Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Evangelism or discipleship

This past Sunday the church in which I preached had a light lunch and a time of Q&A. I was there preaching on transformation issues, and the church leadership invited people to stay and ask questions regarding things they heard in the message or some questions they might have about church transformation. Over half the congregation stayed, and several of them asked some excellent questions.

One of the final questions was which was most important for them to focus on: evangelism or discipleship. My response was both. The Great Commission includes both outreach and discipleship, and we make a mistake if we focus on one without the other. Some churches do a good job reaching out to the unchurched in their communitites, but they do not encourage the ones they reach to become disciples. In our area most churches will have Sunday school attendance that is about half of the number attending the worship service. Few churches in my area offer small groups.

Recently I was speaking to a judicatory leader in another denomination who said they are having the same problem in their churches. He mentioned a rapidly growing church in his denomination that is getting good recognition for their outreach efforts, but he said that their Sunday school numbers are declining almost as fast as their church is growing. He said that in about 10 years when these new members take over much of the leadership in that church they will not be spiritually qualified to do so, and he noted that is the situation in many of our churches today.

One of the key needs in our bivocational churches is trained, spiritual leadership. We need to make discipleship a priority in our churches. People must be challenged to go deeper in their walk with Christ and given the tools to enable them to do so. If we fail to do this we will have failed to obey half of the Great Commission regardless of how large our churches may become.

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