“I would especially encourage you to take to yourself the discipline of discipling men.” Look at Paul’s instruction to Timothy in 2 Tim 2: 1-2 You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others. This is the method Jesus used – man to man evangelism, one person teaching and encouraging another. This is more expensive in terms of time, but infinitely more effective than simply lending one another books or inviting one another along to meetings. Christians have a real duty to encourage one another, personally, taking time to explore subjects together and to learn together how to rely on God. Yet, discipling is a sadly neglected ministry. We seem to manage to read the gospels without seeing the basic pattern of Christ’s education of His disciples. Out He would go into the towns and villages, healing and teaching and using opportunities as they arose to offer His pupils some new insight. If Christ the Rabbi, the master teacher, could use this system, then it is not for us to neglect it. We throw out messages, we get masses of people flocking to conventions and seminars, but while they do retain some benefit they remember much less than they should. I am convinced that they would do far better if they do regular encouragement in their own churches, especially if each church made fuller use of talented and informed members within its own ranks to teach the newer and less well informed. Young people who have never done evangelism need to be taken by the hand and shown how. Most of us are not very good at learning such things from books. This is equally true of pastoral counselling, youth work, leading Bible studies, you name it. By contrast, in most churches, it seems as if the poor pastor has the task of teaching the whole congregation, with all its widely varying needs and fears and ambitions. Any educationalist would tell you that the smaller the ratio of pupils to teachers the better. In consequence, half the congregation knows the subject well; the other half is struggling to keep up. The Biblical principle is very different. Where there was and is a place for the big meeting, Paul and his companions were very careful to place the responsibility in the hands of responsible elders, with the injunction that the chain of teaching should go on from man to man, as we saw in the extract from Timothy. The leaders disciple others who in turn disciple others, right down to the grassroots of the congregation who in their turn as they reach out discipling outside the church on an individual grass root level, which is by far the most effective means of spreading the Gospel. Jesus did not simply give out a set of instructions, instead He lived with His disciples, caring, suffering, talking, and illustrating from their common life along the road. In our churches today the modern equivalent is for the pastor to be training the leaders who then train others. Perhaps you feel that this is quite unrealistic. You are completely incapable of training anyone else. It would be like a fish showing people how to ride a bicycle. Remember that the best way of learning something is to teach it. As you try to explain sticky passages and wrestle with awkward questions, the word of God will become more and more real to you – and it will give you a real impetus to find things out, asking those older than you in the faith and digging into commentaries. Just think what could happen if you can disciple just one person the next 6 months and the next 6 months you could both disciple one other person each, and so on. How the word would spread! Perhaps it seems modest to you as a goal, but such a progression soon mounts up. All too frequently Christians in aiming for the stars don’t even hit the trees. We become number neurotics. How many people were there at the meeting? A thousand. Praise the Lord. Yet the Lord is more concerned with quality.”
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 06:05:16 +0000
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