 "Christians
are better than other people"
After three years of hard work and Bible
teaching, a tentmaker serving in Asia was speaking at a house
church meeting. - It is true that Christians are better than
other people, isn't it? the tentmaker asked.
The tentmaker was surprised to see
people in the congregation starting to nod their heads in
agreement. After a few clarifying questions, he realized that
what he had tried to teach people throughout the last years had
been in vain. The believers in this mid-sized Central Asian city
really believed that they were morally superior to others in the
society.
“If I could have done it over again and
retrained the believers, I would have done things in a very
different way,” the tentmaker stated a few years after finishing
his job in the former Soviet republic. With a lack of knowledge
on how to train disciples, the tentmaker focused on Bible
teaching and systematic theology.
“For all Christians it is valuable to
have a profound knowledge of the Bible, but I understood too
late that many of the people I taught did not apply the Biblical
message to their own lives. As a result, their lives were not
changed,” states the tentmaker.
What does it mean to be a follower of
Jesus Christ in my life, at my workplace and in my neighborhood?
This is one of the most central questions when it comes to
discipleship training. Unfortunately the Biblical message
remains head knowledge for many of us, and thus our lives are
not changed according to the Scripture. Theological issues, and
not the transformation of lives, also remain the focus in many
churches.
Jesus called us to make disciples of all
nations. In the four Gospels we read how he trained his
disciples, concentrating on the few people he knew would be able
to teach others. And he focused much of his teaching on everyday
challenges and principles in the Kingdom of God.
There is no doubt that a tentmaker can
be a good disciple-maker. A tentmaker works and lives under the
same conditions as the people he or she has come to train. In
this way a tentmaker, like Paul, the tentmaker from Tarsus, can
model what it means to follow Jesus in everyday life.
It is said that when
we we aim at nothing, we hit it every
time. If we don't know what the aim of our
discipleship training is, we will probably fail. Dawson Trotman,
the founder of Navigators, has given us the following guideline
that can be of help: “A person is mature physiologically when he
or she can reproduce physically; so too, a person is mature
spiritually when he or she can reproduce spiritually.”
Read more about making disciples in the
Discipleship Journal, published by Navpress
www.navpress.com/dj
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