Hearing the Beat of Your Community
Adapted from Community: Taking Your Small Groups Off Life Support, this post deals with knowing your neighborhood in an effort to reach the people around you for Christ.
17 hours ago
In particular, what does “teaching them” in the Great Commission refer to? Sermons? Bible studies? Lectures? Maybe. But there’s a clue there in the text itself. Teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded. This necessarily involves both modeling and verbal teaching.
Let Me Tell You A Story (Part 5)
Part 5? Yes! The other four parts are here.
Hopefully you want to tell your story … not because you think you are so interesting, but because your story is about Jesus and what he has done for you.
So you get your chance … you are sitting at the coffee house. Your friend is sitting across from you. You’ve asked some good questions, like “Did you grow up around here? What did your family do for fun when you were a kid? Did your family have any faith tradition that you embraced?” And they have opened up. They have told you about growing up with parents of different faiths and how that left them confused. They mentioned the college years that they wish they could do over. They have told you about how they believe all religions are basically the same and that they are spiritual without being religious. Now it’s your turn.
What in the world do you say next?
If you felt a sinking feeling in your stomach as you imagined that moment, you are not alone. Most of us fear that moment when we get exactly what we have been praying for: an opportunity to share! Here are some simple tips to make it easy to share your story when the moment is right:
- Say a quick prayer, Nehemiah style (Nehemiah 2:4-5)
- Use the Acts 26 model (My life before Christ, how I met Christ, my life since I met Christ)
- Weave the gospel into the story (1 Cor 15:3-11)
- Avoid using Christian jargon like “saved”, “sanctified”, etc.
- Remember to smile: what you are sharing really is GOOD NEWS!
Douglas Cecil, in his book Seven Principles of an Evangelistic Life, gives us the ABC’s of sharing our faith:
- Ask the Holy Spirit to guide you as you speak
- Be brief
- Center on Christ
Relax, people want to hear your story. And you never know, God might use to change someone’s life!
For more on sharing your story, see our free resource entitled Sharing Your Story: Your Most Valuable Tool for Sharing Christ.
By Michael Smith
Community Pastor
Fellowship Bible Church of NWA
mismith@fellowshipnwa.org
—Spiritual formation is slow work. Our culture demands results now.
—Becoming a real follower is one step forward two steps back kind of stuff. Our culture expects success on success.
—Bending our lives toward Christ’s model means denial of self. Our culture says gratify the self at all costs!
Discipleship is counter-cultural …
here’s what I mean:
—The soul work of growing faith IDEALLY happens in silence with nothing competing with the Spirit’s work in us. But culture is multi-task friendly, stimulus rich, and data intensive.
Jesus understood that the process of becoming a follower happened away from the crowds. Do we?
Excerpted from a great post by Andy Blanks. Read the whole post at Andy’s Blog.
“We don’t have to do evangelism. We get to!”
So writes Ross Appleton in this post from Gospel Centered Discipleship
A Fishing Lesson
A conversation I had this summer with my brother-in-law:
Me: “How was fishing this morning?”
Brother-in-law: “Um, it was fun in a different way. It was a lot of work.”
Me: “What do you mean?”
Brother in law:
“Well, I never got to fish. I took a friend and his kids out fishing.
They’d never been fishing before so I spent the whole time baiting their hooks, netting their fish they caught, retrieving fishing poles the kids dropped overboard. So it wasn’t fun per se. More rewarding than fun- but so fun to see their faces as they caught their first fish.”
What a great metaphor for discipleship. I’m convinced that our primary job in discipleship is not to do ministry but to equip others to do ministry. But the problem is that most of us have a passion for fishing. Not making fishers of men. We have spent a lot of time thinking through our own personal ministry, but not much time thinking through the ministry that we want our proteges to have. Our job in discipleship is to get more players on the playing field. The Apostle Paul wrote that the role of a Christian leader is to:
“equip people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up” – Ephesians 4:12
So our job in leading is to cultivate an environment that encourages the people of God to be stewards of the gifts God has given them and help them use those gifts to minister to others. A couple practical ideas on what this might look like:- Never do anything alone. If you’re going to do any kind of ministry (breakfast discipleship, evangelistic lunch, teaching a Bible study) bring along someone you are discipling to watch and learn.
- Start a multiplication chart (click to download a template).
The linked file has boxes for each future fisherman you are investing in and then boxes for the people they are investing in (the larger box is for them to list out the people in the Bible study they are leading). Every time you meet with someone for discipleship pull out the sheet and talk about it with them. It’s a visual reminder for both of you that your primary job is to help them have a multiplying ministry.
I would love to hear:
If your primary job is to Teach Others How to Fish, how will that change how you approach ministry?
By Tim Casteel
Cru Campus Director, University of Arkansas
Follow him @timcasteel
photo courtesy of Tassava
Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.
-Jesus in Mark 5:19
I really enjoyed Tim Chester’s book A Meal With Jesus. This excerpt, posted at my new favorite blog, Gospel Centered Discipleship, discusses how meals are the perfect opportunity for gospel conversations.
A few years ago I was captivated by a simple, clear, and compelling vision: The presence of Christ in every neighborhood. This post from theResurgence.com is adapted from Brad House’s book Community: Taking Your Small Groups off Life Support.
Let Me Tell You A Story (Part 4)
Try these opening lines on for size:
- When I was in high school I was always worried about what people thought of me.
- I was in an abusive relationship, but I was so lonely that I was afraid to leave.
- My family life was a mess, but I wanted people to think that we had our act together, so I always pretended everything was OK.
- I used to look for happiness in the wrong places… alcohol, relationships, entertainment … but nothing ever really satisfied me.
Each one of those makes you want to know what happened next, don’t they? That’s because we love STORIES. And each one of those stories openers above sets up for the next part of the story: “But then I met Jesus.”
How about this one, “In the beginning, God created everything”? That’s a great opening line, huh? I want to know what happened next! Try this opener: “I was serving God in all the wrong ways. I was so zealous for God that I was having people locked up and even killed if they didn’t believe what I believed!” That one will get you listening. And that’s pretty much how Paul begins sharing his life’s story with King Agrippa in Acts 26:9-10. And King Agrippa is hooked! As a matter of fact, after hearing Paul’s story Agrippa says “Keep this up much longer and you’ll make a Christian out of me!” (Acts 26:28 MSG).
What is really interesting about Acts 26 is that Paul gives us a great model for how we can share our own Christ-story. It breaks into three simple and easy to remember segments:
- Acts 26:4-11 –Paul’s life before he trusted Christ
- Acts 26:12-19 –How Paul came to trust Christ
- Acts 26:20-23 –How Paul’s life changed after trusting Christ
Read Acts 26 a few times this week. Take a moment to write out your story using this simple formula and answering three questions:
- What was my life like before I trusted Christ?
- How did I come to Jesus?
- What has my life been like since I trusted Christ?
Next week we will look as some “do’s and don’ts” of sharing your Christ-story.
By Michael Smith
Community Pastor, Fellowship Bible Church of NWA
mismith@fellowshipnwa.org
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