When Spiritual People Meet
Alright, I have to say something uplifting as I begin Exodus
18. Notice what happens when Moses tells
Jethro about the exciting things in his life that God has done? Rejoicing ensues! Man, that’s spirituality right there. Moses wants to tell Jethro what God is doing
in his life. And Jethro wants to hear
it. Is there anything better than people
getting together to talk about the ways God is active in their life?
Jethro’s Advice: Small Group Discipleship
The rest of Exodus 18 has really convicted me today. Let me explain this comment for those who may
not be aware. For the last two months or
so, I have been pretty active about promoting a discipleship model. It is a model that has the pastor engaged in
active discipleship with 10-20 people, who then actively engage with disciples
of their own. The process then spawns
again and again and again.
I much prefer this model to the concept of the typical
church – that is, that everyone has to be in relationship with the pastor in
order to be a real part of the church. I
have seen this traditional pastor-centric model burn out my dad in many
churches and I want to be active in not having that same result be true with
me.
You see, a typical person can only have between 80-100
relationships at any one time; and even the most charismatic of people can only
get by with 150 relationships. Combine
that with the fact that a typical pastor has 160 hours a month. Even if a pastor didn’t do things like
hospital visits, prepare sermons, lead worship, prepare and lead Bible Studies,
do meetings, etc the most a pastor could really give any one parishioner in a
church of 80 people is 2 hours on average per month. Throw in all the other tasks and it probably drops
to an hour per month per person. What
kind of disciple can anyone make if they only give a person an hour per month? How would you feel about an education system
that only gave an hour per month from teacher to student?
However, if the pastor can focus on a small group and that
small group can each focus on their own small group then the process works out
a whole lot better! The pastor is focused
on a dozen or so relationships, enabling the pastor to give an average of 5 or 10
or even more hours per month to each person!
You can really make some serious disciples being able to give away that
kind of personal time! If those
relationships are seriously involved in discipleship, then the odds are that
those people will also be able to help go out and have deep relationships with
other people, too!
I feel like I have done a horrible job explaining all of
this, so anyone that wants to should ask me about this process face-to-face. I’m quite passionate about it
face-to-face. But here’s my point with
this and Exodus 18. Doesn’t this sound
pretty close to exactly the advice Jethro gives to Moses? Isn’t this model of small group discipleship
affecting ever expanding small groups exactly the model that Jethro gives to
Moses?
Jethro tells Moses that he needs to select some trustworthy
folks and draw them close. Then Moses can
encourage some additional trustworthy folks under the first group. This process continues until everyone can be
involved. What I find amazing is that
Jethro’s advice is to set people up over the tens, fifties, hundreds,
thousands, etc. In a way, Jethro is
essentially saying that if everyone had a small group of 10 or so that faith
and community would be much more productive!
Comparisons to Modern Western Christianity
I am convicted that for the most part American Christianity
has gotten our structure completely wrong for a long, long time. When we structure ourselves so that we have 1
person engaged in many relationships we are just trying to burn out the central
figure.
Jethro steps in and tells Moses to do it in a way that makes
sense. Small groups form deep fulfilling
relationships while big groups form shallow draining relationships. That is essentially Jethro’s point. If we actually want to make disciples, we
need to make deep relationships. If we
want to change the world, we need to deeply change people one relationship at a
time. That means we may just need to
rethink this whole way that we think about and structure what we call church.
Huh. Who would have
thought that Jethro would give such great advice to people trying to make
disciples of Jesus Christ almost 3,500 years later?
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