Over the last several months, I've personally experienced a lot of growth in terms of the way my life is evolving and unfolding. I owe much of this change to the vision seeking that I mention a lot about in the latter half of 2015.
As church life gets busier and busier, my mind is also getting busier and busier with the way I think about how to approach church. I think it all started when I heard a guest speaker talk about church growth. The comment he made was that it's easy if you want a big church. All you have to do is have the right programs and the right marketing, and people will come. Make everything look pretty, and your church will grow in size.
Such a comment put me into a bit of a deep search about what it means for a church to grow. And throughout the following months, I kept coming back to the idea that disciples of Jesus are to make disciples of Jesus. In order to make a disciple, we have to know what a disciple is and how to be one.
And then I fell into a bit of a struggle in finding that a lot of our modern churches don't really do a good job at explaining what a disciple is and how they're made. If we don't even know how to be a disciple of Jesus ourselves, we can't go make more of us. So this has been a big reason of why I've been preaching the book of Philippians. Very few places in the Bible show us what an authentic and true follower of Jesus looks like in the way that Philippians does.
My struggle didn't stop there. I thought to myself that another reason why we don't seem to be good at making disciples is because we don't even know what makes a disciple. It may sound a little weird at first, but the common theme these days is to get people to accept Jesus into their hearts - this will make them a disciple. Really? All of our methods, those of which include raising up your hand, walking up the aisle, saying a prayer, to ask Jesus into our lives, these are what makes us disciples of Jesus? I've witnessed so many people do that, some even go as far as being baptized, but their lives look nothing like that of a Christ follower.
It makes me think: has this person really met Jesus? Or is he/she just going through the motions? Do they do all these actions just because it's what they've been doing all along? I've expressed to a few people recently, partly because it's weighed heavily on my heart, that I find it really hard to believe that someone can encounter the Jesus described to us in the Bible and not be radically changed.
To cut to the chase: our evangelism methods suck. We try too hard to make it all about "the decision" to put up your hand and to pray some kind of prayer that I'm still trying to find in the Bible that we're told to pray. The closest I've come is all of "repent and be baptized" in Acts. Still nothing on a prayer about accepting Jesus into your heart.
What lead to "repent and be baptized" is what we actually miss out on and what we need to focus on. We need to be able to present a full picture and story of the gospel of Jesus. We're good at the "believe in Jesus so you'll have eternal life!" But that's not the full picture. And unfortunately, we've tried to sell our entire faith on that one statement.
I feel so strongly about this because in a few instances over the last while, I've asked for an explanation of the Gospel and salvation told to me, and all I proceeded to see were blank stares. People who've allegedly grown up in the church, know all the Bible stories, know everything you'd expect them to know, but don't actually know the Gospel. This is what living in a post-Christian society has done to us.
It was amazing, actually. In one of these instances of a failure to explain the gospel of Jesus, I then changed my original plans and decided to explain the Gospel to the best of my ability. Some time in the middle of my explanation of the Gospel, I saw it. I visibly saw the relevance of Jesus take form in the faces of the people I was telling it to. It was a surreal moment for me, when the reality of the Gospel kicked in and suddenly came to life. Even though these two people had been taught all of these different things growing up, I think for the first time in their lives Jesus became real to them. One of them even confessed afterward, about how they were taught all these things growing up, but they didn't know what the Gospel truly was until that moment.
So I'm really thankful for this experience. It's tragic that pastors and leaders try to give people something other than Jesus for the very thing Jesus is trying to do in their lives. I think a lot of what we'll be needing to do is to restore the Gospel into the lives of our churches.
I would go through lengths again if only I can see more people come to the realization of what the Gospel means to them.
