Discipleship

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The root of the problem

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The root of the problem

A lady was sharing her woes with my wife in the changing room at the gym. Her problem was simple. She had to keep dying her hair every couple of weeks, or the roots would start to show.

And this is a pretty decent description of how people handle more serious problems in their lives too. We coat our issues with something that makes them disappear, but before too long they all come back. The reason, of course, is that the roots of our problems have never been dealt with.

A frequent mistake in pastoral care is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause. An over-the-counter painkiller will deal with an ordinary headache, but it won’t do anything much for a brain tumour.

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Lessons from the whirlwind

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Lessons from the whirlwind

After about an hour listening to a man’s story the other day, I said to him, “You’ve been living in a whirlwind.” He thought that was a pretty apt description.

Life seems like a whirlwind every so often. When we’re caught up in it, things can seem to be out of control. We lose sight of God, we find it hard to see any purpose in what’s happening to us, and we feel helpless, abandoned and lost.

But I think God operates in the whirlwind. The fact that he created the world and he also sustains it means he is always in control. The whirlwind that looks like confusion to us may in truth be full of his purposes.

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Dumbing down or calling up?

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Dumbing down or calling up?

Just the other day, I had a discussion with a good friend. He was expressing his frustration with the popularity of certain Christian media personalities who have the ability to attract enormous crowds, sell millions of books and take in vast offerings, without seemingly having the capacity to make a single decent Biblical or theological point when they preach.

Some people seem to think that we need to adjust our preaching in a downward direction in order to accommodate the fact that we live in the age of attention deficit. It’s a little bit like the idea that the purpose of a youth group is mainly to provide light spiritual entertainment for teenagers who would never have the ability to sit in church and listen to a proper Biblical message. Doing this, I suspect, will produce a generation of youth group graduates who want to be entertained the rest of their lives. Or a generation of millennials who are checking their phone throughout whatever shreds of truth are left coming out from behind the pulpit.

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Church or crowd?

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Church or crowd?

There are two types of congregation, in my admittedly simplistic definition, and the best way of differentiating between them is by asking a simple question: is this a church or is this a crowd? 

The difference between church and crowd is summed up in one word: discipleship. 

This was on my mind this week as I attended a dinner honouring a number of men who had been through a discipleship programme run by the church we are working with this winter. They have run this course for the last thirteen years. A lot of men have been through it, and it has had a deep impact on the life of the congregation (and before I proceed further, let me make it clear women are disciples also!).

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The unexpected value of friendship

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The unexpected value of friendship

Today I met with two very good friends. The meeting had a point. Both of these men are committed to helping us practically in our mission to extend the kingdom in the way we feel God is calling us to do. We are not on the same leadership team, or even part of the same church. Our link is simply the personal relationship our friendship in Christ has given us. That friendship led these men to place their creative resources at our disposal, for which we are extremely grateful. In fact, God has given us friends all over the place, each of whom has helped us in various ways, and without whom we could do little or nothing.

Church often works on the basis of organization. We do a job assigned to us within an organizational framework, and access resources that are provided to us by that framework. Without the organization, however, we are lost. I don’t think that’s right. I think church should operate on the basis of friendship, not function. Function isn’t wrong, but it should flow out of friendship.