Saturday 31 July, 2010

.blogs

Hangin' out

Posted: Sep 09, 2008 by Matt

Discipleship sums up what Jesus told his disciples to go and do after he left. In Matthew 28, Jesus says: Go and make disciples of all nations. Discipleship sums up what we do – but what exactly is discipleship? It sounds quite impressive to ‘disciple’ someone. In my mind, I get images of Yoda discipling his young Padawan, Luke Skywalker. Yoda was extremely gifted and wise and it’s tempting to think that in Christian terms, you have to be as godly as Jesus to even attempt to disciple anyone. But of course that’s not true. If God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise, discipleship isn’t for guru’s, it’s for us mere morals.

So, what is it then? Here is where, like Archimedes, I had a eureka moment. My aha moment is that discipleship isn’t really that complicated at all, it’s really just about _hanging out _with people. The key component is time and lots of it. The buzz word is quality time. In a marriage quality time isn’t just moments grabbed inbetween doing the washing up and sending emails, it’s a date night with your wife/husband. A night out with no distractions so that you can make time to listen and communicate properly. Quality time for a parent is the same – time spent with a child when what they say matters. I heard of a minister in the US who has Daddy-dates with his daughters where he takes out one daughter and they spend the evening doing something fun – eating at MacDonalds, playing sport – whatever the daughter wants to do to make sure he wasn’t distracted in any way.

As Christians I think we can become way too busy with Christian activities and programmes and just the sheer busy-ness of life to have quality time to spend with other Christians. Our calendar gets so crowded with doing things that we forget that making disciples involves quality relationships. We never just hang out with people because we’re all busy doing something that we think is more worthy. Surely having a prayer meeting is more important that spending time with a Christian friend? I’m not getting at prayer meetings, I think they’re great, but if we have prayer meetings in our churches without any deep and meaningful relationships – what’s the point?

For me, discipleship is just one Christian intentionally hanging out with another Christian. Pick your friendships carefully because your quality time will only stretch so far and that means being strategic and praying that God would show us who we can help and encourage the most by spending quality time with them. All of this might sound exclusive, having to ignore many in order to spend quality time with a few, but then this is just what Jesus did. Faced with endless need around him he spend most of his time with just twelve disciples. The Son of God only had time for twelve disciples and even within those twelve there were only three who were considered close to Jesus. The point for Jesus was that these twelve were to do the same with others, spend quality time building relationships so that the gospel would spread.

Intentional hanging out might look very different depending on your life situation. If you’re single it might mean lots of time hanging out with friends. For those with a family it might mean including others in the life of your family and inviting other Christians on family days out. For those who are retired it might mean using the free time in the day to invite students or stay-at-home mums around for meals. We all have the same amount of time, it’s up to us how we use it. And as Jesus commands us to make disciples, lets make sure we allow time for close relationships to develoAnd let’s be those who take the initiative in doing it. You don’t need to be Yoda, you just need to be you, but you do need to make quality time.