Jun 13, 2023
For the last few weeks we have talked about building the church.
Not the actual building, but the church...the people. We've
addressed the importance of connecting ourselves to King Jesus, as
well as living out his values in our everyday lives. However, there
is third and final imperative he gave his
followers: Make disciples.
This is a skill that's kind of been lost by the church, however we
see this discipline being practiced all over our culture in
different professions. For example, it takes over a decade for a
person to become a doctor. The process includes a lot of
testing for sure, but it also requires supervised practice. It's
one thing to have knowledge, but it's a totally different thing to
apply it in a real life setting.
The same is true of the Christian faith. The church excels in
the area of information and knowledge. Where it falls short is in
the area of taking that information and providing the hands on
assistance needed to learn how to live it out the knowledge in
everyday life. I think this is why often times people carry the
name "Christian" yet their lives looks nothing like
Jesus.
So how do we go about change our strategy? How can we have a great
impact that scales to reach more people? I would suggest looking to
the dandelion. Why would we look to that pesky weed as a model for
how to carry out the mission of Jesus? One dandelion can change an
entire field of grass in a relatively short period of time. You see
the dandelion isn't just focused on adding one dandelion, it's
purpose is multiplication. It want's to send out hundreds and
hundreds of seed parachutes that are focused on sending out
hundreds and hundreds of their own seed parachutes to fill the
fields with their beautiful yellow flowers!
Here's how this translates to the mission Jesus wants his church to
carry out. Our current model is, come to church and worship and
listen to a message about Jesus. This is important and helpful to
the lives of Christians, for sure. Community worship is important
for unity and building relationships and being encouraged. However,
it's not the best model for making disciples. You see this model
focuses on simple addition; adding people here or there.
However, what if the community worship service was instead a
"dandelion" moment where as the service concludes, the
attenders were launched to go model and disciple other people. All
of a sudden the focus shifts from addition to multiplication! In
this final sermon in this series learn how you can get on mission
with Jesus.