Monthly Archive for July, 2007Page 2 of 2

More on discipleship

Published
by
Graeme
on July 13, 2007
in Ramblings
. 2 Comments

Where should our focus be? Should it be on discipling those who are in our corps to make them more effective, or should it be on people getting saved?

I think that this type of thinking makes a fundamental mistake. It sees salvation and discipleship as distinct things, whereas I believe that they are impossible to separate. I believe wholeheartedly in the Great Commission! Jesus calls us to “Go and make disciples … teaching them to obey all that I commanded”1.

At this point in a conversation someone, usually a staunch evangelist, would normally throw the text “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” into the hat to prove that actually getting people saved is the most important bit. Of course they would be right, but if we concentrate solely on getting people saved, then discipleship can get completely left out of the equation.

Getting saved is simply one step, albeit the most important step, on the road of true discipleship. If we get the discipleship bit right, and start being true disciples of Jesus, then I suspect more people will travel along the same road than would if we simply concentrate on getting as many saved as possible.

1 Yes I know I missed the baptism bit. It was deliberate just in case the conversation gets diverted away from my main point!

What difference?

Published
by
Graeme
on July 13, 2007
in My Pilgrimage
. 0 Comments

One of the sites in my Google Reader is inward/outward which gives daily quotes from various sources. This was yesterdays!

The important question to ask is not, “What do you believe?” but “What difference does it make that you believe?” Does the world come nearer to the dream of God because of what you believe?
Verna Dozier, The Dream of God

It’s not me that’s important but how I affect the world!

Maintanence to Mission *long post warning*

Published
by
Graeme
on July 12, 2007
in Mission and Ramblings
. 8 Comments

We are in a place in the West where it is a constant battle for many local congregations simply to survive. Dwindling congregations and lack of leadership is a constant problem across almost all the established churches. The money coming in often is totally inadequate to meet the costs of sustaining the building in which the congregation meets. I’ve no doubt that we in The Salvation Army are no stranger to this sort of situation.

In her book Mission-Shaped Spirituality Susan Hope says:

For essentially the spirituality of the English Church – of whatever denomination or tradition – is that of a settled community. Its liturgies, its way of organizing itself, its buildings, its synods, its financial arrangements, its self-understanding, have been formed and shaped through a long time of settlement.1

This period of settlement is possibly one of the reason why the established churches still find it so hard to get away from the way they have always done things. Indeed change is not even seen as necessary in some congregations because they fail to see that they are failing in some way as they continue to enjoy the same things despite seeing no growth for many years.

Last year I led a meeting and preached at a corps in the UK where the soldiers expected the Corps Officer to do everything for them. I really do mean everything as they expected them to even go out and buy the craft materials for the craft club because they didn’t want the responsibility! Basically it was the Officers job to provide them with everything they needed for their corps and they were not prepared to do anything to help. How is a corps like this ever to survive and continue the mission that Jesus has charged us with?

Congregations like this are like baby birds sitting in the nest waiting for their mother to regurgitate food into their mouths! For these it is all about maintaining the personal experience of Christianity and at the most there is only a hat-tip towards real Christian mission.

How then do we move forward from a maintenance mentality into something that approaches the sort of mission that we are supposed to be involved in? Let me make a few suggestions:
Continue reading ‘Maintanence to Mission *long post warning*’

Passive Salvationism

Published
by
Graeme
on July 9, 2007
in Ramblings
. 7 Comments

Surely the title of this post has to be an oxymoron! To be passive and to be a Salvationist, indeed to passive and be a Christian, must be the very antithesis of each other. Yet many people who claim to follow Jesus sit in their seats for Sunday worship and then at the end of the meeting go home and do very little either in the life of the church itself, or within the community their local congregation is there to serve.

A few weeks ago I saw a post on another blog that contained the following quote:

We are convinced that a church system which allows believers to fulfill their weekly spiritual obligation by listening to a sermon creates a consumerist audience who have not been encouraged to step into the responsibility of being a disciple and discipling others. source: emerginggrace.blogspot.com

In my 23 years of soldiership in The Salvation Army the majority of involvement in ministry amongst my fellow corps members has been in the Band and the Songsters. Other ministries in the 9 corps I’ve soldiered at has been limited to a small handful of the membership.

A few days ago I was chatting to someone who truly did not see the problem with the sum of Christian involvement being limited to the Sunday worship service. They could not see that sitting in a seat on a Sunday and singing a few songs is not what being a Christian really is. There was an acknowledgement that our role is to get other people saved, but they truly believed that this was the sole responsibility of a Christian, although they personally didn’t do anything about it.

In the west we seem to have become a church full of consumers. We complain if the style of worship doesn’t suit us, rather than worshipping He who died to save us. We moan if the meeting extends five minutes beyond the deadline, rather than getting lost in the presence of the Spirit. We come looking for sermons that speak to our situation, rather than applying teaching that will help others.

Surely this isn’t what Jesus died on the cross for?

It’s really happening!

Published
by
Graeme
on July 8, 2007
in My Pilgrimage
. 0 Comments

I meant to post this at the end of last week, but I ran out of time before Zoe, myself and the girls got away from Riga for a short weekend break.

On Thursday afternoon we opened the postbox to see a letter addressed to Envoy and Mrs Smith. It turned out to be the Godalming Corps newsletter and within it there was the following:

Envoy Graeme Smith has been appointed as our new Commanding Officer from early September. We look forward to welcoming the envoy with his wife Zoe and their two children in early September.

Firstly, it was very strange for me to see the title Envoy in front of my name. Until 4 months ago the thought of being an Envoy had never entered my head as I was expecting to be a cadet come September. Secondly, there is a growing understanding that I am about to enter a completely different form of ministry from anything that I’ve ever done before, and that is both frightening and exciting.

Moving towards a deeper understanding of discipleship

Published
by
Graeme
on July 4, 2007
in Ramblings
. 3 Comments

I’ve been giving a lot of thought towards what it means to be a disciple recently and how we should be modelling that within our lives. The examples of discipleship that I grew up with within the Church seems to be fundamentally flawed for many, one of the reasons why so many of my generation have left the Army and Christianity altogether. It’s also one of the issues at the centre of the Emerging Church debate!

This morning I opened my Google Reader to see an article on Missional Discipleship and was intrigued to read what the writer said. The article was good but his illustration of discipleship simply didn’t sit comfortably with me. This led me to make a comment which included the following:

… , my only concern with your model of horizontal/vertical discipleship is from an illustrative point of view. By having two axes of discipleship there is an obvious inherent danger.

For me the type of discipleship I saw as I grew up is more like this horizontal/vertical design. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the image, but lets look at what it could and has resulted in. Below is an image of how that model could be seen, and apologies to Martin if I’m misrepresenting his idea in anyway!

Horizontal/Vertical Discipleship

The danger of this understanding of discipleship is that by necessity we need to focus our attention on one or the other ‘lines’ at any given time. So if we put our attention on discipleship that is focussed on God, there is a danger that we move away from a community focus, and of course vice-versa. If we keep this up for too long then the distance between the two is almost too far for us to successfully bridge the gap between them.

This could be seen as one of the reasons for the conservative/liberal divide that we see too much of within Christianity. The problem of course is that both have elements of truth within them. The conservative element of the church has placed primary importance on God focussed discipleship. In many this has led to a personal piety that is detached from the world in which Christ has called us to be His disciples. Of course the liberal element have placed their attention predominantly on Community focussed discipleship, resulting in a strong emphasis on Jesus’ compassionate nature but casting aside the need for repentance from sin.

Another danger is that it can also result in a hypocritical type of Christianity in which we have a theoretical understanding of God focussed discipleship, but in fact have never actually embraced that in our own lives and interaction with others.

I think its time that we move toward a new model of discipleship. I said in my comment on Martin’s blog that I saw this as two inextricably linked strands and as I pondered this more I realised that God has given us the perfect model in nature.

DNA Discipleship

It is of course the Double Helix of DNA. In this model the two strands of discipleship, God focussed and Community focussed, are not only intertwined along a common axis, but are also permanently linked together through bases1. This means that as we move forward in either strand we are taken further along the other strand as well. As we learn more about our relationship with God we would also learn and experience more of our relationship with our fellow man, and as we increase our interaction with others our relationship with God would also grow.

I don’t pretend to believe that this idea is a perfect model of what discipleship is about, but am throwing it out there. It has probably already been written down better somewhere else, although if it has I haven’t seen it yet. I would however be interested in hearing what others think.

1 As an aside thought, could it be that these bases are made up of the traditional aspects of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral? I know there are some inconsistencies in the illustration but that’s always the danger of illustration

Last things

Published
by
Graeme
on July 2, 2007
in Mission and Ramblings
. 0 Comments

Today sees us with only 5 weeks left in Latvia, and consequently we are seeing the start of the ‘last things’. Yesterday, saw my last sermon at my current corps. During the meeting I realised that I have spent longer as a soldier here than at any other Corps I have ever been in. It really is amazing to look at how much it has changed over the years and to see the potential it has for the future!

I sense that it is on the cusp of something amazing. There seems to be a lot bubbling beneath the surface just waiting for an opportunity to burst forth in the power of the Spirit. I think this is one of the reasons why so many of the foreigners are returning ‘from whence they came’. In order to be really effective those of us who have been a support over the last few years need to leave and others need to step up and take on responsibility. We have already seen that amongst the young people and I suspect that they will be the driving force over the coming years as they seek to follow God’s will for the corps.

The same can be said for the whole Salvation Army in Latvia. We have so much potential here for reaching out to the lost, but need to find our own way. There is a danger that we just import wholesale the methods of the Army, or the Church in general, from other parts of the world and expect to see it achieve the same things here as it has elsewhere. I don’t agree with this! I pray that there will be those who will seek God’s will and follow the path that Jesus has set before the Army here, so that it becomes effective in a way that will reach the people of Latvia.