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Love Limits

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Love limits.  When a man says “I do” to his wife, he says “I don’t” to all other women and when a couple decides to have children they choose a lifestyle that is limiting in comparison to their childless friends.  Recently I attended my nephew’s wedding. Both sets of his grandparents are still living whose combined years of marriage is 114.  I was moved at the sight of a room full of their direct descendants who all love and enjoy one another. We willingly set margins around our family so that love will multiply to future generations. To neglect a marriage leads to divorce and to neglect a child results in a wounded person, which both break the love continuum.

Christianity accepts the setting of boundaries to effectively love our families but for some reason we do not apply that same principle to our ministries.  I can only love a limited number of people, so to choose a disciple making approach to ministry (which in a word is love) means to limit the number of people to whom I can minister.  To not limit the number of people in my ministry is to actually hinder the gospel multiplication process, but if I can remain disciplined and love my few disciples well, in the long run there will be a continual multiplication of love for generations to come.

Disciple Making and Children #2

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Recently I was with a Jewish couple that had converted from Judaism to Christianity.  One difficulty in the transition was the home life.   Judaism had provided for them a template for a Jewish home (e.g., keeping the Sabbath, Passover, and feasts, etc.), whereas Christianity gave them little help on what a Christian home should look like.  (Other than they were told to be sure and get their children into Sunday school and youth group.)  As Voddie Baucham points out, Christianity’s approach to ministry communicates to parents: “leave the spiritual training of your children to the professions.” [1]

God gave the Israelite parent the responsibility for the spiritual training of their child.  To be an Israelite meant to train children for a lifetime-not only were they expected to teach their own children but also their grandchildren.  “…teach them to your children and to their children after them.” (Deuteronomy 4:9-10)

Since God is familial (Father-Son-Holy Spirit) the best environment for a child to learn and experience the nature of God is in a family.  Are there benefits for a child in attending Sunday school, children’s ministry, vacation bible school, and youth group? Sure.  But the best context for him to experience sacrificial love, belonging, grace, and a servant’s heart is in a home.  Here, day after day, year after year, a child learns what it means to belong in a family just as the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are in perfect union.

[1] Voddie Baucham  http://media.sermonindex.net/15/SID15607.mp3

 

Disciple Making and Children #1

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Around 80% of the children who are raised in an evangelical church will leave Christianity at college [1].  If the number were 50% we should be concerned, but at 80% alarmed. Yet churches seem to be more concern about their numerical growth than they do about losing their own kids.  Churches spend thousands of dollars on church growth conferences, consultants, and materials searching for the key to their expansion, while spending comparatively few resources to help parents with their marriages or on how to disciple their children.

In many cases if a married couple volunteers for ministry in their church, they will be required to have some type of training and be under the apprenticeship of an experienced leader for a period of time.  But when a couple announces to that same church that they are expecting their first child they will given little or no training on how to raise that child.

There is something inconsistent about strategizing on how to reach our community and the world when we are unable to reach our own children.

[1] Glen Schultz, Kingdom Education; 2002 Southern Baptist Council on the Family.

 

Generational Love

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Lois Synder died this year, she was 96.  Mrs. Synder taught my 2nd grade Sunday school class and directed our Christmas pageant each year at the Christian Fellowship Church. I attended her memorial service with my mom and dad in the same auditorium where in 1952 Lois had decided to follow Jesus.  When the Synder family walked into the service that afternoon I was moved.  Before us stood 3 generations who follow Jesus nearly 60 years after Lois’ conversion.

In the service family and friends shared their memories of Lois.  It was in these stories that we discovered the reason why her family still follows Jesus today: Lois loved well.  She so loved her children and grandchildren in their formative years that this love overflowed to her great grandchildren.  Not only did Lois love her family, but each week she would load her car with teaching materials and go share the gospel with children living in the inner-city.

Lois’ seemingly endless ability to love others flowed from her understanding of God’s love for her grounded in the cross of Jesus.  God’s love for me will not be found in my circumstances, my heritage, my abilities, or my position, rather it is anchored in the truth that Jesus died for me.   “. . . God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8

God shows me how to love others in Jesus’ death for me.  John writes: “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 3:16-17” Once I begin to grasp the depth of God’s love for me, I am then able to love others in sacrificing my life for them.  It will cost me to love my mate, my children, my friends, and my disciples.

How silly a question it would seem if we could ask Lois today, “Was it worth it?”  I can only imagine the joy in her heart in seeing 3 generations loving God and loving one another. 

Hospitality: A Starting Point For Making Disciples

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Hospitality is a good starting place for making disciples.  It provides for you an opportunity to serve your disciple and to carve out a safe place for him to belong. Serving and making followers of Jesus are inseparable.  Jesus told his disciples:

Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.  For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.  (Mark 10:43-45)

Hospitality not only allows your disciple to observe service to others, it also provides him an opportunity to become part of the serving process; whether it is cutting the bread, setting the table, or taking drink orders.  Teaching your disciple hospitality is an important component for the spreading of the gospel through serving others.

Henri Nouwen writes:

How does healing take place?  Many words, such as care and compassion, understanding and forgiveness, fellowship and community, have been used for the healing task of the Christian minister.  I like to use the word hospitality, not only because it has such deep roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but also, and primarily, because it gives us more insight into the nature of response to the human condition of loneliness.  Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler.  Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers and makes closed-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.

Recommended Reading on Hospitality:

  • “Real Love for Real Life:  The Art and Work of Caring” by Andi Ashworth.  Colorado Springs: Shaw Books.  ISBN  0-87788-048-4
  • “Contagious Holiness:  Jesus’ Meal with Sinners” by Craig L. Blomberg.  Downers Grove:  InterVarsity Press.  ISBN  0-8308-2620-3
  • “Reaching Out:  The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life” by Henri J.M. Nouwen. Garden City: Doubleday. ISBN  0-385-03212-9
  • “A Gentleman Entertains: A Guide to Making Memorable Occasions Happen” by John Bridges and Bryan Curtis.  Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 2000.  ISBN 1-55853-812-7 (Great for beginners!)
  • “Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition” by Christine D. Pohl.
  • “L’Abri” by Edith Schaeffer.  Wheaton:  Crossway Books, 1969, 1992.  ISBN  0-89107-668-9

Unity and Making Disciples 2

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The best defense against hypocrisy is to make disciples in a small community, as Jesus demonstrated. How your disciples relate to one another in a group is an indicator of how each relates to God as an individual. The reason I disciple in community is because the only real way to know a person is based on how he interacts with others. A person can say that they love God with all their heart and that they worship him with a total abandon, but if he does not relate well with others, he is a liar (1 John 4:20).

The test to see if a person is a child of God and if he knows God is that he lovingly relates with others. “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7-8). My relationship with God cannot be separated from my relationship with people; it is a direct indicator of my relationship with God.

Disciple making is not just an equipping course on how to do ministry, at its core disciple making is learning how to relate lovingly with God and with others. For this reason conflict and disunity among a group of disciples should not be looked upon despairingly by the discipler; but rather it is an opportunity to instruct his disciples on how to love one another.

(This is also why the family is an optimal place to make disciples. Within the home the parents have the opportunity to observe how their children relate with one another and then are able to teach the children how to love one another from a young age.)

Here’s what I do:

  1. I talk privately with each disciple about their relationship with each member of our group. We then discuss how he can affectively love each individual of the group. (We have found “The Five Love Languages” has been helpful in teaching our disciples on how to love one another.)
  2. I make sure that the group members spend one-on-one time with one another.
  3. Generally, when there is a conflict I do not address the entire group, but rather only those individuals involved.