Relational Discipleship

It only takes a casual reading of the Gospels to understand that Jesus spent most of his time with just twelve people. It seems that a huge part of the purpose of his ministry was to invest all of who he was into the lives of those twelve guys. He deliberately chose those twelve out of the many who he could of chosen. He spent most of his time, not in teaching the crowds or healing the sick, but in letting these twelve into his life so that they could understand who he was, what he was like and to share in his passion for God and the lost. Finally, he deliberately left the twelve to carry on the work that he had started in the cross and resurrection.

This is one aspect of discipleship that we are very weak on. I knew this when I first started my sabbatical and it was one subject that I wanted to work on. Last week I attended a conference at St Thomas Church in Sheffield. This is the Church that LifeShapes came out of and they have worked hard at developing what could be called relational discipleship. I attended the conference because I knew that there would be a lot of teaching on how they have established these kind of relationships.

The Church is really three Churches. It started at St Thomas, Crookes, but as that grew they developed another congregation which is now called St Thomas, Philadelphia. Since then The King's Centre in Sheffield has become part of the set up there. Altogether they are about 2000 people and are a very mission focussed Church. This is based on a strong ethos of discipleship, worship and innovation.

It was a really stimulating week for me. I came away with a lot to think about, not just on relational discipleship but also cells, my leadership and the direction of our church. There is a lot I could put in this post but I'll refrain for now until I have processed it a little more and integrated it with some of the things I have been thinking about. For now I'll share a word I was given on the last day by Nicole Brown (who some of you will know). She said she had a picture of me standing on my 'land' (our community). She said that God knows how much I love the land I am in and that he was saying the land will yield its fruit. She also had the words 'shattered glass', although she wasn't sure what they meant. Although I'm not sure what those words mean, I did remember a time a few years ago when I felt that God was talking to me about a glass ceiling in church. In other words there was something hidden that was hindering our growth. May those words relate to that, maybe they don't. If you have any insight let me know.