Concept 3 – Familial Context
I see God teach this at five levels:
1.Immediate Family –
Men, your wives are your first treasure after Christ. I am in the middle of some major repentance here. Wives, your husband is your first treasure after Christ, not your children. Then, your #1 job together is to disciple these gifts (these children) that God has given. I am working on this one also. Teach them to make disciples; teach them Godliness. All other is secondary, including important things like education. WATCH OUT – sports, fine arts, and organizations (Boys Scouts, dance, etc.) can be positive venues to work on disciple-making and Godliness, but they quickly can become idols that replace Christ as our affection.
2.Missional Cell Family –
Going on mission together requires what I call teamwork discipleship (once a coach, always …). As we engage our culture together, the one anothers (how we treat each other, love each other, minister to each other) will produce FRUIT. Ask the people who have been to Chacocente, on mission together, what it did for their discipleship to work as a team.
3.The Rest of The Bridge –
Each of us must be on constant vigil to reach out and help members outside our cells. We must not only pay attention to our own families and missional cells. If we hear of a need and we can fill it, GO take care of it. Example: an individual is moving and nobody in their cell has a truck or young strong backs, another cell has a truck and still another has the bodies – we must change our schedules and make this happen – God promises to respond with blessings. ALSO, every member of The Bridge is responsible for getting folks connected who show up at our celebrations and start hanging around. We all need to get to know names of new folks, find out some things about them, and make suggestion of connection points. We can make suggest a missional cell family either in their community or one that is based on something that might interest them. Or, we can just invite them to Starting Point, or one of our many classes that will introduce them to the idea of community (Alpha, CA, SOG, Crown are all set in small groups of community).
4.The overall Body of Christ –
We are in a very large family called the Body of Christ. We want to partner with other churches locally and world-wide to deliver the Gospel to a dying world. WE MUST VIEW THIS RELATIONSHIP AS FAMILY. As we partner with other churches, our goal is not to enhance The Bridge, it is to extend this family. This is a real challenge because most churches view others as the crazy uncle (they do things so weird over there) or as the competing brother (we have to WIN). Do you remember hating to lose to siblings? These thoughts must go away from the church – capital 'C.' WE ARE FAMILY whether we like it or not!!
5.Familia with the unchurched, the lost, the unregenerate –
This one is tough because the Bible has multiple commands about how familiar to be with the WORLD. Our war with sin means that there has to be some separation from the world. If we have people in our lives that pull us toward our sin cravings, we cannot hang around them, let alone make them family. There may have to be some contact because some of these folks may be in some of the other groups. But the lost cannot be people of INFLUENCE in our lives. On the other hand, we are encouraging everyone to have relationships with people who live far from God. Jesus did. We want you to hang out in coffee shops, malls, Facebook, etc – where people who don't know God hang out. We want you (God does too) to invite folks to hang out at all four of our other family environments. Invite them to your house to be with your family, to your cell to eat & hang out with that family, to The Bridge for special events (concerts, conferences, Night in Bethlehem) and Sunday morning worship celebrations. We also have a lot of community church familia-wide events like BBQ's, bowling, or trips that your unchurched friends and family can join.
Just to conclude, we will all find out very soon that MISSIONAL CELL is ALL ABOUT opening up your familia to folks who live far from God.
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1 comments:
It's great to hear things are going so well there! Many of these points have also been echoed by those who have studied how church is done for decades. Often, sadly their voices are drowned out by the hum of the institutional machine. But Jesus is alive, the Holy Spirit is moving, and many churches all over the world are waking up to their identity as world changers.
As Tim has pointed out here, we are not called to be benign but intentional in our discipleship. The bearing of fruit is not a passive event but an aggressive attempt to multiply the species. We would do well to follow this simple example and make disciples wherever people gather.
Great to see you all right on target.
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