GlocalNet

Yesterday was a wild day—late flight home—dead battery at the airport—yadayadayada . . . got to bed around 2:00am but couldn’t sleep. Got up this morning and was reading my Bible.  I read it through every year, and I was reading 1 Samuel 15:22 “Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice . . .” I thought to myself, as David wrote in Psalms, “The Fool has said in his heart there is no God.” As Bob would say in Texas, and “The Idiot says there is a God, but then refuses to obey Him!”

The core of discipleship is obedience. It isn’t information. It isn’t production. The key to the future of Christianity will not be found in new models but in a new kind of disciple. The fundamental building block of Christianity is the disciple—not the church. The disciple defines the church.  I know that sounds backwards, but a church is the composite of the disciples that you have.

We want movements—church planting movements. The way to get them is not making churches, but going one step removed and asking the question who drives, the movements? It’s the disciple. What kind of movement? It’s the disciple. Can you tell me of one church planting movement that came up with a model first, and then preachers to drive it? I don’t think so.  It was the power of the Gospel planted in the life of a person, and it infected everyone around them.

If we would focus on disciples that obey the voice of God, we’d have movements popping up all over the place many of which we’d know very little about how they started other than they did—like the two guys who showed up in Antioch.