Wednesday 1 July 2009

Growing Pains?

How hard will the Growing Disciples programme be? Who will it be aimed at? Will it be covering really hard issues? These and similar questions are sometimes spoken, or hinted at - so here's an attempt to explain the thinking:

1. It's really important that people know Growing Disciples does not need 'experts', as in people with a lot of specific knowledge - because it does not involve teaching in the formal sense of someone sharing their knowledge. Instead, it is all about resourcing the whole church to explore its sense of purpose together. In other words, you are all the experts, because you are all disciples of Jesus, of all ages, all kinds of backgrounds, with a wide range of experiences - and this resource aims to help you draw on your own experience, to make connections between what you think and feel, and how your church can live with purpose in its community.

2. So the main focus is discipleship: Growing Disciples aims to help churches be communities of disciples today. So in one sense, it will not be easy, because churches know very well that we face real challenges - it is not proving straightforward to make connections between our discipleship and the world around us. So there is a need to ask important questions. This doesn't mean "questions which we cannot understand", but it does mean "questions which ask us to think carefully about what we are about, what our Good News is & what kinds of community we are trying to be". So in another sense, they are 'basic' questions, as they are about getting us back in touch with some of the simple principles about being churches:

3. So, Growing Disciples is about helping churches to develop the skills of discipleship - which involves learning together, as mutual disciples, to identify and celebrate what our Good News is, and how to demonstrate it in our daily lives. To do this, we look to our key resources - the Bible, our times of worship, the diverse gifts of the Body of Christ - in order to become better able to make connections between our faith and our life and others' lives.

4. The simple truth is: to be a disciple of Jesus is demanding. There is a cost to discipleship. So it is not like paying your money and getting a quick return. Instead, it involves being 'disciplined', developing the skills of the early disciples - the skills to interpret the parables of Jesus, about God's kingdom being 'close at hand'; the skills to make connections between what they were witnessing and how they should live their lives; the skills about building a distinctive kind of community, where every member is valued in the Body; the skills about joining in with Jesus' mission, confronting injustice and exclusion with the Good News of God's mercy and love.

5. So, on the one hand, Growing Disciples is straightforward! It's simply about developing the skills of a community which nurtures disciples - learning together, worshipping together, listening together, and practising God's Good News together in the world. But on the other hand, Growing Disciples is demanding! After all, churches face big challenges - and to be a sign of God's kingdom is a difficult way of life - so we need to give our time to it, our thought, our care, our hopes and concerns, our desire to listen to each other, our desire to grow and be changed.

So - easy and hard, at the same time! Not intellectually hard, but to be disciples demands a lot from us - and this programme aims to help people give of themselves, purposefully, humbly and boldly!

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