[From the archives] I love the story told by Stephen Covey about the two men having a contest to see who could saw down a large tree in the shortest time. The first man is sawing like crazy, harder and faster than ever before. As he is sawing away, out of the corner of his eye, he sees the other bloke sitting down on a stump, although he can’t tell what he’s doing. This of course, pleases the first man; realizing that as they are fairly evenly matched strength-wise, there is virtually no way the other guy can win after having taken this break. Some time later both men are sawing furiously when the second man sits down yet again. The first guy can’t figure out for the life of him what’s going on with the second man, but he knows he has this locked in – he’s going to win for sure; his pace begins to slow a little as his arms weary from the effort.
The second man stands up and gets back to work. With just a few strokes, his tree falls and he wins! Convinced that the second guy must be cheating, the first guy storms over to him and says, “What’s this? There’s no way you could have won fair and square. You sat down for a couple minutes at least twice while I was working the whole time. Now out with it – what was going on when you weren’t working?” The man who had won simply replied, “I was sharpening my saw.”
A great illustration demonstrating that if we are to remain fruitful we need to take the time to “sharpen the saw,” that is to sustain our personal resources – to refresh, refuel, reassess and even retool. Time invested in this sort of re-creation and regeneration makes us more effective than struggling on, exhausted and with blunt tools!
As I reflect on where things are at in terms of the Church and its mission, I think there is a broader analogy. The faith-tribes of Australia (of most traditions) have been struggling with viability concerns for a long while now. Congregations are aging, numbers are relentlessly declining, pluralism and secularism surround us, the younger generations decreasingly identify with their parents’ faith, and effective mission and evangelism are a hard grind. It is painful for us to watch the churches with which we’ve grown up struggling so.
There has been an ongoing flurry of activity over the last three or four decades as many have tried to stem the tide. The church growth advocates; the emerging church movement; natural church development; seeker sensitive services; meals programs, housing initiatives, language learning classes, counseling centres, small-groups, church cafes, playgroups, childcare, sporting teams, hi-tech Sunday presentations and so on. There have been some magnificent initiatives that have blessed their communities and encouraged us, and there are congregations that model worship and mission in inspirational ways.
But (to generalize), for many churches there is a small, faithful but exhausted core group who drive the programs and experiences for a much larger group who have come to depend on the diligence and giftedness of that core group and their hard-working minister. I hear faithful core team members (and ministers) say things like this:
“We don’t have energy or time to stop and appraise the overall strategy.”
“It’s like we are tired the whole time.”
“There’s always more to do and not enough volunteers to help.”
“There are so many needy people who depend on me.”
“We dare not lose momentum because we’ll lose numbers.”
“Our little group keeps the show afloat. If we stopped – there’d be no one else, we dare not take a break!”
“As the minister, I am busy doing everything, I don’t have time to delegate.”
“There are so many tasks and so few of us to share the load.”
“If the numbers and offerings drop any more – we’re cactus!”
“I’m not sure our strategy is all that effective - but I can’t risk changing it right now.”
“We’ve been through a swag of consultants and fads but we are still going backwards.”
“We have a fantastic community outreach program, only there’s barely a church left to run it!”
“Most of our income comes from the space we lease to outside groups – so we can pay for some pastoral care, but it means we can’t use the church property for expanding mission or ministry”.
“We are getting old, it takes all our energy just to keep the church open – where are the youngsters?”
“My church ministry has an insatiable appetite for eating all my time and energy.”
“It’s mostly the paid professionals who make it happen, we’d be in trouble if we had to cut our staff hours.”
What I see are blunt saws and tired, aching arms, sawing furiously ...
But what if we sharpened the saws and multiplied the number of fit lumberjacks with strong arms and sturdy legs?
What if we placed “making disciples” rather than “running church” at the heart of our strategy?
It seems to me that sustainably fruitful churches will often pull back from all-out activism or outreach to gradually create a culture of trained, maturing, fruit-bearing disciples who can in turn birth like-minded disciples. This never happens by itself. It requires a deliberate decision to direct time and resources towards forming disciples in a way that is relational and replicatable by them. It may mean taking ten steps back, in order to then move twenty steps forward.
Esmae and I have been re-reading Building a Discipling Culture, by Mike Breen and Steve Cockram (2011). I can recommend it to you. Let me leave you with a quote that for me, touches the heart of the matter:
“... Most of us have become quite good at the church thing. And yet, disciples are the only thing that Jesus care about, and it’s the only number that Jesus is counting. Not our attendance or budget or buildings. He wants to know if we are “making disciples.” Many of us serve in, or lead churches where we have hundreds or even thousands of people showing up on Sunday But we have to honestly answer this question: Do their lives look like the lives of the people we see in Scripture? Are we just good at getting people together once a week and maybe into a small group, or are we actually good at producing the types of people we read about in the New Testament? Have we shifted our criteria for a good disciple as someone who shows up to our stuff, gives money and occasionally feeds poor people?
Effective discipleship builds the church, not the other way round. We need to understand the church as the effect of discipleship and not the cause. If you set out to build the church, there is no guarantee you will make disciples. It is far more likely that you will create consumers who depend on the spiritual services that religious professionals provide.
Now one of the buzzwords around today is the word “missional.” People want to create missional churches or missional programmes or missional small groups.
The problem is that we don’t have a “missional” problem or a leadership problem in the Western church. We have a discipleship problem. If you know how to disciple people well, you will always get mission. Always. You see, somewhere along the way we started separating being “missional” from being a disciple, as if somehow the two could be separated. Pastors started saying they didn’t want to be inwardly focussed so they stopped investing in the people in their churches. So they could focus on the people outside their churches.
Granted, we should focus on people who don’t know Jesus yet, but Jesus himself gave us the model for doing that: Disciple people. If you know how to actually make disciples, you’ll reach people who actually don’t know Jesus. Because that’s simply what disciples do. That was Jesus’ whole plan. If you disciple people, as these people do mission in their everyday comings and goings, with the work and shaping of the Spirit, the future of the church will emerge...” (Building a Discipling Culture, Mike Breen and Steve Cockram, 2011, P. 16-17).
My hope is that in the midst of the busyness of “doing church” - running programmes, writing reports, recruiting team members, having meetings, preparing for programmes and all, that we would find the time to be still and be renewed as disciples who can then make disciples - disciples of Jesus who are in love with him, and who are learning the practices of faith, and who in obedience are growing like him, and reproducing further disciples day by day.
My hope is that in the midst of the busyness of “doing church” - running programmes, writing reports, recruiting team members, having meetings, preparing for programmes and all, that we would find the time to be still and be renewed as disciples who can then make disciples - disciples of Jesus who are in love with him, and who are learning the practices of faith, and who in obedience are growing like him, and reproducing further disciples day by day.
