The Grace Discipleship Group

In this post, I want to continue to post a few additional notes from our winter seminar. I will post the original notes in italics and then add a few comments.
The Priority of the Gospel (Community in Mission)

Grace Fellowship is Jesus’ church. He is the Senior Pastor. Jesus Himself is the gospel – His Person, His all-sufficient work on the cross, and His resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Father as King of kings and Lord of lords!

We are committed to taking the gospel both to our neighbours and to the ends of the earth. We will challenge one another to be sacrificial, risk-taking and flexible because the gospel has priority over our comfort, security and traditions. We want to have a global gospel vision and to this end be generous with our resources. We will not let Christian activity be just one part of our lives.

“Everyone assumed Sheila would make it to the top when she landed a well-paid job with good prospects. And things had started well. But during that first year something strange had happened. Almost unnoticed, her old ambitions were replaced by new ones. It may have been the teaching she received at church, but she thought it was more down to the examples of other Christians. She had moved into a poorer area, got a low paid job in the local citizens advice bureau and pitched in with the work other Christians were doing. Her parents - her Christian parents at that - said she was throwing her life away. But she remembered someone once saying that was just the way you gained your life.”

The gospel is not just an outline or a set of facts to memorize, Gospel truth should energize us.

When we sing songs with phrases like my God, my Saviour, my Lord, do we rejoice in our hearts at these facts? Listen to how the apostle Peter describes it in 1 Peter 1:8: ‘Though you have not seen him, you love him, and through you do not see him now, you believe in him, and you rejoice greatly with joy inexpressible and full of glory.’

We often explain to unbelievers that Christianity is not a religion, but a relationship. But what kind of relationship do they see? Is it cold and distant, clinical and formal or do they see someone who is in love with God? Someone whose heart beats faster at the thought of him, at the prospect of seeing him, and with the thrill of speaking to him and listening to his word?

This is emotive language, but it echoes the tones of biblical language. For a true work of God to take place, the gospel must capture our minds, wills and hearts. The gospel is never about mere facts imparted to analytical brains producing sterile obedience. It is about a God who has gone to the most remarkable lengths in order to win our love. It is about our minds and hearts grasping the truth simultaneously, forcing our will into glad and eager obedience.

Ironically, gospel work has a tendency to drain this heart-felt love of God from us. It is so easy for us to become focused on the tasks of reaching people with the gospel, developing effective strategies, ensuring we are reading the Bible with people, writing sermons, leading Bible studies, attending conferences and reading books. What is even more ironic is that so few conversations between Christians are about Jesus! We are so comfortable talking about strategies, ideas, models, Bible passages, and doctrine. But we are uncomfortable talking about our relationship with the One who has loved us so well in intimate and personal terms. We should learn to encourage each other by talking about Jesus with each other.

Mission Through CommunityWe are committed to communicating the gospel message in the context of a gospel community. We want people to experience church as a network of relationships rather than a meeting you attend or a place you enter. We want our people to see church as an identity instead of a responsibility to be juggled alongside other commitments

It is not good for man to be alone – to live isolated and independent from the church. (Marriage is to be a life-model of the reality of Christ and His church. It is not good for us to be without Christ – and thus apart from His church – His body. Our God is a community God – to not be in community is to deny God – it is to not reflect His image.

God made us lovers (but sin causes us to love ourselves and not others). Who do I devote most of my time to? Who do I make sure is fed, and clothed, and entertained?

The development of God’s call to community life requires significant face-to-face relationships

To have the quality of community life that God expects from the church requires deliberate effort.

This cannot happen only, or even mainly, in the large worship service. We cannot assume that merely by gathering together in large groups we will be able to embody the gospel or carry out the functions that God intends for his people to fulfill. We will be incapable of being ‘a city set on a hill’. We will not be able to proclaim the good news credibly. To do this requires face-to-face groups. It demands ongoing significant relationships in which we are consciously pursuing Christian community and not settling for casual social involvement with one another. It requires a concrete group of people who know each other’s faces, names and lives and who regularly spend time together. It requires what the Bible refers to as house churches. The New Testament epistles talk of ‘the church that meets in their house’ (I Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:5). Acts 2:24 and Acts 20:20 tell how the Christians all met in homes as well as in the temple courts. If we follow this pattern we will be living in a very concrete way as the light of the world and the salt of the earth, and the non-believing world will not be able to dismiss the Christian message so easily.

We need to be more intentional about our lives and ministries. If we adopted this alternative model, our first decisions in life would not be about lifestyle and job, but about church and ministry. We would begin with a commitment to seek first God’s kingdom. We would see ourselves first and foremost as gospel ministers and members of gospel communities. We would consider the gifts and passions God has given us. We would consider the needs of our church and local communities. We would decide first what our ministry is going to be: it might be sharing the gospel with elderly people, caring for the homeless, bringing Christian values to the business world or providing pastoral care in the church. It could be any one of a hundred things. Then we would look for a home near our ministries and churches. It may involve relocating to serve the needs of a local neighbourhood or to be close to a particular Christian community. Only then would we make decisions about a job and that choice would be determined by what enabled us to do our ministries.

Some might pursue a ministry through their careers, but they will be intentional about that, seeing it as their ministry and not an end in itself. What would count would no longer be the Western dream, but serving God and putting first his kingdom.

Too frequently our approach to fellowship groups is to ask the question, ‘What am I getting out of this?’ But on the basis of everything that has been said, the first question that should be asked is, ‘What am I giving into this group?’

Mission involves three elements:

· building relationships

· sharing the gospel message

· introducing people to the Christian community

We want ordinary life to be saturated with the gospel. We want to live and talk the gospel as part of our life together. We want God-talk to be normal. We want to be a community in which it is normal to talk about what we are reading in the Bible, normal to pray together whenever we meet, normal to talk about delight in the gospel, normal to share our spiritual struggles – both with Christians and unbelievers.

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