Tonight was our “discipleship scenario.” We talked about a few different things
relating to how discipleship plays out in a real life scenario, and then Prof.
Reese gave us examples that we had to pick apart as groups.
SOME QUICK NOTES
Some of my
notes from our discussion before breaking into groups:
Love is a continuous selfless action/compassion towards a person to
better the person it is being extended to.
We talked
about different ways to be a disciple.
Disciples can be made through
a class (although generally we seemed to shy away from this), by taking them
out to dinner, eating with them, spending time together and just talking. We said that we can’t let discipleship fit
into one little box; it’s so broad.
Ultimately, being a disciple is about being a follower of Jesus. I brought up my definition of discipleship
that I wrote down a few weeks prior during our group discussion on it:
A disciple is a student of Christ who has devoted their life to knowing
who He is and doing what He says.
The class
thought that wasn’t bad, but Prof. Reese pointed out that the word “student”
doesn’t entail relationship. You can be
a student of something, learn all about it, and not be intimately connected to
it in any way. This is why I thought
adding, “…devoted their life to knowing
who He is…” was important to put in there.
It really is tough coming up with one, single definition of
discipleship!
When it
comes to discipleship, we said that it is important to have a good relationship
with the person who is becoming a disciple.
We also said that using the “Learning to Follow Jesus” book by Daniel
McNaughton is a great tool to use. I’ve
noticed that so many people that we’ve brought in throughout the semester have
used a lot of Daniel’s material; I feel like I should explore this more. A few churches seemed
to almost swear by it! I have one of his
first copies, but have never read it. I
also have the Youth Edition (co-authored by Claude Valdes), which I thought had
great material inside for one-on-one discipleship for youth.
TAKING INVENTORY
Based off
of some of our discussion, we talked about evaluating ourselves as disciples of
Jesus Christ. We talked about important
questions to ask ourselves every day, which I thought were so essential! I’m glad we went over this, because I don’t
always evaluate myself in this way. They
were:
Have I engaged in a personal relationship and fellowship with Christ
today?
Have I even talked to Jesus today?
Have I only studied Him?
The RELATIONSHIP factor is
key! We still have to devote ourselves
to knowing who He is, wherever we are in our walk with Christ.
DISCIPLESHIP SCENARIO
Prof. Reese gave my group a
fictional scenario for my group to discuss how we would disciple this couple:
-They are
both 24 years old, married for 2 years
-Fight like
cats and dogs
-Made a connection with us through
hearing that we do a marriage mentoring ministry
-Came out to a marriage workshop
thing we did
-Don’t know much about God
-Not Christians (she went to a
Bible club a little bit when she was 16, that’s it)
The first
thing our group said is that we would take the couple out for dinner. We would just want to get to know them, as we
were able to make a meaningful connection during the marriage workshop. At some point, we would intentionally bring
up the marriage workshop and their thoughts of the event, which would hopefully
lead to a bit of insight to their marriage and why they decided to come. We would invited them to our (weekly, bi-weekly,
monthly?) meeting where we have our marriage mentoring ministry.
As part of
this process, we would also meet individually with the couple. I would meet with the husband, mostly just
hanging out and getting to know him, and Alexandra would do the same with the
wife. Perhaps it would be over coffee,
but later on maybe even hanging out at each other’s houses, playing video
games, or whatever it might be. It would
be casual yet still intentional. There
wouldn’t be any material we would officially go through (unless they wanted
to), but we would just spend time together with them.
Between
them coming to our marriage mentoring ministry, our individual one-on-one
meetings on a regular basis and our already established meaningful connections,
we would hope to start to see a change.
This process would definitely take a while, surely more than a few
weeks. Perhaps it could take several
months before they started to see real change, but we would stick it out,
because that’s what it would take, and that’s why we would be there. We didn’t think that they would be turned off
to this invitation, as they decided of their own initiative to come out to the
marriage seminar we hosted. Perhaps we
could even talk about how they came to that decision as a talking point somewhere
in this process.
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