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Organic Church Blogs Felicity Dale Felicity Dale
Organic Church Blogs Felicity Dale Felicity Dale
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Discipleship within simple/organic/house churches
No discussion of discipleship within the organic/simple/house church movement would be complete without pointing people towards Life Transformation Groups (LTGs). Many years ago the Lord posed a series of questions to Neil Cole: What would you do if 100 people came to Christ this week? What would you do if 1000 people came to Christ this month? What would you do if a million people came to Christ this year? (I may have the exact figures wrong, but you get the idea.) Any idea would have to be so simple it could be easily multiplied. It would have to easy...
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Why Jesus worked with groups
Having written the last post on how Jesus trained his disciples, yesterday I came across a key point that I had missed. I discovered it on the blog of Paul Watson (http://bit.ly/cqS21C ). His premise is that "Jesus discipled groups." Obviously he had one-on-one interactions with individual disciples, but most of his training was done in groups. What do we learn from this? As I have mentioned in other posts, there are only one or two examples of individuals becoming followers of Jesus in the book of Acts (Paul and the Ethiopian eunuch). Mostly it was households (Lydia and her...
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Jesus' pattern of discipleship
My apologies if you get this post twice. I've had a couple of people tell me that it came out in Greek! Hopefully this is now corrected. How did Jesus train his disciples? · He shared the rough and tumble of everyday life with them (Luke 8:1-3) · He asked them questions to show them what they needed to learn (Matthew 16:13-20) · He answered their questions (eg Matthew 17:19-20) · He demonstrated the practical skills they needed to know (Luke 11:1-3) · He used teachable moments. Consider, for example, the occasion in Matthew 20 when James and John persuaded...
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Jesus' pattern of discipleship
Ho How did Jesus train his disciples? He shared the rough and tumble of everyday life with them (Luke 8:1-3) He asked them questions to show them what they needed to learn (Matthew 16:13-20) He answered their questions (eg Matthew 17:19-20) He demonstrated the practical skills they needed to know (Luke 11:1-3) He used teachable moments. Consider, for example, the occasion in Matthew 20 when James and John persuaded their mother to approach Jesus about letting them sit next to him in his Kingdom. Jesus used the opportunity to compare the world's style of leadership with his Kingdom way of...
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The core skill of a disciple
In Matthew 28:18-19 Jesus commanded his disciples to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that he has commanded them. We have reduced this to teaching new believers all about the commandments. But becoming a disciple is not about a body of knowledge, but about a lifestyle of obedience, of following Jesus 24/7. The core skill we teach the new believer, therefore, is how to hear Jesus voice, how to recognize when he is speaking and then the importance of obeying what...