discipleship

LIFE is our Cityview vision

/ Craig / Leave a comment

I recently had a conversation about vision and organizations.  My friend made the statement that people give their lives to vision.  I think that is true.  Unfortunately I think many of us can live a subsistence life when it comes to vision.  One of the great opportunities that I get week in and week out is to call people to connect their lives to what matters most.  I get to help them shape a God-formed vision of their life.  As well I get to remind them of the God-formed vision we have of our life together at Cityview.

LIFE is our vision.  We envision LIFE-transformed followers of Jesus Christ.  We see people who:

Love God with their all; they joyfully live the Great Commandment and elevate Jesus as Lord in a community of worship and prayer.

Include people in the grace of Jesus; they build healthy and loving relationships for koinonia and evangelism.

Find freedom in the Truth; they apply God’s Word in their actions and attitudes for a new and freeing perspective on life and relationships.

Engage the world as a servant; they infiltrate their circles of influence in the fullness of the Holy Spirit for gift-oriented, sacrificial service.

Now we have had a longstanding statement of our mission that says we seek to create communities of devoted followers of Jesus Christ in Vancouver and around the world.  Out of that we know that we have three wins at Cityview.  We are winning when people who are far from God receive Jesus and begin the process of becoming LIFE-transformed followers of Jesus Christ.  We are winning when community groups are reproducing through the development of new leaders and dynamic caring relationships.  And we are winning when new churches are being started in Vancouver and around the world.

Our strategy has three parts under-girded by leadership, prayer, and faithfulness. 

Spaces:  Worship Gatherings, Small Groups, and 3rd Space settings

Stances:  Spiritual Disciplines and Servanthood

Domains:  Oikos, Neighbourhoods, the “building blocks” of a city

a matrix for identifying and empowering reliable people

/ Craig / Leave a comment

Last Sunday I preached from the hard-working farmer metaphor highlighted by Paul to Timothy in 2 Timothy 2:1-10.  Paul directs Timothy to reflect on the soldier, the athlete, and the farmer in order to gain insight for investing his life and ministry in reliable people who will in turn be able to invest their lives in other people who in turn will be able to invest their lives in other people.  Paul envisions the Gospel life and message being passed on through a chain of discipleship.  A few years ago I developed a matrix from these three images for identiying and empowering reliable people for discipleship.  You can download the pdf: matrix-for-identifying-and-empowering-reliable-people-for-discipleship

missional discipleship

/ Craig / 1 Comment

You get what you inspect, not what you expect.  With that leadership lesson I have too often realized my own agreeable nature fails to be as loving as Jesus is.  Jesus has great expectations for his disciples; expectations that pushed their minds and captured their hearts.  However when it comes to the inspection of his expectations in their lives Jesus follows through.  Jesus calls the Twelve that they might be with Him and that He might send them out and that they may have authority… 

While they are with Him Jesus makes the most of every teachable moment.  As I read the Gospels I find that He is inspecting their lives for faith, servanthood, clarity about His identity, kingdom values such as obedience to Him and sacrificial giving.  As well His teaching seems to constantly seek to realign their worldview to the coming reality of the cross and the resurrection.  It’s as if Jesus confronts them with pain and their need for change daily:  “You thought God was like this, but He is not;  He is like me.”  The disciples are being confronted with forgiveness, grace, and the incarantion of God in flesh.

When it comes to discipleship and the question of missional or incarnational living, I find that I am of two minds.  I am right brained and left brained.  Moses came down the mountain with the Law and I want the disciple of Jesus to know the Word of God.  Jesus came down from Heaven as the fulfillment of the Law and I want the disciple of Jesus to know Him.  I want their knowledge to be formed by their experience of the Word and Him by the Spirit and I want their experience to be formed by the knowledge of Him and the Word.

This requires inspection of the most crucial expectations.  So Paul says to Timothy, “Watch your life and doctrine carefully that you might save some.”  Obediece to Jesus as a response to grace is the fruit of a regenerate and Spirit-filled life.  As we have been seeking to work this out at Cityview we have landed on three words to describe our congregation’s strategy for pursuing our vision of L.I.F.E. as a follower of Jesus Christ:  stances, spaces, and domains.  More on each of these later.

We have some huge challenges to missional discipleship.  But the biggest of these has nothing to do with our access to the Scripture.  Rather it has to do with the amount of time we make available to the people with whom we would share our lives and our walk with Jesus.  Then it has to do with the kinds of activities and conversations we actually engage in together.