry this so far as to say that if I were helping to bring a Jew into Christian fellowship (no human “converts” anyone), I would want to make sure that person understood Judaism as well as Christianity to be sure he or she is making a choice that is as informed and as free as possible. Similarly, if a person is kept in the church because he or she was prevented from getting outside information, that brings no glory to God. While it may build up the church organization, the Kingdom of God is not built.

    I could summarize this by saying that God’s kingdom cannot be built by deception, and trying to deny people information from another perspective is deception. That’s the reason leaders do it. The leadership is afraid that if we, the followers, have information other than what they approve, we might decide differently than we have.

    This is often done for the best of motives. In the church, the idea is to prevent people who are less informed from being led astray. So information is restricted in pursuit of truth. But just because an approach is intended to accomplish something does not mean it will accomplish that. We often give credit to people for being well-intentioned, but the universe does not. The laws of physics don’t care about your intention. You may intend to fly when you jump off the cliff, but gravity (and the rocks below) does not say, “I’ll give him/her credit for having good intentions.” It’s just plain splat!

    Similarly in politics we have a desire to limit information to what is accurate and unbiased. I agree that the internet provides a huge reservoir of material that ranges from misleading in presentation to flat out wrong. But those who would like to clean that up somehow, other than by countering false with true, are playing with fire. Whether it’s by controlling political spending or trying to narrowly define a “real” journalist, it’s going to head toward control, and control will lead to mass falsehood and delusion. The universe will not regard the supposedly truth-loving intentions of the censors.

    So I do advocate freedom in ideas, and I follow that belief in the small (very small) world of my publishing business. I restrict what I publish not because I think the other stuff is bad, but simply to define a reasonable audience for me to try to address.

    At the same time I personally advocate a program of education in churches, however carried out, that makes sure people are aware of the full range of ideas that are out there. Carrying this out will involve reading books that are written by people who disagree with and disapprove the church’s views as well as hopefully hearing directly from them. There’s nothing like hearing an idea from an advocate. I may be ever so careful to present my adversaries position, but hearing me is not as good as hearing them.

    Those are the beliefs that underlie what I said about curriculum last night.

    And for those who might need context, the actual presentation:

  • Church as a Social Occasion

    Church as a Social Occasion

    Or perhaps as the social occasion.

    Thom Rainer has a post titled Seven Things Church Members Should Say to Guests in a Worship Service. It comes complete with a header picture of people who, to me, look like they’re forcing excessive smiles. I probably see it that way because I’m an introvert. I suppose that there is nothing wrong with these seven things, though I must note that I prefer that the restrooms be well-marked with signs so that I don’t have to ask someone where they are, and I’m very likely to be the guy who forgets who you are even though you’ve been down the pew from me for months. In fact, I’d just as soon you let me sit there, think, and pray as come try to make a social occasion out of it.

    There’s nothing wrong with being the social person. There’s very much right with being a friendly person. Yet I’m left with several questions. The most important question is just what it is we’re trying to accomplish.

    It seems to me that all of this is aimed at getting more people to attend your church service. The goal is to make people “church-going” and to make sure that an adequate number attend your church. In order to accomplish this we try to make church a great social occasion with a friendly atmosphere (provided one likes that sort of thing).

    I confess that I may be hypercritical here. But all of these lists, and in fact a huge percentage of the talk about church growth seems to center around how many people we have in church. So if you have a church that is a very strong social club, you’re a successful church.

    But in reading the gospel commission I can’t seem to find the part about making sure large numbers of people attend church once per week. That isn’t even mentioned, much less presented as a goal.

    Someone’s going to say that this is the goal. We get them into church and from there we make disciples of them. But I don’t seem to see as many lists of ways to make disciples out of the people you manage to get to attend your worship service. I don’t see nearly as much about getting the people who are good, church-going people to go out and make those disciples. I don’t see nearly as much about getting those people to observe the things Jesus commands.

    I recall a pastor recently who said to the church: The only excuse for a church to exist is to be a witness to Jesus Christ. I’d refocus that to this: The only excuse for us to have a church service is to help us be and become better disciples of Jesus.

    This means that there is a good reason to get people to attend church, provided that church is about becoming better disciples. As I’m been reading about fellowship, I think there’s much more to the idea of communion as a shared meal celebrated regularly. Our church gatherings are not so much services as training and motivation to become active servants. In order to do that we need to be reminded of who we are and of how we are part of a body.

    Perhaps if we built these times around a common meal where interaction involved more than greeting and attempting to remember names, singing a few songs, and listening to someone lecture, we might be able to build the body of Christ as a community that serves, and in fact embodies Jesus Christ for the world. That might mean we need to break up some of our huge congregations and spread out into the community in smaller groups.

    I’m no expert on church organization or church growth. I’m pretty sure that, despite my own tendency, Sunday morning isn’t designed as a time of individual prayer and meditation for me. I can do that many other times. Yet I can’t help but get the impression that our church activities are centered around that Sunday morning worship service. If singing hymns and listening to a lecture of variable quality doesn’t light up your life, you’re just the wrong type of person.

    But do these worship services really help us to be Christians? Do they carry out the gospel commission? Are the spaces in which we do these activities well utilized in pursuit of the gospel? Despite being a person whose habit it is to be in church every week almost without exception, I’m seeing it as less and less productive.

    Perhaps our problem is that the goal is the wrong one. Filling our church sanctuaries on Sunday morning was never the aim of the gospel commission. Making disciples was.

    Is it?

  • Helping One Another Change

    I just extracted a note from Dave Black’s blog to The Jesus Paradigm. (That site supports his book by the same name as well as a few others that don’t have their own domain name.) In it Dave talks about admonishing, encouraging, and upholding. You’ll have to go read the post to find out what these are about.

    For my purposes here, they are all ways in which we help one another change for the better. In my view, there’s too little helpful activity of this nature in our churches today. We don’t want to get into each other’s business, and often we’re in congregations that are large enough that we don’t really know one another’s business enough to be helpful. In my own congregation I know that one of the considerations whenever we discuss greeting people is that there is a risk of approaching a life-long member as a new visitor. If I can’t be sure a person is a part of the congregation, how can I possibly respond to them in a helpful way about anything else?

    But I think that even in groups small enough to do so, we would have a hard time doing it. We seem to move too easily from neglect to condemnation without taking the necessary steps in between. Dave points out the different ways of handling different people. In order to interact with someone in a helpful way, whether correction or encouragement or any other approach, you have to know them pretty well. One big difference between correction and condemnation is simply the relationship between giver and receiver.

    I “correct” my wife’s use of the computer on a regular basis. I know more about computers than she does, she knows that, and so it generally works. Even so, it still won’t work if I am condescending or impatient. But if I both understand her starting point and work to help her get to where she wants to go, things work extremely well.

    She, on the other hand, corrects my work in the kitchen. It turns out that in the same set of circumstances, I can actually produce a meal with her direction. The things I don’t know how to do she does. The things I might ignore, like precisely which position the oven shelves occupy, she encourages me to get right.

    So here we are in the church. Let me just list some things we might need to work toward in our churches so we can truly help one another change.

    1. We need to know one another better, whatever that takes. If that means more home churches, great! If you can find a way in a large church to get some sort of accountability as a group, great!
    2. We need to understand forgiveness. I hear someone saying that we’re talking about correcting, not letting people off the hook for their misdeeds. That attitude is precisely the problem. Correction that comes with condemnation isn’t generally going to be mutual. We are all sinners together looking to Jesus. We abuse this in two ways. First, we decide we’re all sinners, so we can just forget about trying to change. Second, we can decide that some sinners are more equal than others. I think the call of Jesus is to mutuality. We are all sinners. We all press toward the mark.
    3. We need to ditch our pride. Ouch! Just about anything we do, even what is normally good, will be spoiled by pride.
    4. We need to know the difference between essentials and non-essentials. Too often when we correct others, we are asking them to follow our traditions instead of theirs. If you want to successfully show someone a better way, it helps if the way you’re showing them actually is better.
    5. We need to let love reign in us. All of 1 John is filled with excellent material, but 1 John 4 is particularly important on this point. Note that there is some help here defining love as well as applying it.

    We definitely need to get past the point where the only encouragement or exhortation in our churches comes from the pulpit, and is therefore easily ignored by those in the pews.

    Let us pay attention to each other, so as to stir up of love and good works … (Hebrews 10:24).

    12Therefore restore the weakened hands and the disabled knees, 13and prepare straight paths for your feet so that the lame might not stumble but rather might be healed (Hebrews 12:12-13).

  • The Cross is an Offense Today

    I rarely post a quote from a book I’m editing, but this one struck me today. It’s from the forthcoming book The Church Under the Cross by William Powell Tuck. Here it is:

    Jesus Christ has called us to a way of life which demands sacrificial living, and this call is still an offense to us today. Oh, we don’t mind hearing sermons about the cross, as long as they tell us about what God did for us in Christ. We don’t mind hearing songs about the cross. We don’t even mind singing songs about the cross or depicting the cross in paintings, sculptures, stained glass windows, or wearing the image around our nicks or on our lapels. But when we begin to realize that the cross is supposed to be a way of life, it is even more offensive to us today. Few people really live a sacrificial kind of life. But Jesus has called us to the cross-like way of life (p. 65).

    How easily we wear the symbol, often made out of gold (or gold-plated), but how difficult we find it to make the symbol a part of our daily life. I think we might well find it offensive to think that the symbol we wear or admire in art should change our lives.

  • Discipleship Not About Numbers

    … so says Dan Dick. All I can say is I agree. Go read!

  • What if Church Was Like

    … This!

    This is Discipling from The Foursquare Church on Vimeo.

    (HT: Dave Black Online)