Four Weeks In Geraldine
The minister, Alistair McNaughton, and elders of St Andrew's Presbyterian Church chose disciple-making as their theme for 2021 and they asked me to come and kick the year off for them. I preached for four Sundays, was involved in six of their home groups each week, met with individuals, led an elders and ministry team leaders' retreat and spoke at a ministers' cluster.
The church bought 65 copies of my wee book, Making Disciples Like Jesus. These were distributed, primarily to members of the home groups. The preaching largely paralleled the topics in the book and I had prepared a series of Bible studies. The sermons can be heard here.
Geraldine is a lovely town and St Andrew's is a good church. I really appreciated the warmth and hospitality, the number of young families in the church and the readiness of people to talk about their faith as something personal and real. I loved being involved in the groups and seeing people grapple with the issues.
I was intrigued by how often the conversation was about evangelism. I think it is great that people do talk about evangelism. People wanted to engage with it. I suspect, however, that another reason is that we often feel inadequate at evangelism and some of the comments seemed like rationalisations for not being involved e.g. "I am not an evangelist", "I let me lifestyle be my witness". As a result, the third sermon dealt with some of this.
I was interested though that disciple-making was so often equated with evangelism. The first half is, of course, evangelism but we also need to give equal focus to the second half - growing believers to maturity.
I was also intrigued by someone saying, "I think this is the first time I have focused on what Jesus did." We are often very conscious of Jesus' words but do not notice his actions. I certainly believe that Jesus has modelled for us what we are to do and how we are to do it. We need to learn from, and imitate, His actions. That is what discipleship is about. Followers of Jesus follow Jesus.
Overall, I was delighted with how people engaged with the issues, showing very real understanding but also wanting to go further and be better disciples and disciple-makers.
The elders were talking about how they build disciple-making into the life of the church and make it a focus of their meetings. I certainly hope this is a significant step in this journey for them. I look forward to hearing updates and hearing what God is doing.
This was a very good experience for me and I thoroughly enjoyed being welcomed into St Andrew's for this period. And thank you Milne and Shelly for the use of your house.
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