Discover steps the church can take to implement the biblical model of discipleship and foster spiritual revival amongst our members

AMEN NW 2017: Comprehensive Health Care/ Developing Your Ministry Toolkit

<p>Discover steps the church can take to implement the biblical model of discipleship and foster spiritual revival amongst our members</p>

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AMEN Northwest

John Stanton

Back to Christ’s Original Design

We could spend this time together in a sanctuary of time.

And not just expect something from Him, but give to Him what He deserves, to bless Him with our praises.

And as we looked at yesterday, that's really what discipleship is all about, right?

It's a sacrifice of our lives to God, an offering to Him to bless him and his work.

In our first talk on discipleship and revival, we looked at the implications of discipleship and the church, how the church is impacted and ultimately will experience revival because of it.

We also looked at the origins of discipleship in the Old Testament and how that transitioned over to the New and how we of course ourselves can offer our bodies and our time as a living sacrifice to God as his disciples.

Today though, we're gonna transition a bit because we wanna take a look at the church and in a practical way, how does this work?

How can the church organize and develop a structure to become disciple makers?

We have a lot of preaching, good preaching, going on in our churches.

We have good teaching happening, but not a lot of discipling.

And for a church who understands discipling probably better than anyone else, where it came from and where it's going, I think we should do a little better at it within our churches.

And so we'll look take a look about at that here this morning.

And so thank you for showing up and being here with me.

We'll start off with a text and we all know this 1 very well, right?

And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.

Always, even to the end of the age." Now some who have read this have said, this is our mission as a church.

And while it may include part of our mission, I tend to disagree a little bit.

It's not so much our mission as I believe it is our job, our disciples' job description.

It is what we as disciples are commissioned to do, right?

And any job, any work given to anybody needs a job description.

And I think this is very telling of exactly what that job description is.

Now, an interesting thing about this text is that the word make there, make disciples, isn't in the original language.

So the idea here of making disciples is 1 of discipling.

So making disciples, and I know in today's age we need to kind of be a little more cognizant of how people receive words.

You don't want to make anybody do anything, right?

It's God's invitation, but the making of the disciple here in every way has to do with discipling them and help them helping them to become the Disciple that Jesus wants them to be so disciples are disciplers As well as ones that are always learning as we saw yesterday From desire of ages Ellen White writes that the Savior's commission to his disciples includes how many believers?

I sometimes have read that Great Commission, at least in the past, and I've done it with these eyes of, boy, the disciples must have felt like, wow, this is an amazing thing that we're going to do.

But I've taken myself out of the equation.

But this is Jesus speaking to me, Jesus speaking to you.

We are to go therefore and to disciple others for Christ.

We used to have a gentleman in a church that I attended years ago.

He used to stand up front at the beginning of the church service and he would say, Jesus said, go saints, where have you gone this past week?

I think it's a question that we can ask ourselves even now.

And so It echoes in my mind when I read that the words of Dr.

Openin Giammi, who was a dentist way back in Fairfield days, Fairfield, California.

There are 4 key components to every disciple-making church.

So if a church wants to make disciples, if they want to organize in such a way so that they're discipling those members there to become disciples who then disciple others, there's got to be some things included, and I refer to them as components of a disciple-making church.

I don't find any way to get rid of any 1 of them.

Not only are they biblical, do they come from the Book of Acts, but we'll see that Jesus himself followed these exact steps, used these components in making his own disciples of the 12.

So as matrices work, Your upper left quadrant is number 1, you go to 2, 3, and 4.

And so the first step in disciple-making as a component of the church is to connect people to the church and to Christ.

That connection happens through relationships, reaching out to people and meeting their needs.

And we'll talk about some of these things in more detail here in just a minute.

But the connection to the church and to Christ is the first step in the discipling process.

Once baptism has occurred, we know what happens if we don't come alongside someone and help them to grow, right?

We lose them, they go right out the back door.

And so the discipling process not only begins, but is continuing on with growing and then equipping.

A concerted effort to equip members for service in Christ's kingdom.

And then lastly, to be sent, to send them out in an intentional way to the community.

Now, disciple-making here is a process, Okay?

So cyclical in that you start with someone who maybe doesn't know Christ or is very early in their walk with God or exploring God, they start here at Connect and they move to grow, equip, and send.

So the church itself needs to be doing all of these things at the same time because everybody's at a different stage, right?

So this is kind of a good check here for each of you to ask in your minds and consider, is my church doing all 4 of these things in a very intentional way?

Are we then equipping them to be sent out into their community and to connect with neighbors, friends, and co-workers?

Because it's important, again, for the church to consider and to plug in or at least create a structure where all of these 4 things are being done.

And it ties in with how Jesus discipled people.

If you consider this, Jesus called the disciples, he taught the disciples, he showed the disciples, right?

He didn't just teach them concepts, he showed them how to do it.

He connected, He grew, He equipped, and then He sent His disciples out.

And if Jesus spent years, 3 and a half years, deliberately doing this with His disciples, I think that's enough of an example for us as a church to be more intentional about this process, don't you?

Where do you think, which 1 of these 4 things do you think or do you believe that our church, the Adventist Church, lacks most strongly in?

Our evangelistic outreach ways we connect with people, we try and connect them in with the church.

In fact, we're quite big on growing, but it's more from intellectual sense, isn't it?

We teach them doctrines and things to know about God and about the church and the end-time events and those kinds of things.

What we're missing is the equipping piece.

And the equipping part is very much that mentoring, coaching, coming alongside someone, helping them, showing them what discipleship really is all about.

You see, I believe, we talked about the elephant in the room yesterday, the elephant in the room was what?

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