To Teach The Way

Is it possible to teach a way of life? Is it possible to teach a way of living? Or are we just supposed to figure it out for ourselves? The public school system believes that we are to learn how to live on our own. They only teach what we need to know. It is up to us to figure out how to use it. We figure out what we believe, what is right, and what is good.

One of the reasons for the writing of The Divine Conspiracy is the implementation of this thinking in the church. Teach them what they need to know, but they are on their own after that. It has even been said that it is not the right of any individual to impress their way of life on another person. This is part of the American dream: we are free from the direction of our neighbor.

Chapter 9 of the Divine Conspiracy tackles this topic: how to make disicpleship a curriculum. For as much emphasis as the church puts on change and becoming a new person, it is amazing to see how few classes and programs there are to create that exact change. It is understandable that churches do not want to make change and systematic process where you go through the steps and finish at the end. However, there is little to no programing whatsoever to guide Christians in discipleship in Jesus Christ. This chapter explains that it is possible to create a curriculum to teach Jesus’s way of life. It is no up to us, the church, to incorporate this idea into our own teaching schedule in order to prepare each life we reach for Jesus.

Divine Conspiracy? Or Societal Confusion?

Chapter 1 of Divine Conspiracy takes an interesting look at how society has lost sight of its moral reference point. In fact, the insist that there is no reference point. This has in turn lead America to a state of confusion, where the “trivial are thought to be profound” and “what is truly profound is thought to be stupid.” (p. 10) And yet, in the midst of this confusion, Jesus has set himself in the very middle of our society, whether society wants to admit it or not.

Chapter 2 talks about how some of this confusion has spilled into Christian thought. But instead of losing sight of our moral reference point, we have lost sight of what Christ originally meant for us: discipleship. We don’t get “scanned” when we get to heaven because we said that prayer once. We are to be constantly, and actively working to grow closer to Christ through disciplines.

What Willard is doing in these two chapters is illustrating where we are right now, and how that is not where we are to be. He is also pointing out how we got to this position. We became comfortable where we were and allowed society to pass us up. Once that happened, society then was able to influence us more than we could influence them. Now, we know we aren’t doing what we need to do, but we are confused as to why things are going like they are. And society is doing the same thing.

In the next chapters, I am expecting Willard to start to discuss how to make changes to out current predicament.

Week Nine Was a Friend of Mine

Well, I just finished my second to last week of my internship and am beginning my last week. It has been a great experience here and I wish I could be here longer.

This past week was a little crazy for me. Monday through Wednesday I had Across the Street VBS in the morning. We expanded it a little and also went to another low income apartment complex to minister to some kids, and it was great to see them hang with us and learn about Jesus. On Tuesday, we actually did a VBS at two places at once. We split our forces and taught lessons at both places. It was really cool to see the number of high school students who volunteered their time.

However, since the VBS was in the morning, I only had the afternoons to get some other work done. I have been working on organizing a van of volunteers for a fundraising day at Park Springs Christian Camp, and I needed to reserve the van, get announcements out and prepare an insert for the bulletin. Also, preparing a lesson for Wednesday and Sunday and having something going on in the evening for the first three nights of the week. It was a very crazy busy start to the week, but I was able to get a lot of things done.

Monday evening was the cookout at Pete Ramsey’s house for the graduating 6th graders. It is a chance to not only hang out with the students, but also build a relationship with the parents and try to get them involved. I ended up having a couple of great conversations with some parents about some pretty big issues. It was a great night.

Tuesday night, the high school students put on a spaghetti dinner with dodgeball and swimming after for the Across the Street Ministry kids and families. It is our chance to bless some of the families over there by providing a meal for them and keeping their kids from being somewhere they shouldn’t be at that time of the day. Everyone had fun and the food was really good. The students did a great job!

Wednesday I taught a lesson on relationships and the importance of surrounding yourself with good Christian friends. I pointed out that it is important to have non-Christian friends because that is one of the main ways that we minister to them, but if we surround ourselves with bed influences, we will be influenced by them. I also talked about how if we are being influenced in a way that is pulling us away from Christ, that the only way to remove that influence is to remove yourself from the situation and get new friends who will help you grow closer to God. There were some hard words there, but I felt God telling me that many of the students there needed to hear it.

After my day off, I was busy getting the insert for Sunday’s bulletin ready and preparing a lesson for the adult class I was teaching. We had a great discussion about truth, what it means, what the opposite of it is, how the world reacts to it, and how we are to react to it. We had a hard time keeping it with in the time frame we had. It was a good time.

During the week, I had a discussion with one of the members of the church about my experience here and what I felt about the church. I gave several of my thoughts about the church and how I feel it is exactly what the church is supposed to be like. During the course of that discussion, I was told that I have a lot of passion when I talk about the things I think and what I believe is true. It was an eye opening discussion for me, because I have never really considered my self a passionate person. I have always felt even keeled. But after that conversation I have realized that I have developed a passion for the truth. This is one of the reasons that I taught about truth for the adult class. So when I talk about things that are true, I do not back down and I say it like it is. Now that I know this, I hope God will help me utilize this aspect of me to bring Him more glory. For all truth comes from God, because God is truth.

Week Eight Was Great!

Last week was my week to go to camp with the students here at Park Springs Christian Camp in Providence, NC. I had a great week; it was one of the best weeks of camp I have been to.

Though I have been to many weeks of camp, this one had some different experiences and lessons for me to learn. The first of which was teaching a lesson everyday. The theme for the week was Signs of Summer and the sign for my lesson was Toll Road Ahead. This is referring to Luke 14:28-30 where Jesus is talking about counting the cost of being a disciple of His. Though I have taught lessons before, the was the first lesson where the topic is actually difficult to talk about. Using the surrounding passage in Luke 14, the story of the rich young ruler in Mark 10 and John 15:18-21, I covered the ideas of walking away from family if they do not follow Christ, giving up everything you have, being treated like Jesus was to the point of persecution and death and being generous with the things that God has blessed us with. These are hard topics to talk about while still highlighting how the benefits of Christianity outweigh these costs. The costs can seem so high that no benefit could be worth it. Through the week, I was doing my best to balance my teaching by covering both the costs and the benefits and talking about how experience will tell you the benefits are worth it. But I kept feeling like that idea wasn’t getting through because I knew that I was saying and what it sounded like. But at the end of the week, my family group was the last group to take my class. During family time we would talk about one thing that God had been telling us that day. One of the kids in my groups said that what God was telling him from my class that the costs of being a disciple of his do not even come close to comparing to the riches and benefits that will be rewarded to us. This was a great encouragement to me because it let me know that God is speaking to the students through me, and I am not speaking my own words. If it was just my words, each student would have left my class very depressed. But God came through and used my mouth to speak to the middle schoolers to have them hear what they needed to hear: real truth. One of the kids in my group said he liked my class because it was real. Both comments were huge encouragements to me.

I was also able to speak for campfire one of the nights, which is something I haven’t done before. The theme for the day was Yield: yielding to God and being committed to him. The speaker for chapel spoke on the importance of yielding to God, so I figured I would hit on commitment. Before campfire, we had a movie night and watched How To Train Your Dragon. There is a great illustration of commitment between the two main characters that I was able to use in my little devotion. I talked about how we are more committed to other things than we are to God, to things like movies, video games, music, etc. I explained that being more committed to these things is a for of idolatry because something else is more important than God. While I was speaking, I realized that I was in this group of people as well. I was more committed to some of the very things I was talking about than I was to God. I asked how many people spent more than five hours a week with movies, TV, video games or music. Quite a big response, including from me. Then I asked how may people had spent five hours a week praying, reading their Bible or talking to God. Not a huge response but the point was made pretty clear. When I said that, I realized that I don’t spend as much time with God as I do with other things and have been working to remedy that. I am glad that God was able to speak to me through what I was saying to help get me to where I need to be.

At the end of the week, we had about 10 first time decisions to follow Christ, 7 of which were baptized at camp, and even more rededications. Many of the kids experienced change from the beginning of the week to the end of the week, and I was great to see.

Now that I am back from camp, I have a full week of Across the Street Ministry in the morning and lessons to work on. I will have another update for you when the week is over.

Week Seven: Check

Well...this last week for my has been quite the ride.

I arrived back at FCC on Sunday after my week of vacation to find out that there had been a tragedy in the church. Two brothers had been killed in a boating accident, the visitation was that afternoon and they were expecting close to 4000 people to come. Needless to say, I was not necessarily prepared for this, but God decided to baptize me into it anyway. I helped direct people through the church and gathered fans from around the building as one of the AC compressors quit. This was a hard day for me for a couple reasons. First, I have a heart for hurting people. I am empathetic, so I am able to sense and feel what a person is going through. Well, there were a lot of people coming through who were hurting very badly about these people they had lost. Seeing so many hurting people made me feel their hurt and wish I could help in some way. Part of why I could empathize with them is because I had just lost a close friend of mine. Since I was not able to attend my friends visitation or funeral, I was mourning for him then. I felt a little weird, secretly mourning for my friend when there were so many hurting around me. I didn't know what to do. I realized that the most I could do for the people around me was to just be there and show support. This let both of us mourn in peace, and that is healthy.

The funeral was the next day, and the church was set up to seat over 1000 people. There weren't that many who attended, but the crowd was still over 800. When the funeral ended, I started getting to work on a couple of things: Wednesday night lesson, Sunday morning lesson, lesson for camp next week. This was the bulk of my work for the week. Wednesday's lesson was on materialism and Sunday's lesson was on whining and selfishness. My lesson for camp is on the cost of being a Christian.

Though I am almost done with my internship (3 weeks left), I can tell that God has more lessons in store for me. Some may be hard, others will be easy. But I am very thankful that I have had this internship so far.