How and Why .W Church Trains Others to Lead

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Part VIII of our series on Preparation

I’m sometimes asked how this whole discipleship method I’ve outlined in the past several posts looks for me and my church, which meets simultaneously in Colorado Springs, CO and Seoul Korea.

Well, when I travel to Korea I lead one of the Korean discipleship training meetings in person and I do one of the American meetings by video conference. When I’m in America I lead one of the discipleship training meetings in person and I do one of the Korean meetings by video conference.

I do this on purpose because it is good for disciples to grow by not always having the teacher around. 

If the teacher is always there in person the teacher usually does all of these things.  But because I am not always here the individual students have to learn to do these things. And that’s why most of the church is not regularly in a meeting I’m leading—because the meetings are being led by those I’m leading.

In our discipleship training program, we take these ten Works of Mercy and we dedicate a month to each.  That’s 10 months.  But before we start hearing and doing the word related to any of the specific Works of Mercy we take one month to study the overall concept of the whole life offering.  We call this the Preparation month. We focus on questions like,

  • What is the gospel?
  • What is God’s plan for each individual Christian?,
  • What is discipleship?

Then, we spend the next ten months tackling each of the Works of Mercy.  Our last month we call the Presentation month. We look back over the whole year and give God glory for how he’s grown us in each area. We set goals for the next year, when we are sent out to lead our own group in our own sphere of influence.

That’s what happens in our church. No one can stay several years in this group, just “being fed.” They get one year of intensive training, and then they’re leading a group.

I still train the leaders of the groups, but the point is there’s no such thing as someone who is permanently only being discipled but not discipling others. That goes against 2 Timothy 2:2:

“…and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

That applies to all of us.

We may not be leading huge congregations, but Christ is holding each of us responsible for discipling those in our own sphere of influence.

If you have any question about that, check out the Great Commission.

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The Relationship Between Works of Mercy and Works of Piety

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Part VII of our series on Preparation

In our last post, I walked through the Whole Life Offering diagram shown to the left (click the diagram to pull up a larger version).

Today, we’re going to focus on the orange icons near the middle. These icons represent the Works of Mercy; the ways in which we love our neighbors. They are the external part of ministry for each and every Christian.

Why do we start by talking about the Works of Mercy instead of the Works of Piety? Why do we talk about loving our neighbor before we talk about loving God?

Well, in 1 John 4:20, the Apostle John says,

“If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”

These 10 Works of Mercy are the ways Christ calls us to love our brother and, in so doing, we see clearly how Christ first loved us. In the history of the church there are different lists of Works of Mercy; some lists are shorter—they may have 9 or 8 works.  Some lists are longer.  They’re not all the same but this list is pretty common among all of the church leaders through history.

These are the 10 ways of loving our neighbor that Jesus commands us to do in order to mirror his love into the world.

Each of these Works of Mercy are commanded of Christians as the ways we should love our neighbors because they’re how he first loved us. (Don’t forget that “The Philanthropy of Christ” outer circle reminds us of where this all began)

One of the Works of Mercy is Sharing Your Bread. Have you ever noticed how the Bible never tells us to feed the poor? Instead it says, “Share your bread.” If I feed the poor I can just hand out frozen turkeys or bags of canned soup. But if I share my bread it means I have to actually be eating a meal together with someone.

Big difference.

Another Work of Mercy is Opening Your Home. The Bible never says, “Find a place for homeless people to sleep” or “build a homeless shelter.”  It says, “Open your home to the homeless.”

The point is this: with each of these works, the words are chosen very carefully – the wording indicates the way we are commanded in the Bible to do these things.

We’ll define each of these in the weeks and months to come. But for now I want you to turn your attention to the outer set of seven items.

These 7 are the Works of Piety. They’re the internal spiritual preparations; the ways that we love God. These 7 areas are all about spiritual development inside of us.

The first is Searching the Scriptures. The second one, Learning, is about how the church, across history, has faithfully interpreted and carried out the Word of God. Then there’s Worshipping, Praying, Self-Denial, Serving, and Giving.

Each of those builds on top of the other, meaning that we start first by Searching the Scriptures, and then we Learn about what the church can teach, then we Worship, etc.

What I want you to see about this chart is how each Work of Mercy is rooted in all seven of the Works of Piety

In other words, for the Work of Mercy of Sharing Your Bread, we need to Search Scripture about sharing your bread, Learn from church history about sharing your bread, Pray specifically about sharing your bread, incorporate sharing your bread into your family’s worship, and so on.

Now, there’s one last circle in the diagram that I didn’t cover on Friday: the fruits of the Spirit.

The question is: where does the fruit of the Spirit come from? How does it develop in our lives? 

The answer is: from the outside in.  That is, by the love of Christ, in the fellowship of our family, local church, and the church around the world, as we hear and do the word together. The fruit of the Spirit, in other words, is the product of the whole life offering, the result of comprehensive discipleship.

That’s basic, Scriptural growth for the believer.

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The Whole Life Offering Diagram: A Practical Strategy for Comprehensive Discipleship

Posted on December 16, 2011 by Pastor Foley

Part VI of our series on Preparation

As we talked about in our previous post, we need a discipleship strategy that links the hearing and the doing of the word.  The good news is, we don’t need to develop anything new because this goal of linking the hearing and the doing of the word has been the basic approach to discipleship through most of Christian history.

We can look at many great Christian teachers to learn how they linked the hearing and doing of the word.  In the ancient church there were those like Origen, Tertullian, and Augustine.  And then the Protestant reformers: Luther, Calvin, and Simons all wrote about this question.  As did John Wesley in the 1700s , and so on.

In other words, it’s not a denominational question.

It is a question that all Christians must deal with regardless of whether we come from Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist or any other background.

The model I want to show you today comes from a book that I wrote called The Whole Life Offering (click the image to view a larger version).

In Romans 12 Paul says, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”  That is a whole life offering. That’s what is being represented in this diagram.

It is a practical strategy for comprehensive discipleship.  It may look very complicated but it’s not hard to understand.

By using a diagram like this, we can make sure that we are helping our disciples to grow in all of the areas God calls us to.  With a tool like this we can make sure that the hearing of the word and the doing of the word stay joined at the hip.

For the better part of 2000 years in the church, that internal spiritual development part of discipleship has been called “Works of Piety” and you can see those represented on the diagram as Searching Scripture, Learning, Worshipping, Praying, Self-Denial, Serving, and Giving.

Let’s look at Ephesians 2:10:

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

According to this verse, we were created for works that he prepared for us to do beforehand. So on the one hand we have Works of Piety, and on the other hand we have these good works, which the church has typically referred to as “Works of Mercy”.

The Works of Piety are internal, while the Works of Mercy are external.

Now look at the center of the circle. There are two commandments there: love God and love neighbor.

Jesus says these are the great commandments.  At the heart of the Christian life, we link those together: loving God, loving neighbor; hearing the word, doing the word.

Internal development/external ministry, the works of piety/and the works of mercy – these things are always joined together at the center of the Christian life.

Now, look at the outside of the circle. The outside of the circle says, “the philanthropy of Christ.”

Philanthropy is usually used to indicate the giving away of money but it is actually a biblical word from Titus 3:4.  It says, “When the goodness and loving-kindness of God appeared.”  In Greek the word for “loving-kindness” is “phil-anthropy.”

In Greek “phil” means love and “anthropos” is people.

But it is not our love for others.  Everything that’s inside of this diagram is about God’s grace–his philanthropy. You’ll see in verse 5 of Titus 3 that God saved us not because of works done in righteousness, but according to his own mercy. Everything that happens inside this circle is God’s love to us—including the Works of Mercy we perform on other people.

Christ’s love forms the outside of the circle because everything that happens inside of the circle is God’s work; it is God’s doing; it is God’s activity in our lives. It’s not something we do in our own power, it is God’s work in us.

The next circle in—the one that says “Family, Local Church, Church Around the World” reminds us that this activity of God is not something that’s just between he and us.

Discipleship in the Christian church and grace from the living God has never been just an individual experience. It is always pictured in Scripture as a group activity.

Wow, does the church fail to see that today.

“Yeah, I don’t go to church but I’m spiritual.” Huh? But God shares his grace collectively with his children; what are you doing over in the corner by yourself being spiritual?

Jesus always taught people in groups. When Jesus taught evangelism in Luke 10, he taught 72 disciples at the same time. Each of us belongs to three different communities.

At its base, discipleship takes place in the family, meaning discipleship is not simply the pastor working with each individual Christian.  Parents have the primary responsibility to disciple their own children. That’s the first community of which we each are a part.

The second is the local church.  Here we’re reminded that discipleship does not only happen in the family but it happens as we come together in God’s wider family.

Third is the church around the world.  Each of us belongs not only to our own local fellowship but to all of God’s people.  The body of Christ only grows to fullness if the whole church around the world is working together and sharing with each other.

Now, here’s a key principle that’s fallen by the wayside today:

Missionary service always begins locally before it goes global.  

Jesus says to his disciples in Acts 1:8, “You will be my disciples in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth.”

So, if a person is not faithful to disciple their own children, they cannot disciple others in the local church. This is Paul’s message to Timothy in 1 Timothy 3:1-5:

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?

The same applies to us: in order to be able to minister to the church around the world, we have to first be faithful in our local church.  The early missionaries would travel with a letter from their church authorizing them as good ministers in their local context.

So, when someone is faithful here, God will raise them up there. But we have too many church missionaries that were not faithful in their local church (the local church doesn’t even know who they are) who are ministering abroad and causing many problems; they don’t disciple well—they never learned how to disciple others (or even be discipled by others) at home.

In our next post, we’ll go into more depth about the Works of Mercy.

What else might be helpful to know about The Whole Life Offering Diagram?  What do you need to be able to explain it to others?

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