This could be a mom or a dad. But it’s more than likely a youth pastor who has the ability to make strategic changes in the discipleship strategy and/or philosophy at his or her church.

A question: How big is your discipleship vision?

The other day I was running through the woods around our neighborhood. I came to an area where there are woods on the right and left bordering an open field, maybe 15 yards across. As I was running, I ran through a spiderweb that stretched all the way across this field.

I immediately thought to myself, “That is one ambitious spider!” I didn’t think anything more of it. Until the next morning when the exact same thing happened again! Same spider web, same field. It got me thinking . . .

Here’s what we know about this spider. He’s ambitious. That’s a heck of a goal! I don’t know what it takes to spin a web across a 50 foot span, but my hunch is that it ain’t easy. His efforts were rewarded by me crashing through it. But, we also know this about the spider: he wasn’t easily discouraged! The next day, another audacious goal. He went big, suffered a setback, and went big again . . . only to suffer yet another setback! (I really wish I had run the trail a third day to see if the spider had gone big once more.)

What can we learn from this anecdote? How can this example help us think of how we view our discipleship strategies?

First, I hope you’re going big. I hope you’re not satisfied with the way things have always been done. I hope that you’re so driven by wanting to see your students truly live dynamic faith lives that you’re dreaming big about how to make it happen.

Second, I hope you take your defeats in stride. Big vision is still big vision whether or not others undermine you. Keep aiming big. If you stumble?

Third, multiple setbacks might mean a change in strategy, not an abandonment of the vision. Maybe you could still spin a kicking web in another part of your field, just maybe not right across the main path. Maybe you can’t win the fight for getting rid of that sacred programming hour. But hey, dream big anyway. Come up with a plan, take a few stabs at it, and if you need to change approaches, do it. But don’t settle for less than your students deserve.

And finally, at some point you might have to spin your webs out of reach of slow-moving giants!

photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons/ (c) photofarmer

TweetShare via email

Knocking programs is like knocking oxygen. We need programs (no matter how big or small) to do ministry.

(For the purposes of this discussion, I see a “program” as anything on your youth ministry calendar. Thus, that small, organic, Bible Study meeting at a coffee shop is a program, just as the large, mid-week, fully-staged worship/teaching event is a program.)

Without some sort of an organized approach to doing ministry, we can slip into a haphazard and unplanned effort at building relationships and shepherding students in their faith. Which doesn’t work for anyone. So, I’m not attacking this nebulous concept of “programs.” I am pointing the finger at a program-driven approach to doing discipleship. In specific, I’m pointing the finger at one of the unintended and often overlooked side effects of a program centered ministry approach.

Here’s a fact: When we operate program-centric ministries, we create a tremendous need for volunteers. And if we’re not careful, what we unintentionally create is people who serve our programs at the cost of serving the Kingdom.

If I am an adult volunteer whose understanding of an active faith is driving vans, or stage design, or meal coordinating, or running off fliers, and so on, what am I missing out on? For many, these type of program-supporting roles are the only way they ever really serve.

What if they never hand a meal to someone in another community, city, or country for whom it may be the first or only mean of the day, or . . .
What if they never lead another person to faith in Christ, or . . .
What if they never give medicine to the sick in the name of Christ, or . . .
What if they never build a meaningful relationship with a student, or a neighbor . . .
All because they see their work supporting the various programs at our churches as service to the Kingdom?

I can hear you know, “Andy, are you saying that serving the Church isn’t serving the Kingdom?” Absolutely not. That’s not what I am saying at all. I understand that serving the Church is serving the Kingdom. I understand that people are gifted differently.

I’m simply saying that serving your church’s programs MAY NOT BE equal to serving the Kingdom.

How many of your go-to volunteers have volunteered in a way that minimizes meaningful life on life interaction with another person?

When we define our values, or our practices, and then ask if and or how programs can serve them, we set a path where volunteering is more inclined to lead toward kingdom service.

But when we think program first, we run the risk of becoming a Christian event-planning company. When we do this, we can unintentionally create a group of volunteers who believe that serving your church’s multiple programs is fulfilling Christ’s call to advance the Kingdom.

And all I’m saying is that this MIGHT NOT be the same thing.

(Photo Courtesy of Flickr/Creative Commons: avrene)

TweetShare via email

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading through the Gospels with an eye toward Jesus’ disciple-making values. You can read a couple of those observations here and here.

Today I was caught by this one verse, a sentence Jesus spoke to His disciples before sending them out to practically apply some of what they had been learning and observing. Re-encounter these familiar words of Christ:

“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.“–Matthew 10:16

I think this is one of the most instructive passages for us as 21st-century disciple-makers. Here’s why . . .

I think the same cultural influences that have given rise to “helicopter parents” has given rise to “helicopter discipleship.”

You know “helicopter parents,” right? The ones who hover over their children, correcting their mistakes, smoothing out their paths for them, keeping things good, and safe, and happy. The same influences that have lead us as parents (and disciple-makers, teachers, coaches, etc,) to create cocoons of exclusively positive feelings, emotions, and experiences for our children (and students, athletes, musicians, etc.) lead us to similar practices in discipleship. Because we don’t want our children or students to fail, or to be wrong, or heaven-forbid, to be uncomfortable, we isolate them. We keep the life of a follower safe and sanitary. I don’t know that we do it on purpose, or always knowingly, but we do it.

And by doing this, we fail.

Listen, I long to build-up my children. I want to take care of them. I want them to be safe, comfortable, and happy, both in life and in their spiritual development. I want the same for the students I disciple. I don’t want my children or my students to be ostracized or picked on for their faith, or for taking a stand.

I don’t want those things . . . And that is precisely the problem. See, I know that risk, and failure, and discomfort are an inherent part of living the Gospel. How do I know this? Jesus said so.

. . . like sheep among wolves . . .

Jesus, the very one who created these men, who cared deeply for them, who knew them in their mother’s womb, who saw the entire span of their lives before they were even a thought . . . this Jesus looked at these men and said I’m about to put you in harm’s way. Sheep among wolves. What a vivid picture of the perilous predicament! Why would Jesus do this? Simple:

Jesus knew that test and trial are the incubators of real discipleship.

If you ask me, my hunch is that “helicopter discipleship” is one of the many factors that contributes to teenagers leaving the church in young adulthood. I believe that for many of them, faith has never been anything more than ideas, in part because we are unwilling as parents and youth workers to intentionally create situations that makes them rub their beliefs up against the world in a high-stakes environment.

Let’s work together to NOT be these types of parents or youth ministers.

TweetShare via email

I’ve found my efforts at disciple-making lately to be more motivated by wanting to see my kids act right. Or more appropriately, to want to see them not act wrong.

I want to see them live their faith. I want there to be no separation from what they believe to be true about God and His Kingdom and how they conduct themselves in this world. I want to see their identity tangled up and intertwined with Christ. In Paul’s words, I want them “hidden in Christ.”

And in my desire to see this, I do the only thing that is measurable. I do what I feel I can control. I focus on their “bad” actions, hoping that maybe in my misguided zeal I can pester them enough that maybe my voice ringing in their ears will keep them from hitting their sister, or talking back, or complaining, and so on.

Oh to be sure, I praise their “good” actions. Which is maybe the worst part of all.

Shouldn’t we be concerned about the way our children and our students act? Of course we should. We are called to imitate the character of God in this world. If this is so, what’s wrong with being motivated by the end product of behavior? Is there abetter way?

There is a better way. And I’m coming to grips that the better way is much harder for me to control. In fact, it has very little, if anything, to do with me at all.

The better way is to consistently unfold to my children who Christ is. The better way is to reveal to them through God’s Word Jesus’ message and mission. To talk to them all the time about what He did for them. About what He does for them. To model for them a life affected and impacted by this truth. The better way is to trust in the Spirit and His work of sanctification. The better way is to do all that I can to help my children abide in Christ.

If I will do this, if they can begin now to internalize the Gospel, and to be broken down and built up in it over and over again, their actions will be motivated by a love for Christ, not a love for feel-good morality.

There is a level of surrender in this. But if we trust God’s message to us in the Bible, we know that this is the better way . . . the only way . . . to see our children, our students, our selves, and our spouses own a faith recognizable to the faith Jesus speaks of in the Scriptures.

TweetShare via email

Yesterday I mentioned how this was in part due to the fact that, by nature, the call to real discipleship is crowd-shrinking not crowd-growing. I said yesterday this is a good reason for us to evaluate our message. Are we drawing a crowd for the right reason?

Let’s look at one more quick aspect of this.

In Matthew chapter 9, Jesus gives two blind men their sight. Which, you know, is pretty amazing. And if Jesus were in the “ministry growth movement” He would’ve asked these guys if He could get a statement from them to put on His website and on the back of His books. But that’s not what Jesus did.

In Matthew 9:30, after Jesus healed them, He said this:

“See that no one knows about this.”

Now, let’s give a nod to good scholarship and acknowledge that the primary reason for this seems to be Jesus’ desire for people not to misinterpret the nature of His Messiaship or the nature of His Kingdom rule (which, you know, they misinterpreted anyway). Or at least not to do so this early in His ministry. People smarter than me believe this was the main reason for wanting people to be quiet.

But I wonder if there wasn’t another motivation, one that has application for us as 21st Century disciple-makers.

You see, I think Jesus understood that the atmosphere of the crowd is counter-intuitive to growing disciples.

Jesus was healing people, and teaching stuff that floored people. Can you imagine the sights and sounds, the constant stimulus, the side conversations and arguments that surrounded this movement? It must have been a circus! But here’s Jesus, shaping the lives of 12 men, rocking their worlds with a crash-course in REAL religion. The chaos of the crowd only served as a distraction to the real, slow, concentrated work of spiritual growth.

As we seek to lead our children or our students toward a more meaningful life of follower-ship, we HAVE to realize how counter-cultural this pursuit is.

Here’s what I mean . . .

–Spiritual formation is slow work. Our culture demands results now.

–Becoming a real follower is one step forward two steps back kind of stuff. Our culture expects success on success.

–Bending our lives toward Christ’s model means denial of self. Our culture says gratify the self at all costs!

–The soul work of growing faith IDEALLY happens in silence with nothing competing with the Spirit’s work in us. But culture is multi-task friendly, stimulus rich, and data intensive.

Jesus understood that the process of becoming a follower happened away from the crowds. Do we?

TweetShare via email

“Now when Jesus saw a crowd around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side.” (Matthew 8:18)

Again, Jesus did this in several places. Why?

Jesus knew what every Christ-follower has realized from that moment until today: Following Christ is hard.

Jesus wanted real disciples. And Jesus knew that the majority of the crowd weren’t interested in following Him. They were motivated by any number of personal agendas and needs. But real discipleship wasn’t one of them.

Beware the large crowds!

If you’re drawing a huge crowd in your youth ministry, it might mean what you’re saying isn’t in line with the Gospel. It might mean that you’re feeding the senses, but not the heart. It might mean that you are delivering experiences and not calling students to follow Christ above all else.

It MIGHT mean that. But it might not. You may have a crowd of committed followers who have gravitated to you because they FEED of the true, powerful, Gospel-centered message you faithfully pour into their lives.

But, it MIGHT mean something else.

Do you have an audience? If your answer is “yes,” today would be a GREAT time to think about your message and whether the crowds are there because your message is easy on the ears, or because your message is food for the soul.

TweetShare via email

Her premise was this: “With new technologies, the way that we write and read (and search and data-mine) is changing, and so must spelling.”

Huh?

In what is a truly fascinating (and short) read, Trubek points out, in her words, that “the notion that words can and should be spelled only one way is a fairly recent invention.” (You can read the article here.) She builds a pretty compelling case for embracing new spelling conventions. An excerpt:

“The most widely used American word in the world, OK, was invented during the age of the telegraph because it was concise. No one considers it, or abbreviations like ASAP and IOU, a sign of corruption. More recent textisms signal a similarly creative, bottom-up play with language: “won” becomes “1,” “later” becomes “l8r.” After all, new technology creates new inertia for change: The apostrophe requires an additional step on an iPhone, so we send text messages using “your” (or “UR”) instead of “you’re.” And it doesn’t matter—the messagee will still understand our message.”

Trubek points out that as new methods of communication continue to arise and rapidly develop, so must our standards of communicating. She closes the article with this:

“But the distinction between the oral and the written is only going to become more blurry, and the future isn’t autocorrect, it’s Siri. We need a new set of tools that recognize more variations instead of rigidly enforcing outdated dogma. Let’s make our own rules. It’s not like the English language has many good ones anyway.”

I’m a professional writer. An English major. An editor. I love the written word. This article rocked my world. And the jump to how we do discipleship was pretty easy for me to make.

So, it’s a very simple question:

What outdated discipleship approaches, structures, and methodology are you holding on to simply because they seem set in stone?

How might a more fluid approach to HOW you do discipleship actually make your discipleship more effective?

TweetShare via email

“The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ; he wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies, not with the bad people but the devout people. O you blasphemers and betrayers of Christ! If Christ had done what you are doing who would ever have been spared”

Yikes!

So, nobody’s going to accuse Luther of having a perky personality. But, I think there is a practical warning here for those of us invested in leading others deeper in their faith lives.

I think the application we can take from this quote is that the life lived as a disciple of Christ is hard. I was reminded of this this week in my personal tile of studying Scripture. Especially in Matthew, we see Jesus consistently turning away people, or trying to help them understand how difficult it will be to follow Him.

I’m not sure we always communicate this to those we lead in discipleship. I’m not sure we communicate this in our words. And I am pretty sure we often don’t communicate this in our actions.

We have to think about the brand of faith we’re leading others to. When we teach a faith that is more knowledge than action, more head than heart (more “doxa” than “praxa” for all my Greek nerds), we often teach a faith that is safe and comfortable. Or at worse, irrelevant.

If we’re to help pass along to our children or our students a faith that looks like the faith of the Bible, a faith that is vibrant, and dynamic, and meaningful . . . If we are to do these things we have to teach a faith that risks greatly, a faith that is stands “among our enemies,” a faith that is uncomfortable. Why? Because that is what true faith is.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”–John 16:33

TweetShare via email

I was hanging out last night with the guys from my adult small group. During the course of the conversation, one of my friends recalled a story about another one of the guys. This friend runs a business that is niche, but profitable. There really are only a couple of other competitors in our city in the same line of work.

Come to find out, my friend had a competitor who had fallen on hard times. His equipment had been repossessed, and he was unable to perform this particular service. Most people (including me, if I’m being transparent) would look at this as a rare business opportunity, maybe even God’s hand of affirmation on their company.

Not my friend.

You know what he did? Without making a big deal about it, my friend used his own equipment to perform this particular service for his competitor. His competitor’s clients didn’t know. And guess what? He didn’t charge his competitor for the service.

What???? Who does that?

At this point the guy who was telling the story about my friend passed it off to him. He wanted my friend to tell why he did this. My friend’s rational blew me away:

“The reason I did it was because my competitor was a Believer. I feel like this city needs more Christ-followers in positions to influence our city, and particularly businesses, for Christ. And I just couldn’t see running a Brother out of business.”

Let me tell you, jaws dropped around the room. What radical discipleship! My friend’s faith is not something he merely believes or claims. It’s who he is. His identity is wrapped in Christ. Is he perfect? Nah. But, this story is evidence to me of a life of very mature discipleship.

Oh, what does this have to do with the title of this post?

My friend has been an adult volunteer in our youth group for years.

This is the guy you want in your youth ministry, discipling your students, modeling for them a faith that is not compartmentalized or marginalized.

Do you have a volunteer, or volunteers like this in your ministry? If not, how can you get one? Or two? Or 20?

TweetShare via email

“I love the things that God makes.”

A simple picture from a little girl. But it speaks to something deeper. It speaks to process. It speaks to synthesis. It speaks to passages of Scripture and biblical concepts taken in and dealt with, and returned as something personal.

I love when we as parents get to see God becoming more real and personal for our children.

I love when we as youth workers get to see teenagers wrestling with and owning their faith.

I love when what we see coming out of them shows that what went in has been dealt with, chewed on, and ultimately, hidden by the Spirit in their hearts.

When they get it, when they really begin to get it, it sure feels good.

TweetShare via email