The Importance of Mentoring

I have just come back from a series of seminars and speaking engagements that took Ruth and me to Brazil (Belo Horizonte, Maceio), Singapore, Hong Kong (CCMN)and Switzerland (Bern, Frutigen, Zurich).

I was made aware that most cells do not prepare all cell members to both mentor another person and to be mentored by a person in the cell at the same time. My emphasis in each case was to point out that the "Basic Christian Communities" term used by Eddie Leo (Abbalove, Indonesia)solves this problem. Triads within the cells meet for 15-20 minutes following the worship time in the cell, with some attempt made to connect the three levels of maturity mentioned in 1 John 2: "Little Child" being cared for by the "Young Man" being cared for by the "Father."

Harold Weitz in South Africa introduced these "Basic Christian Communities" into his cell system after discussing it with Eddie, and in Brazil they have been incorporated into the Year of Equipping training provided by TOUCH Brazil (Robert Lay).

A serious error takes place when a cell group mimics a traditional "sit and soak" mentality by not activating ministry between all the cell members, leaving the "discipling" to the cell leader. In the community of believers, everyone is a "minister" and everyone should be receiving ministry from others. The "Priesthood of all believers" should be more than a theological teaching: it should literally exist within the body of Christ. After all, every single believer contains an equal amount of righteousness--the righteousness of Christ.

If you are interested in this, investigate the web site of Little Falls in South Africa: http://www.littlefallsnetwork.com/ffmi/.

Have you registered yet for the Cell Symposium (www.cellsymposium.com)? Don't linger! The 300 chairs seating delegates are fast being filled. If you delay you may find you waited too long...

Fifty Years!

A half century ago, at age 29, Ruth and I were seminary students in New Orleans planning to serve in Africa. Our plans were stopped when she came down with a little tiny ulcer. That was enough to end our processing with the Foreign Mission Board! I was stunned. I had already entered the PhD track and now had to ask, "Lord, why is this happening?" He replied, "I want you to know that two thousand miles of bathwater doesn't make you a missionary!"

I applied to the Home Mission Board, explaining I was searching for God's direction for a US assignment. I was not prepared for the response: "We need you right now, if you are willing to drop out of the seminary. Harrisburg PA is desperate for a church planter."

Two days later I was on a plane to Harrisburg. The Lord said, "This is your mission field." So it was that in a matter of a few weeks we were situated in a tiny plant in Middletown, PA, started by Frank Brown, a displaced Southern who was stationed there to coordinate trucker's movements for a corporation. The dear guy saw a need and although not trained, he began to evangelize and formed the Valley Baptist Church in the basement of his home.

According to the church log, Frank was member #3 and I was member #93. We had far less than 92 others, but Frank's passion for the lost had reaped the first harvest, mainly from the military stationed at Olmstead Air Base (now closed). From 7/1960 to 2/1963, Ruth and I pastored Valley Baptist and I planted additional churches in the area, finally constituting 7 of them in 1963 as the Keystone Baptist Association. When I left, the next pastor's membership number was 309. So we saw a great revival break out during that brief period.

It was there I read Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian life. It totally transformed my life! And that truth was the theology that spawned the harvest.

Have you read the book? It's a classic.

What is the "Plan of Salvation?"

I have long realized that a "downstairs church" offers a "what's in it for me?" salvation, focusing on what God will do for ME rather than my dying to self and living in obedience to His plan for my life, directed in all things by Christ. I recently ran across this comment by T. Austin Sparks and wanted to say "Amen!" to what he wrote:

What is the Gospel? The Gospel is Christ crucified, as revealed in the heart. The Gospel is not only attesting objective facts, even the fact of Christ crucified, but what constitutes the Gospel is that, that which was true in the Lord Jesus, has been revealed by God in the heart. We are not constituted Gospel preachers because we have read somewhere that Christ was crucified, raised fromthe dead and ascended, and all those historic facts, but because God has revealed in us, not facts but a Person in relation to the facts, and the facts in relation to the Person. There has come to our hearts by revelation of the Spirit of God Jesus Christ and Him crucified, and that has constituted us preachers; that has constituted the Gospel.

There is no Gospel apart from that.

Now you see how that brings us back to our initial position. It means this, that a struggling to reach, to attain, unto something conceived as Christianity, is a failure to see Christ. Christ has not been seen, He has not been revealed. Immediately the Holy Spirit reveals the Lord Jesus in us, we have come into the place where the work is done, and what we are doing now is to live out from a perfected position, instead of striving to reach a perfected position.

WHOSE CHURCH?

I wish I had a dime for every time I have heard a preacher refer to "my church." This common remark is a dead giveaway about the value system of the man who says that. A man-made church will always be "my" church.

I recall a pastor many years ago who had switched pulpits about every 4 years as he climbed the Baptist ladder to greatness. During a lunch date, he explained he had a full file cabinet of materials he had developed and the first thing he did when going to a new pulpit was to unload his fail-safe "system" to make the church prosper. Of course, to do that his first act was to destroy all vestiges of what the previous pastor had left behind. From record keeping to program structures, he had what "his" church needed.

The systematic preparation of the structures as one pastor sees things causes a lot of shock when he moves on to the next highest position in his career. With few exceptions, little will be left when the next man moves into the Pastor's Office and sets up what will make the domain "my church."

Jesus made a powerful comment in Matthew 18: "Upon this rock I will build my church." This leaves little room for the Senior Pastor to brag about ownership. Which brings up the question, "What does the church built by Christ really look like?"

To honestly seek the answer requires us to set aside hundreds of years of churchianity's many aberrations and return to the simple church composed of hands, feet, and inward parts that are controlled not by the preacher but by Christ himself.

I shall never forget the Australian pastor who faced the reality of this truth. He stood behind the pulpit and said, "I used to come to this sacred desk as a place of exaltation. Since I have experienced my death and resurrection in Christ, I come to this pulpit as a place of crucifixion."

Wow!

Awesome Head, Tragic Body

I have just returned from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, where I met the men who are taking their D.Min. majoring in Cell Church Leadership. One of these fine brothers is a Korean whose English name is "Daniel." I discovered he was one of the translators of my Equipping Track series a few years ago while living in Korea.

As we concluded a session studying Bill Beckham's presentation on God-Made Cells, Daniel referred to Steven Hawking, the author of the second-largest selling book after the Bible, A Brief History of Time.

Hawking's Motor Neuron Disease has caused his brilliant mind to be completely disconnected from controlling his body. In spite of that, he has blessed the world with a book.

What an illustration of Christ and his contemporary "body." Instead of the Holy Spirit calling in those who are to form His new body, converts are called into organized structures that dump dismembered arms and legs and inward parts into buckets called "programs." They never experience the awesome body Christ uses to reveal His Presence and Power.

Randall has now gone into the final stages of preparing my new book for release (advertised at Amazon and on www.touchusa.org).

I am anticipating a flurry of criticism over the term "Bodies" of Christ. That disturbing term is the whole point of the book. We must realize that the "Body" of Christ is the sum total of the Basic Christian Communities (bodies) who together compose that greater Body.

Instead of a top-down understanding of this great truth, I am starting at the base (basic) and proposing that until we understand the makeup of the authentic body, we have a brilliant head (Christ) who cannot function with all the legs and arms and inward parts stuffed into wicker baskets called "programs."

This is a time in the history of Christianity where we simply MUST withdraw from the lack of community we now experience in traditional church life.

There is a heaven and earth difference between a "small group" and a Christ Body! Only in the latter will Christ be the Head and in charge of how the body members function.

I am very interested in knowing what you think about all this. If you took the time to read my blog, please take another second to respond, either with a positive or negative thought. Let's begin to work through what it will take for Christ to have a functioning body!

WE MUST MAKE CHRIST CENTRAL!

The most sacred Person in the world is the One sent from the Father. He is the Son, sent on a special mission. Thus the Son is called CHRIST, a word which means "Anointed." An anointing is always related to a task to be performed. Christ came to dwell in the human body of Jesus and did so for these tasks to be fulfilled:
1. He would bring the message of a Kingdom not of this world that He would establish for the Father.
2. He would reveal in human flesh the attributes of the Godhead for all to see.
3. He would atone for the sins of all mankind.

But He had a fourth task, one that could not be completed in the body of Jesus! The reason? For the fourth task He would indwell a human form that could be present in all cultures in all centuries. That task was to continually reveal His Presence and Power as the revelation of God's love for all the people of the world. He would not "empower" others to do this; rather, His Spirit would indwell the new body and He would personally be the Power manifested in and through them.

This new body is called the ecclesia, those men and women who are called out from the world to jointly become body members for Christ. Thus, Paul wrote in Galatians 4:19,
"My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you. . ." Paul writes in Colossians 1:29, "To this end I am toiling strenuously with all the energy and power of Christ at work in me."

We have lost our way. The true church is the sacred body of Christ. He is not yet honored as the Head of the Body. We are grieving the Godhead with the concept of "church" we now experience. Not until we recognize the body parts are formed by the Holy Spirit as the agent of Christ in the earth will this change.

If you are reading this, I would like to ask you a question: "Can you live in the status quo?" If so, please explain how you can do so. I cannot. Tell me how you do it.

Many years ago, I entered the doctoral track at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. I had chosen Church History as my focus, which brought me into the life of Dr. Penrose St. Amant. This professor was a brilliant communicator who taught most of the time without notes, filling the blackboards with dates and places from any century in focus.

A fellow entrant into the program named Chuck sat beside me as he sat on the edge of his desk to welcome us to our journey. He held out his arm and cupped his fingers as though he were holding an imaginary baseball. He said, "You men have come to the highest level of academics this denomination offers. You have a moral obligation as historians to remain objective about the theology and structure of Southern Baptists. You must see the specific segments of church life that are out of touch with Biblical truth and with human society in this period of time. You must speak into it with clarity and courage. That is your greatest challenge: not only to study history, but also to create change in the history of your generation."

Those comments were used by the Holy Spirit to plant something in my spirit that would change the entire direction of my life. As the years passed, I saw at "arm's length" the dry rot of a structure that focused on programs rather than people. Indeed, in the 1970's, Dr. W.O. Howse coined a phrase to describe the structures: "Program Base Design." The biblical concept of community was forgotten, replaced by how to structure baskets to dump church members into: Sunday School baskets, Training Union baskets, Choir baskets, etc. It was a subtle depersonalization of the people of God. The seminaries focused on preparing young men to organize the baskets. Ecclesia as an organism was seldom considered.

The Chinese elderly have a saying when they want to "put down" a brash young person: "I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice!" Now that I am 79, I could make such a remark--but instead, I would like to say to young pastors and seminary men, "I did what St. Amant said. I have lived on the edge for all these years. Out of my life, God has caused many men around the world to realize P.B.D. structures are human mistakes that smother the Kingdom Communities that contain the Indwelling Christ."

Now, it's your turn! Are you prepared to objectively view the disintegration of traditional churchianity and form true Christ-directed ecclesia? Either you get sucked into the present systems or you must hold what you see at the end of your arm in your hand and ask, "Lord, if the sacred Body of Christ is to become authentic during my lifetime, what would you have me do to bring change to it?"