Our church can be whatever we desire it to be. We are the facilitators of change, success and failure. True transformation and change comes because of God’s love, grace and power but it is our faith and obedience or lack thereof that either releases God’s transforming grace or quenches His Spirit.
The question is how bad do we want it? And why do we want it? Are we so caught up in the American dream and upward mobility that we assume the same things must be true for our church? Or is it because of jealousy? Or perhaps because we have allowed our feelings of personal worth to be tied to what others believe about us…
If however our desire for growth stems from a cry deep within our souls that we must be obedient to God, we must honor the Lord, we simply have to gain, propagate and share the compassion and love of Jesus Christ regardless of the tangible results then perhaps we are ready to begin changing our churches and truly making disciples.
I know that deep within me lies a yearning to be a part of something bigger: something really making a difference. Not just a few more faces on Sunday mornings, but something that changes the landscape of the culture around us: something that revolutionizes our communities, our families and our churches. I know that many times my motives become mixed. I know that I allow jealousy, pride and other false motives to begin to creep into my life, but the deepest seated, most powerful and unchanging force in why I do what I do lies in this desire to please God and radically change people’s lives now and forever.
My question however is: how? How do I change them? How to I find them? What do I say? What do I do? I grab book after book off the shelf…I ask minister after minister and person after person, and very few if any have been able to offer me the answer to my question. I am beginning to believe that the reason why they cannot answer it is because there are truly so few people making disciples that their stories are hard to find and even harder to pin down the how and what of their methods.
And to clarify before I go any further, I would like to say that I know that methods do not save: Jesus Christ saves. I also know that one of the primary reasons I am not effective in ministry, evangelism and disciple-making as I should be is because I do not tend to my own spiritual life as I should. My prayer life is hap-hazard and often filled with selfish requests; my hunger for the Word of God is sporadic, and my attention to other spiritual disciplines is often overshadowed by schedule, pursuit of personal pleasure or worry/doubt/lack of faith.
Having said all this, I would still like to assert that I want to be a fisher of men, not a keeper of the aquarium. I want to be a disciple-maker not a church CEO. And I need help to know how. I wonder if I could begin to take this questioning of mine to a deeper level? What if I shifted my thinking from questioning, pondering, discussing and yes, even doubting to searching, inquiring and discovering? Perhaps my pursuit has been too lackadaisical, and too intellectual. Maybe if I shifted to a quest. A mission. A pursuit even. What if I had a personal quest to see what would happen if I focused all my outward attentions on disciple-making? I still don’t know what I am going to do, but perhaps the paragraphs that follow these will be an account of discovery and praise: seeing what God will do, as I ask, seek and knock: “Lord help me make disciples!”.
Pastor Michael Johnson 