Pilgrim Soldier

In the last few days I’ve started to read Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart and on page 20 of the UK version of the book found the following thought:

Churches, local assemblies of apprentices of Jesus, naturally resulted. Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts of the kingdom. They were societies of Jesus, springing up in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria and to the furthest points on earth (Acts 1:8), as the reality of Christ was brought to bear on ordinary human life.

Now other than the love I have of the concept of discipleship being an apprenticeship, I liked the idea that in fact local congregations are simply an assembly of Jesus followers. This, in my mind, moves the focus away from the Church itself, onto the people who are apprentices and consequently to the one they are apprenticed to.

One of my biggest concerns is that we are still focussed far too much on getting people inside our meeting places, whatever we may choose to call them. If we have a mentality that sees congregational size and numbers of people through our doors as a measure of our effectiveness as Kingdom deliverers, then I’m not sure that we will ever get out the rut that we are in here in the West. Only when we realise that the Kingdom is wherever Jesus’ apprentices are can we really start to move forward.

So what do we do? Well, in mind opinion we have to move away from looking at quantity and instead start focussing on quality. I suspect that once the quality of our discipleship improves and we become more like the Master who we follow, then the Spirit will take care of the quantity.