A review of M. David Sills, Reaching and Teaching: a Call to Great Commission Obedience, Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010.
This book has sought to bring awareness to those who have been lulled into thinking that God wants us to simply reach them. He doesn’t. He wants us to reach and teach – reaching them with the saving gospel message and teaching them to observe everything that He has commanded. (220).
So ends Sills’ book.
At the SEND Family Conference in July, I led a workshop on what we can still learn from Roland Allen’s book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? a hundred years after it was first published. Allen’s key principle of submission and dependence on the Holy Spirit and the Word of God was the focus of the first blog post. In this blog post contemporary application of Allen’s principles will be the subject.
At the SEND Family Conference in July, I led a workshop on what we can still learn from Roland Allen’s book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? a hundred years after it was first published. I’m going to highlight our discussion in two blog posts for the whole SEND family.
Why bother with a hundred-year-old book? J.D. Payne wrote in 2012, Roland Allen was “One of the most controversial, yet most influential, missionary thinkers of all time… it was Allen’s insights into the expansion of the church that sometimes equated him as being a prophet, a revolutionary, a radical, or a troublemaker.” (J.D. Payne, Roland Allen: Pioneer of Spontaneous Expansion, Kindle Edition, location 126.)
My DiSC profile says that I am a high “D” in personality type. That means I am supposed to be direct, decisive and driven. I think living in Asia for most of my adult life has probably softened some of the edges, and 27 years of married life has helped as well. But I admit that I prioritize results (the word “results” shows up 52 times on my DiSC profile!).
I also admit that I am often tempted to discouragement when I look at my own ministry and that of my SEND colleagues around the world. In most of the places where we work, our ministries are pretty small, and decisive results are not nearly always evident. In many places, we are just beginning, sowing seeds in hard places, building relationships, meeting with small groups of believers. I love to hear and read about mass movements of people to Christ, but we have seen very few of those (yet) in the places where SEND is working. Instead we read about ones and twos coming to Christ.
In Matthew 28, Jesus commands us to go and make disciples of all nations. At SEND we are committed to planting reproducing churches among the unreached because the Church is God’s primary means for making disciples through the ages. Without discipleship, church planting is reduced to shuffling sheep around and does not bring much glory to God.
My concern is that we are often ready to talk about discipleship, but much less ready to actually live it out. I recently took part in a discipleship course in a local church. We talked about discipleship and its importance in our lives and I expected that we would somehow start “doing it” but that didn’t really happen in a significant way. Then I thought that perhaps we would “do it” after we had established a bit more of a foundation, but that did not really happen either. In a personal conversation, a fellow member of the class asked me, “When will we actually disciple people”? Great question, I thought, and perhaps you have asked similar questions. Knowledge is an essential foundation but we must build something on that foundation, otherwise it is useless. How can we apply our knowledge to actually “just do it” as a contemporary “philosopher” once said?
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén