What’s Important?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Lewie Clark

In the last couple of years I have two new friends who have influenced me greatly in regards to my approach to ministry: age and cancer.

While young I did not give much thought to how I did ministry because there were many exciting opportunities before me, coupled with plenty of time. I knew that if one approach did not work then I could always try something else. I have since worked at a Christian college, traveled with an itinerant ministry, participated in church start-ups, and served in both traditional and contemporary churches—all the while being involved in myriad ministry strategies and initiatives.

Age has given me the opportunity to look back over thirty years of ministry to determine what lasted and what did not. I have now simplified my life to do the main thing, make disciples of Jesus.

The day I was diagnosed with cancer, I walked out of my doctor’s office in a daze, went across the street and sat down on a park bench. In those moments I realized that what mattered was God’s love for me, my love for him, the people who loved me, and those whom I loved. I had a new understanding of what John meant when he wrote: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).

I have a new singular devotion . . . to love well. That’s how disciples are made.

Bridging the Breach

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Lewie Clark

You cannot expect someone to love who has not been discipled. To assume that your disciple has a desire to love God, you, and others can frustrate him because he is aware of the relational expectations you have of him but he knows that he cannot fulfill them.

Fear developed in your disciple because of a void of love. This fear disrupts his relationships, which inhibits love, which brings on more insecurity, and so goes the downward cycle. He is afraid of what he does not know how to do and so to ask him to love God or people is to ask him to face a deep fear. That fear leads to frustration and frustration to anger and you may be the recipient of his anger.

The inability of your disciple to build and maintain healthy relationships is a result of a detachment from God caused by a distorted view of God, which may have been brought on by his Christian experience. This distortion developed out of the contradiction of his hearing the message of God’s love in sermons, books, and bible studies that did not match up with his experience whether in his family or church.

As Jesus bridged this breach by the laying down of his life for his disciples so you remove the contradiction in your disciple’s thinking by the laying down of your life for him. The message of love now lines up with his experience.

Closing thoughts:

You will experience your disciple’s inability to build relationships either by (1) his aversion to connect with you or (2) his outright rejection of you fueled by his fear.
Laying down your life for your disciple will cost you. It can be a painful experience.
Parents have the opportunity to daily demonstrate love to their children by the laying down of their lives for one another and also for each child.

Jesus Loved First

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Lewie Clark

The example of how followers of Jesus should relate to one another is found in the Trinity. Jesus instructed his disciples that they were to love one another after the pattern of his relationship with the Heavenly Father (John 15:9-12). For eternity the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have loved one another with a familial love and have brought delight to one another as witnessed at the baptism of Jesus:

“ When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:21-22)

The beauty of love among the Trinity overflows to a love for mankind. We are responders to this love that empowers us to love others. “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” (1 John 3:16) “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) God’s love for and delight in your disciple is his basis for relating to others.

Making disciples of Jesus requires simultaneous efforts on your part to help your disciple learn how relate to God and how relate to people. As he deepens his understanding of God’s love for him he will deepen his relationship with people and as he deepens his relationship with people he will discover new measures of his relationship with God.

Meet the Parents 3

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Lewie Clark

It is not possible for your disciple to separate his relationship with God from his relationship with people, as hard as he may try. To understand your disciple’s relationship with God you need to look no further than how he relates to people, including his parents and siblings. His relationships serve as a mirror for him and a window for you to understand how he relates to God. John, in no uncertain terms, irrevocably ties our relationship with God to our relationship with people when he writes:

If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:20-21)

It is a contradiction to give the appearance of having a relationship with God and yet have discord, jealousy, selfishness, dissension, hatred, and envy with people. Your disciple’s relationships will either expose a facade of religion or affirm a genuine relationship with God.

In closing,

Making disciples in community gives your disciple the opportunity to learn how to love others and to receive love from others.
Making disciples in community gives you the opportunity to observe how each disciple relates to the others.
Your community’s relationship with one another is an indication of how the community as a whole is relating to God.

Meet the Parents 2

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Lewie Clark

One way to get know your disciple is by getting to know his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents through family stories. Here you are looking for relational tendencies, values, character traits, and dysfunctions that have been passed down through the generations. Most people I disciple have given little consideration to their parent’s relationship to their grandparents, or their grandparent’s relationship to their great-grandparents, even though we are all products of preceding generations. Family stories are a mirror for your disciple to see himself.

Several years ago I wanted to get to know my dad and mom better so I set out to discover some of their childhood stories. My dad is from upstate New York so one summer I loaded him in the car and film in my camera and we toured the places of his youth. Later I did the same with my mom visiting her old stomping grounds in the Indiana Harbor. In both cases they were almost compelled to tell the stories of the past as memories were stirred by revisiting the houses, schools, neighborhoods, cemeteries, and churches of their childhood. I learned about people and events that I would have never known about apart from these trips down memory lane with my parents. Dad told me how as a boy on cold Sunday mornings he would build a fire in the woodstove at the Emory Chapel, which was built in 1833, so that the church would be warm when the congregation arrived since his family lived nearest to the country chapel. Mom told of her Yugoslavian neighbor, Mrs. Horvat, who taught my grandmother how to make stuff cabbage, which to this day is my favorite meal.

The best way to gather information about a person is through stories rather than asking direct questions. Story telling unlocks the memories of the heart. Often I have had a disciple say, “I just don’t remember much from my childhood”, but as you get him telling stories he will start remembering things and then say, “I haven’t thought of that in years!” or “I had totally forgotten about that.”

A couple points in closing:

Memories can be locked up by fear and shame. Story telling is a backdoor entrance to your disciple’s heart.
Telling his childhood stories can be emotional for your disciple. Just yesterday a guy got choked up as he was telling me about his childhood.
Together my disciple and I build a timeline of his life, which helps him remember the stories of his youth and helps me keep his story straight.
When possible visit the hometown of your disciple. I find it intriguing that most of Jesus’ disciples were from around the town of Capernaum, which was the base of operation for Jesus’ ministry. Jesus would have known some of his disciples’ families.

Meet the Parents

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Lewie Clark

A helpful piece of advice for making followers of Jesus is to meet the family of your disciple, no matter his age. Within minutes of meeting his dad, mom, brothers, and sisters you will have a deeper understanding of his behavior because it was within the context of these relationships that he developed his approach in relating to others.

Jesus told his disciples: “Love one another. As I have loved you so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:34-35) To follow Jesus is to love others, which means a large part of the disciple making process is teaching your disciple how to love and how to receive love.

For many of your disciples the home was not a place of love. He developed dysfunctional ways of relating to men through his dad and brothers and dysfunctional patterns with women through his mom and sisters. His framework for all relationships was formed by his parent’s treatment of one another, their treatment of him, and how they guided the children in relating to one another or in many cases how they neglected to guide the children.

Usually any façade, concealment, or pretense by your disciple, whether intentional or unintentional, will be exposed by meeting his family. I am often humored at how a person’s disposition can immediately change in the presence of his mom, or dad, or sibling. More than once I have been surprised when I have met the family of one of my disciples. The sooner you can meet your disciple’s family the deeper your relationship will be with him and the more effective your counsel.

The Art of Observation

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Lewie Clark

The objective for your disciple is to live his life as Jesus did. John writes, “This is how we know we are in him: whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.” (1 John 2:5-6) Part of your role is to observe your disciple in different scenarios in order to commend him when he is living as Jesus would and to exhort him when he is not, as demonstrated for us by Jesus with his men. He formed his team and observed them in many situations over three years, including how the disciples related to one another. Sometimes they did well and other times they did not but in each case Jesus was there in the moment both to commend and to correct.

It is not sufficient to obtain information about your disciple just from him. Even the most honest of people has blind spots, fears, and assumptions, which will limit and skew the information he will give you. Incomplete information will result in you giving him bad counsel and so it is important for you to observe your disciple in various scenarios over a long period of time to ensure that you have an accurate picture of him. This essential component of observation necessitates for you to live in close proximity to your disciple to provide the opportunities for you to see him in different settings.

This is one reason why I believe that the home is the optimal place to make disciples. The family setting provides ample opportunities for the parents to observe the behavior of each child in many situations and so they are able to give accurate and therefore effective encouragement, correction, and instruction. At home the children can both observe the parents living out the values of the kingdom of God and also experience those values as the parents serve and love them.

Observing Beauty

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Lewie Clark

Disciple making requires living in close proximity to your disciple in order for him to have the opportunities to observe the beauty of how you and your family live out kingdom values. Although instruction is important, life change comes by witnessing another actually living out these beliefs. It matters little what you say to your disciple in comparison to what he observes from your life. As Marion Wade has said, “If you don’t live it, you don’t believe it.” One example of this from the life of Jesus is when the twelve shooed away the children thinking them a nuisance until Jesus demonstrated the beauty of children by placing them into his lap.

My parents have consistently lived out the values of the kingdom for over 60 years. In the 1960’s it was customary for a new car owner to leave the dealer’s sticker on the car window to let every one know that he had bought a new car. Only after he had paraded around town in his new automobile for a few days would he then remove the sticker. Not Lew Clark. My dad had the dealer remove the sticker from the window before he would drive the car off the lot. I do not ever remember my parents instructing me about humility but that one small act of beauty by my dad did not go unnoticed by me as a young boy and it has made a lifetime impact on my character.

The Pursuit of Beauty

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Lewie Clark

Beauty transforms lives. To follow Jesus is to pursue beauty because he is the embodiment of all that is beautiful. The story of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection is the most beautiful ever told.

Jesus demonstrates for us how to replace the odious with the beautiful through his interaction with his disciples. Beauty is cultivated in the life of a disciple by him experiencing the beautiful. Jesus taught his men the beauty of serving by washing their feet. Later they experienced the beauty of placing others ahead of themselves when Jesus laid down his life for them.

The cost of making a disciple is your willingness to sacrifice your life for your disciple in order for him to experience beauty. Just being taught about serving or being instructed about sacrifice does not change a life; rather it is by the laying down of your life for your disciple that he will come to understand spiritual truth. It is only in the experience of being served or in the experience of having another lay down his life for you does the life changing power of beauty take affect.

The Beauty of Belonging

Posted on November 16, 2011 by Lewie Clark

Man was created to participate in beauty and not just to be an observer. A lack of beauty rarely comes to mind when dealing with personal problems but when other approaches with your disciple have failed an absence of beauty should be considered.

There is beauty in belonging to others of which the Psalmist writes in Psalm 133: “How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!” It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the collar of his robe. It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion. For there the LORD bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.” To paraphrase, being united to others is a beautiful thing.

This beauty flows from the eternal love between the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. God designed man to enter into this beauty by being connected to Him and His other children. But sin in the Garden of Eden brought shame and a separation between God and mankind and man with one another, which resulted in ugliness.

A relational breach demoralizes and creates a void of beauty in a person which will compel him to desperately seek out perverted and distorted forms of beauty to compensate for this vacuum. This search will lead him to self-destructive attitudes and behaviors such as pornography, flirtation, sex, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, materialism, etc.

Your disciple will become confused and frustrated over the contradiction of this behavior. He desires to love, belong, and please the Lord and he is aware that his behavior is sinful and self-destructive but he continues it anyway and he does not understand why. He soon discovers that his self-determination and self-control cannot compensate for this void of beauty.

The nature of God moved Him to restore man’s relationship to Him and mankind’s relationship with one another through the death of Jesus. So once where there was sin, shame, hatred, and discord there now can be the beauty of unity and peace. Although the story of relational restoration through the gospel is familiar to your disciple the implementation of this reality may prove difficult. A large part of the disciplining process is helping your disciple understand the beauty of how he is restored to God and how he can now be connected to others.