PRODUCING DISCIPLERS

The men in the pictures are pastors that I have been helping to become producers of reproducers (disciplers).

This is the goal of The ECWA Discipleship Ministry Team for the people we meet with each week. The reason we focus on this is that we believe that a true disciple isn't one that just learns to love God but he also learns to love his neighbor, just as Jesus spoke about in Matt. 22:37-40. Loving your neighbor involves sharing the gospel with unbelievers and helping believers to become disciplers also. If we only emphasize the verticle relationship with God without the horizontal relationship with our neighbor, I think Jesus would say we are leaving something out. This is the essence of what Jesus said to the lawyer, when He was asked, "what is the greatest commandment"?

This is why in churches around the world Christians are not bearing the fruit that God desires for them to bear. How are things in your church? We certainly see this in the church in Nigeria. Because of this churches spiritually are many miles wide but only an inch deep. They are filled each Sunday with babes in Christ but not true disciples.

It is the desire of the ECWA Discipleship Ministry Unit to see this change. The key is to teach people what it means to be a true disciple of Jesus. Jesus said in John 15:8 "This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples." A true disciple will be fruitful in his own spiritual life and in the lives of others as he helps them learn how to follow Jesus.

How long does it take to produce disciples who reproduce disciplers? It is not something that will be accomplised in a few months or by a one week long conference, as is often thought. But rather it takes one or more years of discipling and equipping someone so they can reach that point of being an effective discipler. It involves establishing a close interpersonal relationship with them.

Here is an example of what I am talking about. In the mid 90s I spent four years discipling a young man. During that time he began to disciple others. Today he is pastoring a church of about 800 people and he is producing disciplers who in turn are busy discipling others in their church.

Maybe you've been reading this and wondering if you are a true disciple. If not, maybe you can find a discipler (your pastor or a mature believer) and ask them to disciple you. Make sure it is someone you see making disciples.

Any comment or interaction will be most welcomed.

ECWA Church District Discipleship Conference

March 1-3, 2007 three of the discipleship ministry staff went to a city about one and a half hours from Jos for a discipleship conference with the district's pastors and elders. About 60 people attended. We had to divide up into three groups. One was for a Hausa language group, one was for an English group and the other one were people who had already done Equipping The Saints (ETS) Book One-A. This group did ETS One-B. Each of us had to teach about seven hours a day. The Lord gave us some rather cooler weather than normal, which was a blessing, and a nice place to sleep.

The exciting thing resulting from the conference, besides seeing their eyes begin to open up to how the Lord can use them to make disciples in their local churches better, was seeing their desire for us to come back monthly to meet with them and carry them on for further training. So every first Monday of the month, we are going to travel there and back. We will have about 3 hours with them. This hopefully will encourage them to follow through with what we taught them and we can keep doing more training and mentoring with them. Please pray for this to bear the fruit that the Lord desires.

Here today and gone tomorrow – electricity that is.

A good supply of electricity is often not available here. Like week before last we had three days when it was off ninety percent of the time. When this happens we have to phone (if the phone is working) or send someone to the local power supply office to report the outage. Many times when you phone they will tell you that it has been reported and they are working on it. Then you wait to see what happens. If it doesn’t come back soon, you phone them again. Finally in desperation you drive over to their office and see them face to face but still that is no guarantee that you will get your lights on any time soon.

After those few days it finally got fixed and now for several days we have had power almost constantly. So we thank God for that. We are thankful that we have a compound generator to use when this happens and are able to keep fridges and freezers cold. Many of our friends do not have an alternative and have to buy food stuff on a daily basis.

Another big problem with not having electricity, besides trying to keep your freezer from defrosting, is thaat we have a phone intercom security system that runs on a battery that has to be charged. So when the electricity is off for a long time, we end up with no alarm. Why is this important? Two week ago armed robbers went to one missionary’s compound. They roughed them up to the extent that the woman had a slight concussion. They stole their car and took a number of things from their house. The security is a siren that is set off by the phones. If set off it will alert everyone around that something is happening and supposedly scare off the burglars. The police will be called and hopefully come to our rescue. We share these things not to complain but to give you a glimpse of what life is like here at times. We often do have to remind ourselves that we are not here because of the comforts of life but to share with people that in Jesus we have a wonderful Savior.