When I first came to Jubilee in December 1997 (At the time still called Selsdon Community Church) I visited every member of the fellowship and asked them what they thought was the most important aspect of church life out of five major areas. I gave them the choice of worship, fellowship, serving, teaching, or evangelism. The answers people gave to my question largely depended on each persons personality and passion, but the majority of folk answered me in the context of the Sunday morning service.
Over the years I have noticed that when I gather with a room full of pastors and ministers to talk about church it doesn't take long for two things to happen. If the leaders don’t already know each other well, the first thing is that they start fishing about the size of each others church (or is it just men who worry about comparative size?).
The second topic of conversation and the one that fills the rest of the time is all about what happens on Sunday mornings. These are leaders know that church is about the people and will actually preach that church is 24/7, but they just can’t help but betray that most Christians still instinctively think of church as the thing you go to on Sunday mornings. This deep down instinct has to come from somewhere, but where?
I believe that most Christians think of church as the Sunday service because we think of Christianity as a religion to get people to go to heaven instead of hell. And our main method of doing this is to get ‘lost’ people to come into a building on a Sunday morning (or other special occasion) and hear a sermon preached that will convince them of their sin and their need of a saviour, so they will commit to Christ and join the church and so become part of the machine which goes on turning.
Now, in many ways there is nothing wrong with this strategy, if its a small part of the whole, but if its the whole part of a small then we are in real trouble. Maybe I will go deeper into the big misunderstanding in a later blog, perhaps ‘Flippin’ Jesus’, but just to say briefly that, if our Gospel is only about making converts then we have totally missed the point of Jesus’ life and teaching. One of the calls on the church is given in Mathew 28
Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations ... Matt 28:18f
Flippin’ Disciples
We are clearly commanded to make disciples not converts. ‘Whats the difference between a disciple and a convert?’ you may ask. Well a convert is someone who just changes his mind on something. Its a crisis point. Some years ago now I went through a crisis point. I had been really let down by some people and I’d anguished for a couple of months over what to do and did a lot of research and asked lots of friends who, I found, had different, even conflicting, advice. Eventually I went to someone who claimed to really know what they were talking about and I made a commitment. The day came when two men came to my house for about an hour and I was converted or rather I should say that I converted to a different broadband supplier!
A disciple, however, is someone who is an apprentice of a master. In ancient Greece masters would take several boys into their home and over many years train them up in all aspects of life which included their specific occupation. These boys would eat, sleep, play and learn together until they eventually became fully trained and completely educated in life. Less than a century ago in England these kind of apprentices still existed. Sent from their family to learn a trade until the day they completed their final test, their ‘Master Piece’ and became master craftsmen themselves.
In the Gospel we find Jesus calling men to himself to be disciples, they followed him everywhere and ate, slept and played together as they learned from him over about three years. The difference is that, even though these men progressed in what they learned, they never became masters, Jesus remained their master and will always be so, and they remain still his disciples. Jesus calls us to be his disciples too and to go and make more apprentice Jesus’. The word ‘Christians’ just means little Christs.
Earlier we saw that the church is called to abide in Christ to make our dwelling in him - the house of God, so that we are now temples, the house of God. A disciple is living in Christ, learning from him as we walk together. Its why one of Paul’s most frequent appeals is for us to live ‘in Christ’ or to 'walk according to the Spirit'. Jesus, in his only recorded description of himself says:
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Matt. 11:29f
It was common practice in the first century for an old well trained ox to be yoked to a brand new wilful one until it learned the ropes. In saying “Take my yoke upon you” Jesus is telling us to apprentice ourselves to him, the only one who knows how to live a full life, for the whole of our lives.
Its amazing that we look to all kinds of gurus for how to be happy, make our fortune or be content, but very few people turn to the one who really knows, the one who created us. The only actual genius is Jesus. There is a huge industry of magazines and TV programmes, courses and experts all telling us how to live our lives, when we are called to be apprentices of the one master, Jesus. Being a disciple is far more than one hour on Sunday mornings, it’s our whole lives. It follows that the church is about every aspect of our lives all of the time.
One of the reasons that church leaders tend to think about the Sunday morning services more than the rest of the week and why they think so much about getting people into their church building more than addressing issues affecting the rest of the city, is that the system of calling church leaders is a circular process. It doesn’t really matter which denomination of church you care to look at, the process is fairly similar. You get saved, you grow up in a Sunday morning oriented church, you like the church, you want to do more, you do even more, now the church is getting in the way of your day job so you resolve to go full time. You are selected by Sunday church people who confirm your ‘call’, you are then trained by people who came through the same system and you are then found to be competent to lead a church where you go and repeat the process with the next generation! Can that be what Jesus calls His body?
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