This weekend is our mid year Forge intensive focused on Discipleship, Spirituality and Sustainability in a Mission Context.
I’ll be doing a session entitled Swimming Upstream – Making Disciples in a Consumer Culture. Its one I’ve done a number of times before, but it still evokes a heap of passion from me as it cuts to the nub of what we are about. If we aren’t making disciples then we really are just wasting our time.
I am not the least interested in funky church services or any of the fairy floss that is supposed to be important to a 21st C church, but I am deeply concerned with how we move from a self focused life to a Christ & other focused life.
The more I think about it the more pessimistic I become.
Discipleship as Jesus describes it is both exciting and disturbing. It is the surrender of my life and my will to his in the belief that he will guide me in a way to live that is true to who I am called to be.
And in that there are no promised of happiness, prosperity or good times. There are promises of suffering and persecution… and yet somehow our take on following Jesus rarely includes those fairly significant elements.
As much as I have done this talk several times it still evokes a lot of energy from me because it is at the centre of what we are all about – swimming upstream.
If you’re interested in seeing what’s going down over the weekend then you can download the program here. Or if you want to have a look at my session you can download the pdf notes of the powerpoint here