The Middle Years: Christian Nurture

 

Reference: Phillips, K. (1996). Out of Ashes. The Middle Years: Christian Nurture. Los Angeles, World Impact Press: 87-94.

When people accept Jesus as their Savior they need to learn how to feed themselves spiritually. We call this "FOLLOW-UP."
 

Follow Up Evangelism
Live Whole

Whole' In Person Family

In 1975, my wife, Katie, became pregnant with our first child. I had promised Katie that I would not be off preaching in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Wichita or some other exotic place and miss this blessed event. To back that up, I blocked off an entire month on my schedule before the due date, and a month after the due date, to be sure that I would be in Los Angeles.

On Sunday, July 13,1976, I was preaching in a rural Mennonite church in Kansas. That afternoon, I flew to Newark. This was three days before "that blocked-off month" was to begin.

When I got to Newark, as was my custom, I phoned Katie to let her know where I was staying. She immediately suggested that I should take the first plane home. I pointed out to her that the previously-agreed-to month did not begin for another three days. She was very unimpressed, and after a brief conversation, I caught the next plane home.

When I arrived at the Los Angeles airport, I called home, but there was no answer. So I phoned my office. When I spoke to my secretary, I asked her if Katie had gone to the hospital and delivered. My secretary said, "Yes, but are you sitting down?" I said, "Are Katie and the baby healthy?" My secretary responded, "Oh, yes. But are you sitting down?" When I asked, "Did we have a boy or a girl?" she responded, "Two boys!" Then I sat down. After the doctor had comforted me for about an hour, he explained that when you have one-month premature twins, they have to be fed every two hours, whether they are hungry or not. I am convinced that from the very beginning, Joshua and Paul could communicate with each other. Joshua always wanted to be fed at midnight; Paul at 1:00 a.m.; Joshua at 2:00 a.m.; Paul at 3:00 a.m. ...

I soon discovered that right after we fed Paul, we had to go through a procedure that we affectionately called diapering. Then we could rock him back to sleep again. And just about the time Paul was asleep, it was Joshua's turn! It does not take a wild imagination to understand that after going through this procedure 24 times every day for six weeks, Katie and I were a bit tired. So, let's pretend that six weeks into the new lives of Joshua and Paul, I propped these splendid young men up against the couch and looked at them with all the seriousness that I could muster and said, "I know you are intelligent. I have been watching you, and you have been staring intently at every step of this procedure. You probably know it better than I do. Meanwhile, your mother and I are fatigued, and need to get away for the weekend...alone.

"But don't worry, because I have written out explicit instructions: how to feed yourself, how to make your formula, how to change your diapers, what symptoms to look out for...and I have left the phone number of our motel at the bottom of the page. So, if you have any questions, you can call. "What do you say?" Since they were both nodding their heads up and down and grinning, I took that to be a response in the affirmative.

Now, let's suppose that Katie and I actually left Joshua and Paul, six weeks old, all by themselves for a weekend. What would have happened? I am not sure about your city, but in Los Angeles, they throw you in jail for that kind of thing. It is called "child abandonment."

Yet all too often, when the Church of Jesus Christ looks at the inner city, it is content to do just what I have described. We have a one-week evangelistic blitz, and then we leave. Or, if we are terribly convicted, we take an offering and send 100 children from the housing projects to camp for the summer, stuff them full of the gospel, meticulously record their decisions, report to our church about the miraculous revival that took place and toss the youngsters back into the projects and yell, "God bless you! Hope everything works out okay. Here is a great six-week follow-up course. If you have any questions, be sure and phone." Then we wonder why on earth, next year, when we go back, there is no lasting fruit.

God began to convict us that with the privilege of being part of the birthing process comes the implied responsibility to stick around for the nurturing. At the point of Joshua and Paul's conception, I had no idea what was involved in raising twin boys. But that did not take me off the hook. Today, 20 years later, Joshua and Paul weigh over 200 pounds and stand more than six feet tall. They have been trained how to feed themselves physically and spiritually. In the same sense, when we lead people to the Lord, God expects us to nurture these young believers, even if we are at first afraid and do not know how. It is not enough to send them

 

Next year, the new convert and I could both lead one additional person to Christ, and invest in them. If we each continued to lead one new person to the Lord every year, and trained those individuals to join with us in teaching others to teach others, in 33 years I would have directly invested in 33 people (a reasonable task for any Christian). And, together with those I discipled, I would have reached the entire population of the world for Christ!

Christ's message came wrapped in His method; multiplication is much quicker than addition. Discipleship is God's chosen method for passing the baton from one generation to the next. Without Christ's method of making disciples (investing in the few, and teaching them to teach others, which leads to massive multiplication) we get discouraged, bitter, angry, and maybe even quit. But Christ's method sustains hope. And mathematically, Christians in the inner cities are several generations into this strategy of making urban disciples!

A weekly correspondence course, or to give them our phone number in case they have questions. Our physical presence - our availability, modeling and identification - are essential so that new converts can learn how to pray; how to study, memorize and meditate on God's Word; and how to worship the Lord. (See Addendum.A). This is not a six- or ten-week course. It may take years. But if God uses us to lead people to Christ, we are responsible to equip these new Christians to feed themselves spiritually.

Once believers have been equipped to feed themselves spiritually and are living the Christian life, they need to teach others what they have learned (II Timothy 2:2).

Evangelism

 

Assures Quality
Throughout salvation history, mentors have trained their students so well that their pupils have donned the cloak of leadership. For example, Moses trained Joshua, Elijah trained Elisha, and Christ adopted discipleship as His method for training His, future apostles. Later, Barnabas trained Paul, and Paul trained Timothy and the others who joined with him in spreading the gospel. Like our predecessors in the faith, our focus is on discipling servant leaders.

Discipleship develops indigenous Christian leaders. New believers gain practical experience through observing and working alongside mature Christians, while receiving theological education, spiritual guidance, instruction and training within the local body. Disciples progress from being understudies, to co-laboring as leaders, to teaching new believers.

Provides Hope
This teaching of others, discipleship, gives us hope for reaching our inner cities for Christ; the kind of practical help without which focusing on the millions of lost could cause discouragement. Allow me to explain. Let's say God used me to lead one person to Christ this year. If I met with this new convert weekly to pray, memorize scripture and study God's Word, if we held each other accountable and came to church together, something extraordinary could happen.

After 25 years in the inner city, many of us asked, "Has the energy, efforts and focus of our lives in urban American been worthwhile? Have we been successful?" Those questions forced us to define success, which was a difficult exercise. We remembered that our purpose in coming to the inner city was not just to help the less fortunate, but to set people free! Beginning community-owned and -operated businesses was good, but was not enough. Building houses for  homeless was admirable, but did not necessarily liberate people. Medical clinics and shelter ministries demonstrated God's compassion and mercy, but in and of themselves did not empower the poor to realize lasting change in their communities.

We had taught thousands of children, teenagers and adults in weekly Bible clubs and adult Bible studies. We had operated Christian schools, job-training programs, a medical dental clinic and Christian camps. We had fed the hungry, clothed the needy and cared for the lonely. While the impact of these ministries was great (lives were changed; families were healed; neighborhoods were improved), none of them catapulted us toward realizing our vision of taking our cities for Christ. The cities were still teeming with sin, enslaved by Satan and spinning farther and farther away from God.

After much prayer, study, discussion and contemplation, we concluded that the best way to make God known in the inner cities was to "evangelize and equip the urban poor to minister to the urban poor." That defined success for World Impact. The fastest and most effective way to accomplish that objective is to plant culturally-conducive evangelical churches, which also thirst to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). Congregational discipleship, where each new church feels responsible to plant other churches, which will in turn birth additional church bodies, is the key to empowering the urban poor, and taking our cities for God.

If God could use us to plant 1000 healthy bodies of believers among the urban poor in South-Central Los Angeles (and in many other urban areas), the impact in a decade would be phenomenal! Why? Because this is the only solution that will heal the wounds of the Los Angeles riots and prevent future eruptions.

No government policy, no political white paper, no newspaper editorial nor television commentary practically explains how people from different races, cultures and classes can be reconciled with their neighbors. But God's Word does! As men and women from different racial, ethnic and cultural groups are reconciled to God (Romans 5:1), they can then be reconciled with each other (as Jews and Gentiles did in the early Church). Koreans will embrace African Americans, Whites will honor Native Americans and Jesus will be preeminent!

The distinction of Christianity from all of the other great religions is not that it has a rule book, or ethics manual, teaching you how to live. It does, but so do Buddhism and Hinduism. A global evangelical mission, with guidelines on how to minister. It does, but so does Islam. The uniqueness of Christianity is the romance of God with His people. Before creation, God was planning to woo, or to call, a people from every ethnicity to be His Bride. God promised Abraham, that He would include all peoples (Genesis 12:1-3). Amazingly, the Lord wants us to participate in preparing His Bride (expanding the Church). It will happen. The only question is whether or not we will be part of God's plan. And there is no better place to find the diversity God desires for His Bride than in our inner cities.

The Bible, after Genesis 12, records God's actions to fulfill His promise of bringing all nations into the Bride of Christ. The Old Testament law leads us to Christ and makes provision for the Gentiles. The Prophets foretell Christ's coming and ministry to non Jews (Isaiah 9:1,2). Christ's Incarnation, culminating at the Cross, provides for a universal multi-cultural Bride (Ephesians 2:11-22). The Great Commission commands us to teach all peoples because the end will not come until every ethnic group hears (Matthew 24:14). God's promise to Abraham will be fulfilled when "every nation, tribe, people and language" stand before Christ (Revelation 7:9)!

At World Impact, evangelism, follow up and discipleship eventually led to planting churches where new believers can grow in Christ.

The volcano you have been watching form (above) describes how World Impact's dynamic inner-city ministries of evangelism, follow up, discipleship and church planting are supported by schools, job training, camping and other ministries of compassion. A volcano has two separate, but complementary, parts-the hot inner core and the structured outer cone. If a volcano loses its hot inner core it becomes extinct. Without a strong outer cone, it splatters aimlessly, or blows itself to bits (see Addendum C).