A Dose of the Ghost

It's a sweet day in our household. We have been running hard all week long and we had to just sit and stop because tomorrow it gets real again for another week. John is outside playing with his dog, Joseph is playing basketball, and Jessie and Nadia are napping. But not before Jessie made a banana nut bread castle. I have gone out a few times, working through my sermon and each time I am touched by the sight of our warm house. I know that when we come in from the cold, the fire will be going and I can sit down with a nice cup of tea and the pile of books that are on my plate to read in preparation for shepherding the people of God.

Wednesday night, we got a dose of the Ghost at our Wednesday Bible study. We have been spending time on discipleship, following Robert Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism and A.B. Bruce's The Training of the Twelve to lay a groundwork for what we will be doing.

There is in this an element of danger, that discipleship, like so much in the Church, can become an onject of study, a time for transferral of information, not transformation. So I like to inject calls to the practical. But I got more than I bargained for!

Alex Absalom sums up the apostolic plan of discipleship when he says that instead of reading lots of books and setting up an elaborate plan for making disciples, you just need to ask, “What is Jesus saying?” And “What are you going to do about it?

When I asked how do we know what Jesus is saying, well, everyone pretty well intuited the content of Foster's Celebration of Discipline and Dallas Willard's Divine Conspiracy. It's simple... anyone can do it.

But then, the obedience question... what are you going to do about it?

In many different ways we admitted, with a simple comment from Tim Miller, that we like to talk about things more than we like to do things. At the risk of sounding like we did a lot of talking... we stayed for 45 minutes past our allotted time.

Johnny Fryman kind of blew it open when he said...”I come from a rural background. We could not pay our preachers much, so we did most of the work ourselves.”

Oh boy. This is what I have been saying for a while. Clergy have been too willing to be the bosses. To be at the head of everything. What if the members did almost everything? What if the pastor preached, visited the sick, evangelized, started new churches (and taught the members to do those things as well!)?

I put forward my idea that maybe we need to go back to 2-year appointments for pastors? The Methodist Church was exploding when that was the pattern. Could it be that made the laity stronger? Jay Barrett said that as it is, a new pastor comes and the church stops to wait and see what the new guy will do.

Shouldn't it be that the church is already doing all kinds of stuff and it doesn't matter who the pastor is?

Joyce Saxon wins the prize for pithiest comment. “Isn't that kind of moving hard on the pastor's family?” I said that moving is not as hard as it seems. I went to 5 elementary schools and on average lived in one place for 20 months until I left home. She said, “That's why you're so warped!”

At the risk of sounding like we talked a lot... yes, but the energy coming out of there. Wes Holland came up to me afterwards and said, “Plant the seed and let us run with it.” Yes. We have been working on that. We are on the verge of some things just letting loose. It's the kind of discipleship and church growth stuff that hopefully has nothing to do with who the pastor is.

I shared that I am discontent and restless. I feel like a chump saying it. 17 new believers this year. Baptisms. 34 new members. But it's linear growth. I want to see multiplication growth. I can't wait for when each new believer wins another new believer! And that keeps rolling. What about if each current member won a new person to the faith? Joyce Saxon said-- leave it to the math teacher-- “that would be exponential growth!”

Ah, exponential!

You know what I think the biggest barrier is? We think we have to be successful. We are afraid it won't work. We are afraid someone will say no to our invitation. I wonder if we can just have joy in asking someone to come to church? Joy in telling someone how much peace we had in prayer!