discipling

What Does Food and Fun Have to Do with Discipling?

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Nov 132012

Finding a Friend while Hiking!

My second story is about Yoshie – a Japanese designer who loves the outdoors. I met Yoshie when I went hiking on Manly beach. We were both lost and trying to find our way back to the main road from the bush. Since finding each other when we were lost hiking, we have been texting each other about going hiking in other places in Sydney, but busyness in our lives had kept this from happening. Finally we re-connected when I invited her to my friends’ Halloween party. We left early to go search for food. In the midst of our conversation about culture, boys, work, and studies, the story of God and His Community came up. Yoshie was exposed to Christianity when she was in the States for few years, but some of her questions never got answered such as: “I don’t mind going to my friends’ church, but why don’t they come to my events? Why do Christians love me, but hate each other? Can I get to know God without going to a normal church?”

Trang's friend Yoshie enjoying food.

That night God taught me the lesson that everyone is curious about God (could be other Gods) and community. Our job is to listen and ask right questions. How do we do it? We have the joy of walking with God everyday and asking Him what He is doing. I can’t wait to start forming a community with Yoshie around food, hiking, and beach volleyball. In the midst of working with God, He wants us to have tons of fun as well. This is my story of how the Kingdom of Heaven is happening wherever we go for fun and relaxation.

On the other hand, postgraduate school has been pretty intense. One of the requirements of my studies is that we have to do group projects with another person. I was praying for a good partner who would be hungry to learn and also have fun. God answered my prayer by sending me Adriana – a girl from New Zealand with Brazilian roots. Adriana has an amazing work ethic, and is very intelligent. We have pushed each other to achieve high quality work in school. After working on 15 projects together, we haven’t killed each other. This is a good sign. We have learned how work together and trust each other. In the midst of school projects, we take time to be each other’s therapist, and we have learned about each other’s family, culture, dreams and beliefs. I started sharing with Adriana about Jesus and what it means to be a Jesus follower. Through the trust that we have built over the last eight months, Adriana has opened up to me and shared with me her desire to seek out His Kingdom. I cannot wait to walk with Adriana through this journey next year over good food, wine, gardening, and business.

My last story is how the Kingdom of God is happening at work. Neil is my industry mentor for my consulting project at an organic certified business here in Australia. One day in the middle of our normal discussion about work the story of Jesus just came up. I found out that he has been curious about God for a long time, but disillusioned with Christianity because of how other Christians have failed him. To be honest, I am always nervous before having a meeting with Neil, because he is so intelligent and successful in the field of psychology and business while I am just a kid with a burning heart filled with God’s love. However, I could not keep myself from sharing with Neil about the love of Jesus, and telling him my story of what Jesus has done in my life. My hope is that God will reveal Himself to Neil in the language that he will understand.

Through this relationship I have learned that Jesus is not a math problem. Jesus is like a poem. A poem can be simply words every time we read it, but the layers of its meaning are only revealed when we spend the time meditating on it, and experiencing it. Poems speak not only to the head but also the heart. The only way we can experience the poem is to read it together through fellowship. This is how it is with Jesus. To really know Jesus, we need to experience Him through an encounter we have with Him personally and through His community. It is not enough to just know information about Him.

Yummy quiche that me and my posse of friends cooked up!

I hope that my four chosen short stories will encourage you to see how simple church, fellowship, and discipling can be. If you start looking to build relationships with not-yet-Jesus followers in the community that God has already put you in, you will be amazed at how many opportunities you will find. Relationship is the starting point of your journey with God and His community, because none of us live in a silo. Food is a great stimulus for relationships to flourish. If you don’t like food, you can find other things that you have in common with the people in your circles. When trust is established and when the Holy Spirit urges you to share; you need to obey and respond. “…To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.” (1Samuel 15: 22)

This is when the beauty of partnership with God shines through. I cannot put it in words how wonderful this feeling is when it happens. Start with simple acts of love, then practice listening, responding to what you hear, and praying together for and with your friends. Pray simple prayers. Pray like you would talk to your father, mother, brother or sister. Please don’t use jargon and church language, because it doesn’t make any sense to your friends. Pray with the language of the heart which will powerfully connect with the spirit.

Delicious!

Working along side Jesus is definitely fun and rewarding, but you need to pay attention and do it intentionally. You need planning to be able to be flexible and spontaneous when the opportunity comes.

I cannot wait to hear your stories. Please share them with us when you can.

Blessings,

Trang

Application Questions to Practice:

Have you ever asked yourselves when would be the right time to become a spiritual parent? How long should we walk with Jesus before we reach out to others and disciple them? I hope that my experience can encourage you to go and search for the answer.

The Who, What, and How of Apprenticing: Part 2

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Oct 082012

Who do we apprentice?

This is the chicken or the egg question. Which comes first? Does the mentor choose the apprentice, or does the apprentice choose the mentor? The answer is both. Ideally the mentor initiates with the apprentice. Yet in Star Wars the ‘jedi mentor’ Qui Gon Jinn finds his ‘padawan apprentice’ Anakin by accident. Either way, I encourage folks to initiate. Go after what you are looking for, or be what you have never received!

The systemic problem that we have had through the ages is that there are never enough mentors, or as Paul calls them, spiritual moms and dads. In I Cor. 4;15 Paul says, “There are a lot of people around who can’t wait to tell you what you’ve done wrong, but there aren’t many fathers or mothers willing to take the time and effort to help you grow up.” That means that we need to become what we are looking for. If we wait around for a mentor in our work place or a spiritual mom and dad in the church to apprentice us, we may be waiting a long time and never find what we are looking for. That is why I am so passionate about apprenticing. I am committed to investing in a few people and places for a lifetime.

Healthy apprenticing starts as an organic or relational journey between two people. So often we have an epiphany that we need to disciple or apprentice people, so we quickly default to the implementation of an ‘apprenticing program or system.’ We assign people to one another for mentoring, recruit people for mentoring classes where we tell people how to mentor, or try to mass produce apprentices through meetings where we dispense information. This is backwards, hard to sustain, and will not produce the desired results.

Another obstacle to apprenticing is that most of us feel like we are not a ‘jedi’ mentor, so we think we don’t have much to offer, no less the confidence to invite a ‘padawan’ into an apprenticing relationship. Yet the truth of the matter is that we don’t have to be an expert or have it all together to apprentice. A good mentor is simply an available friend who is a few steps farther down the road and is willing to pass on the little that he or she has learned.

Many folks have been hurt by overly authoritarian leaders who abused them, or absentee types of leaders who abandoned them, the consequence being a disdain and avoidance of any forms of mentoring or apprenticing. Leading in any fashion is like a rash, and the distrust of leadership is high.

Healthy apprenticing is not a hierarchical relationship in which all the advice and wisdom flows one way from the guru down to the apprentice. It is a relationship of mutual learning. Neither is it a relationship in which the leader controls or manipulates their apprentice to puff up their ego or use the apprentice to accomplish their agenda. A good mentor comes alongside his or her apprentice to coach them to be all that they were created to be and do.

The first step for leaders is to observe where people are already connected to one another in their business, church, or organization. We don’t need to force relationships. In every community, church, or business, there is a tapestry of relationships where people are connected in circles of two or three. It is not hard to spend time with people you like. This is the starting point for developing an apprenticing culture. Here are few questions to help people discover who to mentor or who to be mentored by:

Who do you have faith for and who would you be willing to spend time with to mentor?
Who in the church or company do you admire for their character and because they have a similar calling, career, or gifts/skills that you would like to be mentored in?
If you were struggling in your marriage or with an addiction, or needed input on a major decision, who would you feel safe going to for counsel or coaching?
Look for people who are hungry, available, teachable, and want to spend time with you.

What is apprenticing?

Find a Few to Apprentice in a Way of Life.

Apprenticing is investing in a few people that you love, by passing on what you are passionate about and living a way of life that is caught, and then passed on to others. Real apprenticing starts with God putting some people in your heart or gut – the stomach was the Hebraic understanding of where the heart is. Paul says in Galations 4:19 “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth, until Christ is formed in you.” Apprenticing is a journey of formation, not just giving people information. Love is what changes people, not first and foremost a program of apprenticing.

Apprenticing is the journey of seeing a person come into maturity in both their character and their calling, and that person then walking with someone else to do likewise. It is a relational yet intentional process. I’ve identified five key practices in the full cycle of a healthy apprenticing relationship, or one could apply this to parenting as well.

Calling the person out: This is inviting a person you have faith for to enter into an apprenticing journey. It also means affirming the God-given gifts, calling, and potential you see in them.
Caring: This is the constant encouragement that we all need to hear that someone believes in us. Caring is learning to communicate in that person’s love language. It means being there for that person in the hard times as well as the good times. Celebrating birthdays, having fun, going on trips together where the apprentice can watch what you do, and living life together.
Coaching: This is modeling to the person how to do things, letting them go and try it for themselves, and then giving them feedback. This is the intentional part of the process where we adapt to the person’s learning style in helping him or her grow in life skills, leadership, and how to mentor others.
Correction: This is earning the permission to speak into a person’s blind spots and giving correction out of love, especially in areas of character development. Often we avoid healthy evaluation, but constructive input is necessary for growth. To the degree people know that you truly care for them, they will receive your correction even if it hurts.
Coaxing out of the nest: This stage is when the person we are mentoring needs to go and apprentice someone else. The person will often feel like he is not ready and will need to be nudged out of the nest.

How do we apprentice?

Demonstrate what you are trying to pass on – We need people to show us the way, not just tell us the way. When our son Jonathan was around two years old, he came with us to some meetings with our church leaders. He loved playing (or pretending to play) the guitar, so we let him bring his miniature guitar with him. When we walked into the meeting there were about 4 or 5 guys in a circle having a jam session on their guitars, with one foot propped up on a chair and their guitars resting on their knees. Immediately Jon saw this and looked up at me with a great big grin and this look asking, “Could I join them, Dad?” I nodded down at him, and he walked over to the circle, put his foot up on a chair and started strumming his guitar. At that moment I caught a glimpse of apprenticing! Paul says in I Cor. 11:1, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.”
Learning by doing what we see!
Do the stuff – Most people learn by practicing what they have seen demonstrated. This summer at camp I had the joy of apprenticing some of the counselors in deliverance. After one of the chapel sessions, a counselor asked if we could pray for one of her campers who was quite distraught and could not stay in the chapel because she was so agitated. I said, “Sure!” As we started to pray for this girl, she started to exhibit the signs of being under the influence of the demonic. I called a few other girl counselors, and we took the girl to a side room. Instead of doing the deliverance myself, I coached them on what questions to ask to get to the root of how this girl had become terrorized by the demonic. After getting to the root, they then prayed for deliverance for this girl. What a joy to mentor others in doing the words and works of Jesus! For most of these counselors this was their first experience of deliverance.
Debrief – We need to have followup after doing, to see what worked and what didn’t work!

The fun of catching fish together.

I believe the most effective way to apprentice is to have a person shadow you. The ideal would be to have the person live with you or in close proximity, so that he or she can be immersed in a way of life. Most things in life are caught, not a theory that is taught. This is how we apprenticed our spiritual daughter, Trang who came from Vietnam to study at the University of Calgary, with no church or Christian background. She lived with us for four years and became a Jesus follower in our home. She became a part of our family. We had been afraid we might scare her away from Jesus if she saw our imperfections and weaknesses, yet as we tried to live the Jesus way, talk about the Kingdom around the supper table, and then encourage her to welcome some friends to learn about Jesus and His Kingdom, we saw a few of her friends become followers of Jesus, too. She understood right from the get-go that as a follower of Jesus she was called to be an apprentice that makes apprentices of Jesus. She is now doing this in Sydney, Australia, where she is studying to get a masters degree in Marketing. The outcome of Trang living a life of apprenticing in Sydney is that a simple community of people who are not-yet Jesus followers, new Jesus followers, and a few ‘older’ Jesus followers is forming around her.

Stay tuned next time as Trang shares her story of apprenticing from Down Under. There is no greater joy than to see one of your apprentices go and do likewise. You will be so encouraged by her story of apprenticing friends in the Jesus Way!

Why Apprenticing is the Heart of the Matter: Part 1

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Oct 052012

Do as I do!

Over the years I have had the privilege of traveling around the world to coach leaders and their communities and teams. Again and again in every culture and context, I have heard leaders lament over the dearth or lack of people who are willing to lead. Even Jesus said in Luke 10:2, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” Why is it so hard to find leaders? Whether in the business world or the church, we can get sidetracked by the discussions and debates around what are the right models, programs, structures, systems, leadership styles and philosophy, and miss the heart of the matter. These are important discussions, but they need to be preceded by addressing a couple more important questions: Why do we exist, and how do we pass on our way of life to others who pass it on to others?

For example, Jesus makes it very clear in Matthew 28:19 that the raison d’etre for His followers is “Go and make disciples or apprentices of all nations.” He didn’t say go plant churches, or run meetings, or simply make converts. These things simply are the by-products of apprenticing people in the Jesus way of life that they then go and pass on to others. As I often say, leading people to Jesus is like having fun making babies. The long haul work is the journey of nurturing babies and investing in them till they reach maturity. The question we need to be asking is: How are we doing at making apprentices that go and make apprentices? I will be using different words such as mentoring, discipling, coaching, and apprenticing interchangeably to describe the same one on one journey of passing on a way of life.

As a pastor for many years, I put an inordinate amount of my time and energy towards planning a Sunday meeting, running the organization of church, and crafting 52 life-changing messages a year that I hoped would produce mature apprentices of Jesus who would go make other apprentices. I kept doing the same old thing getting the same result, which some would call insanity! Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in and enjoy preaching and teaching as one small part of the continuum of how we apprentice people in community. What has changed in me is that I believe that the deepest forms of transformation happen through an intentional relationship of one-on-one mentoring, where we can dig in on the core growth issues as we live out life together. The Sunday message or speaking to groups at conferences is no longer the locomotive driving how I disciple, but simply one of the train cars.

Many of us leaders need to go through a radical overhaul to re-calibrate and shift our priorities. Our priorities are revealed by where the majority of our time, energy, and money is going in a typical week. Thus my primary metric or measuring stick for evaluating my success as a leader is no longer how good of a preach or talk I gave to a crowd, though this is one of my gifts which I still value, but rather how many hours of a week I have invested in one-on-one intentional apprenticing relationships, to pass on the Jesus way of living.

Watch and learn.

My conclusion after years of coaching, leading, and pastoring is the following transferable, ageless, cross-cultural, and transcendent principle: Healthy organisms or organizations grow when they develop a culture of apprenticing where a way of life or the genetic code/DNA is passed on. Where there is a healthy mentoring culture there will be a multiplication of leaders who have caught the vision, values, and practices of that church or business, and are passing it on to the next generation of leaders. To develop an apprenticing culture will require a re-prioritizing of where we put our time, energy, and money! The seduction of rapid numerical growth, or the insecurity around being small and looking for the panacea to fast track growth, so quickly de-rails us from apprenticing. This initially is the slow way and is time intensive, but paves the way for multiplication that lasts.

In my next blog I will address the questions: Who do we apprentice? What is apprenticing? How do we apprentice people in our churches, businesses and communities?