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Discipling the Laity for Disciple Making (04)
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Paul Jang
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2008-03-24 03:25:23, hit : 3,630 |
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Discipling the Laity for Disciple Making (04)
The second area: spiritual maturity can be attained through teaching and training. This can be attained through the Bible study (2 Tim. 3:14-17), spiritual exercises such as prayer and praise to God (Luke 22:32, 40; Act. 8:22; Ps. 33:1). R. C. Sproul has written:
Prayer is the secret of holiness, if holiness, indeed, has anything secretive about it. If we examine the lives of the great saints of the church, we found that they were great people of prayer...The neglect of prayer is a major cause of stagnation in the Christian life. (Sproul 1986, 21, 22)
Roger A. Swenson suggests a priority of prayer:
To be sure, prayer must precede any attempt to rebuild trust, but we must be prudent in our objectives. There is nothing wrong in asking God to open the heart of another, to make him more understanding, to lead him to tolerance. (Swenson 1991, 165)
The third area: financial increase can be attained through the membership increase and maturity. First of all, the finances cannot help but increase when the membership increases and matures. The more membership increases, the more the finances increase. It is a matter of common knowledge. Furthermore, maturity of the members accelerates the financial increase. The Christian in maturity, therefore, should be conscious of his giving relationship because that is the responsibility of the man who is "born again," in whom the Spirit moves and has full course (Ward 1958, 9).
Basically the man who born again recognizes that human possessions belong to God with himself (Kim 1985, 61). Accordingly, giving can be used to enhance our relationship with God and bless humankind. The grace of giving is often a tremendous stimulant to the life of faith (Forster 1985, 42). Edward J. Hales insisted that the giving life has an effect on other area of our spiritual lives (Hales and Youngren 1981, 51). The quantitative and qualitative growth of the church must guarantee the financial abundance of the church. Therefore, the financial goal must be set in the ground of quantitative and qualitative growth.
The second stage is involving members. If the church members do not get involved in the church activities, the pastor cannot carry on making disciples for church growth. He cannot even start his disciple making program.
Why, then, do the laypeople not get involved in church activities? The writer thinks that this issue may be considered in two aspects: pastor and laypeople.
First of all, surprising to many, is that some pastors don't want extensive numbers of laypersons involved in ministry (Habecker 1990, 138). The problem is that many pastors have regarded laypeople as ignorant. Of course, they cannot know as much as the pastor about ministry, but their gifts given by God must not be underestimated.
Another problem is that the pastors don't trust the laypeople to be involved in their ministry. But the pastors must trust the laypeople, and make them be involved in the ministry because they are also the royal priesthood of the people belonging to God (1 Peter 2:9), and have different gifts for ministry to the church (1 Cor. 12:28-30). Marlene Wilson explained a theology of the priesthood of all believers as follows:
Christ has declared that all believers constitute this royal priesthood. From the earliest tradition of the Old Testament, some of the priests have been called out (ordained) to perform certain special functions... but 99 percent of the priesthood is unordained laity. Ministry is the work of the whole priesthood. (Wilson 1983, 15)
In addition, it must be considered that the laypeople may become good leaders through training by the competent pastor or leader.
Secondly, from the viewpoint of the laypeople, they also have a tendency to be indifferent as well as underestimate their gifts given by God. Therefore, they don't get involved in the ministry. This is a crucial problem. They think that the ministry belongs only to the pastor.
Pastors also think that the ministry belongs only to them likewise. Such an idee fixe or preconception must be broken as soon as possible. As long as there are these misconceptions, the church cannot grow.
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Introduction
Ch Growth 