Discipleship as the Foundation for Church Planting - Finny Kuruvilla | CGS 2018

Well, grace and peace to everyone this morning. It's good to be here again with you.

My subject for this morning is on discipleship as the foundation for church planting.

Discipleship can be defined as the process of taking someone from the outside, a non-Christian, all the way through evangelism to a point of maturity when they are Christ-like and go on to make further disciples. So I think most of us know that. Jesus, of course, described that in a very memorable metaphor. Jesus calls us to be fishers of men.

He calls us to be like people who go out and throw our lines into the sea and bring in a haul of fish and do that again and again. Are you this morning, if I asked you, are you honestly successful as a fisher of men? Have you taken people through that whole process of non-Christian, someone in the world, all the way through conversion, maturity, becoming Christ-like, and then that person going on to make disciples of his own or her own? How have you fared with that, or do you feel like a fake? When I was somewhere around eight or nine years old, I was a Cub Scout. So a lot of you know what Cub Scouts are.

Cub Scouts are the level below being a Boy Scout. And you have these uniforms and caps and badges and all of that. And you have to go out and do various activities out in the wilderness. And you have to prove your mettle as a young boy, soon-to-be man. And one of the tasks that they had given us one year was to go to a particular lake and go catch fish, go learn how to catch fish, right? That's kind of a boy's dream to do that. So I went. I had my fishing rod, and we all were there fishing in various parts of the lake. And I noticed that my fellow Cub Scout members were throwing out their lines, and they'd wait for a little while, and sure enough, they'd catch a fish and another one and another one.

And I was out there, and I was trying my best, and I couldn't catch any fish. I tried and I tried, and after several hours after several hours, I think the microphone just went out, but hopefully you can still hear me. After several hours, I decided to give up. And instead, what I did was I walked along the shore of the lake. And as I walked along the shore of the lake, I saw there was a dead fish laying right on the shore. And so I took my hook, and I put it in the dead fish, and I put it on my pole, and I walked back to the rest of the scout members as if I had caught a fish.

Well, I was a fake, and I knew I was a fake. I didn't really catch that fish. It was a nasty old dead fish that had just died. And that evening came for people to cook their fish and prepare their fish. And I had enough sense in me to not want to cook that fish. Who knows what bacteria or viruses were in that?

That whole day until this very day, I feel guilty about that. I feel guilty that I was a fake fisherman.

Some of you may feel this evening a little bit like Peter, who said to Jesus, "Lord, we fished all night, caught nothing."

Some of you feel, if you're honest, like you're a fake, that you've tried and you've put out a lot of effort but have nothing to show for it. We need to be taught by Jesus. We need to be instructed by the Master himself where to fish, when to fish, how to fish in order to be successful.

I was speaking at a Bible school in Ohio a few months ago, May, and I had asked the question of the students there, "How many of you students," and these are from good congregations, congregations I'm sure that many of you are part of, I asked, "How many people in your particular congregations have come in from the outside?" So I don't mean the Mennonite shuffle, someone from a pilgrim group going to a nationwide group. I don't mean that. Someone from the outside truly coming in. And there were 31 people there. There were hundreds of members represented behind their congregations.

And now one student raised his or her hand. There was not one person in the last year who had come in. That's a sad statement. How is it in your particular congregation? If I were to ask you about your success as a fisherman or your congregation's success as a group of fishermen, how has it gone?

If you look at the people who are in your respective groups, are they growing in their walk? Are they discipling others? Are they overcoming sin? Are they prayer warriors? Are they actively sharing the gospel? Are they bringing in zeal and passion into the kingdom?

Or, as Dallas Willard has so elegantly said, has the great commission become the great omission?

There are, broadly speaking, four types of churches out there, and this is across all different kinds. I'm not specifically speaking about plain churches here. But there are many churches that are primarily educational, and you will hear great sermons, very nice speakers who are eloquent, and the dynamic feels a lot like a classroom. There's the teacher, and there's the students.

The second type are churches that are more social in nature, and often there's a lot of family and relatives there, and people do a lot of picnics and spend time with one another. A third type of church is one that is more defensive. The focus is on avoiding sin and holding ground against the world.

The perception that is had in these places is that the world is making an onslaught, and we have to somehow dig our heels in and resist the tide of sin. Another type of church focuses on community service, so things like working in soup kitchens or cleaning trash, things like that.

Those are all good things. We like education. We like being social. We like community service. We want to certainly be defensive. But I would contend that they have missed the far greater goal of discipleship. And in fact, most churches do very poorly in this.

If you pay attention in the New Testament, there's actually not a single place, not a single place in the whole New Testament where it says to plant churches. There's no command to go plant churches, which is interesting. However, there are many places where it says to make disciples. Matthew 28 is, of course, the most famous instance. There's a reason for that. Discipleship is the prerequisite. It is the essence of planting churches. If you can make disciples, churches will organically form and spring up as a result.

I think a lot of times we put the cart before the horse, and we talk about, "Oh, we want to go out and do church planting," before we've asked the question, "Have we actually made disciples? Are we doing it in our current places?" Because if we're not, church planting will not be successful either.

So the overall thesis that I have is that discipleship is the prerequisite to successful church planting. And if you don't know how to make disciples wherever you're at, you're not going to succeed at church planting.

We have had in Boston now five years of history. We have now six churches that we've been steadily growing, and I'm pleased at our progress. One is in Uganda. The remaining are in the United States. We have made plenty of mistakes along the way, too many to recount here. I have a lot of scar tissue on my body as a result of various mistakes that we've made.

There's a wonderful practice that they do in medicine. It's called M&M rounds. M&M stands for morbidity and mortality. So what you're supposed to do in the medical world is whenever there's been a serious error, whenever there's been a mistake made, you are supposed to stand up, actually in a room about this size, and you present your mistake in front of all of your fellow doctors. And that becomes an opportunity to say, "What did we learn from this, and how can we change our system such that this mistake never happens again?"

So maybe someone will say, "Oh, well, the dose was given was too high. We need to change the computer system so that it blocks a prescription that's higher than a particular dose," or, "We need to add an extra protocol," something like that.

It's wise to be reflective on our mistakes. It's only sensible. And when the stakes are high, we naturally think about doing things like this because we recognize the cost is so grievous when mistakes are made. The same thing is done in the flight industry, for example. If there's an airplane crash that happens, people don't just say, "Oh, too bad. Let's go on." They say, "Let's stop. Let's pause. Let's think. Let's understand what has happened." So what I want us to do for a moment is to say, "What's going wrong? What is happening wrong that we are not succeeding in this enterprise of discipleship, going from start to finish?"

As I think about some of our experiences and some of our failures, 90% of our mistakes this is in Boston. 90% of our mistakes, I'm convinced, have been a failure to proactively disciple. We need to systematically, proactively disciple people. Instead, what has happened whenever we've made mistakes is people have seen a problem, and they've said, "Oh, I hope it fixes itself."

Subconsciously is what they're saying. "Or I hope it goes away," or, "I don't want to talk about it. Maybe somebody else is going to deal with it," or, "Maybe they'll just figure it out on their own." This is a common problem. I'm an MK. I'm a missionary kid. I was raised the son of a missionary. So I have been to literally hundreds and hundreds of churches across the United States of all different denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist.

And I will say that the vast majority, 99% of these places, the expectation is that you come, and you kind of just figure it out, that somehow, some way, you'll learn things, but there's not a structured, intentional process to disciple.

We're going to look at one passage this morning. So if you have a Bible, please turn with me to Ephesians 4. I'll make allusion to other passages, but this is the only passage that I want us to carefully study together. This is Ephesians 4:11-13.

Ephesians 4:11-13. "And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."

So I want us to look particularly at verse 12. So he mentions these five offices, if you will, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors or shepherds, and teachers. And he says that they are given for a clear purpose, for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God.

I have a thesis that our terminology is bad. So a lot of times we go and we'll ask somebody, "Oh, tell me about your church," and we'll say, "Who's the ministry there? Who's in the ministry there?" Right? We've heard that. And normally what you're expecting to hear is, "We have this many deacons, and here are their names, and this many pastors," whatever you want to call it. But who is actually doing the work of the ministry in Ephesians 4? Saints. It's the saints. That's right. It's very clear that the role of the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and the teachers is to be equipping the saints to do the work of the ministry.

So if we were more biblical in our terminology and someone said, "Who are your ministries?" you would just list off all the people in your congregation. You'd say, "Well, there's this family over here. This is their ministry, and this is their family over here." That's a far more biblical. In fact, even in our language, I think we maybe in a subconscious way convince ourselves that the church leaders and leaders are important, but they're the ones who are supposed to be on the front line, and everyone else is supposed to be watching them, as opposed to what is a more biblical idea where the leaders are the ones who are the equippers. There's a very good Greek scholar who has actually proposed a far better term to use than pastor.

He's being serious in this. He says it should be the word coach. And the word coach doesn't have some of the same reverence and gravitas. But I actually like that word because we hear the word coach, and we all think, "Oh, yeah. A basketball coach is the person who's getting his players to play the game. He's not the one who's playing the game. He's helping his players to play the game."

And that's a much better analogy for what it is supposed to be from the New Testament perspective. So I think that some of the problem we have is that discipleship is not having enough because people don't really believe that they're the ministry. They're the ones who are supposed to be on the front lines.

I have a related fear which comes from my many, many years in the Protestant evangelical world. So in the Protestant evangelical world, which I know extremely well, there is a disease. There is a brokenness where people believe that it's basically a few things that you believe in your head and a couple of things that you do practically. But there's this set of head beliefs that you have, and if you have that, congratulations. You're a Christian.

In a sense, it can be a very weak form of Christianity that simply is content on, "Do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God? Do you believe that he died on the cross? Great. Congratulations. You're a Christian." I have a great fear that there's actually something that is similar in plain churches.

I sometimes call it checklist Christianity. And what do I mean by checklist Christianity? I mean that there's three basic things, and if you can check off these boxes, you're probably okay: non-resistance, divorce and remarriage, separation from the world. If you can check those boxes, you're probably one of us, and you're probably in a good place.

Now, I love all those three doctrines. I'm a strong advocate of all three. Don't get me wrong. But can it be that perhaps we have settled for a varying form of the checklist Christianity that has crippled the Protestant evangelical churches? Are we merely avoiding negatives? So are we just saying, "Okay. I'm going to avoid war. I'm going to avoid divorce and remarriage. I'm going to avoid immodesty"? Whew. I'm sad.

Imagine you met somebody, and you said, "What is your goal in life?" And they said, "My goal in life is not to fall down." You'd think like, "What a goal. Really? Your goal in life is not to fall down?" Now, if I met somebody who said, "My goal is to be an Olympic runner and to win the marathon," I would say, "Hey, that's a good goal." But if I met somebody who told me their goal in life is to not fall down, I would say, "That's a fairly pathetic goal."

Similarly, I wonder whether or not we have been content to avoid some negatives. Wow. I made it through. I avoided war. I avoided divorce. I avoided immodesty. Whew. I made it. I'm there. Congratulations. That is a sad, sad goal. It's not very compelling. Now, do I want people to fall down? Of course not. Do I want people to fall into those things? Of course not.

But there ought to be something far more captivating and compelling than merely avoiding these negatives. So again, I ask you the question, how are you doing with respect to being a fisherman, with respect to being an effective disciple? Now, we know from Jesus this is one of my favorite passages. It's from Luke 14 where Jesus says he talks about the cost of discipleship. And he says that at the very end of that passage, he says, "Unless someone gives up everything he has, he cannot be my disciple." Are you willing to be someone who gives up everything that you have?

We also want our discipline. We want our Christian life to be marked not merely by taking nice people and making them nicer. Right? It's a fine thing to be a nice person. Again, I want to be a nice person. But sometimes I think like, "Wow. Is this all that we're about?" as opposed to complete transformation, changing people from the inside out. I worry that sometimes we've created a construct of discipleship that is so easy, that's so comfortable, that requires so little sacrifice, that we will never be able to stand with Peter, who said, "Lord, we've left everything to follow you."

Do you remember that line where Jesus is talking to Peter, and Peter says, "We got no place to go, Jesus. We left it all. We burned our bridges. We have nowhere to go but to follow you"? I worry often that in our settings, there is a tremendous problem of comfort and ease and multi-generational businesses and easy lives such that very few people will be able to say with Peter, "Lord, we left it all to follow you."

Can you say that? Can you honestly say that? Could you say that you have left, as Jesus says in Luke 14:26, "If someone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple"?

I've spent quite a bit of time in the last year and a half or so studying models where people are transformed in profound, dramatic ways. I don't mean nice to nicer, but complete changes of personhood.

Unfortunately, I've had to spend more time than I would like studying secular examples of this. So there are organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous where they take people who are drunks and people who have very little ability to control themselves, and they rehabilitate them, and they make them sober and able to live a life that is law-abiding and harmonious with being able to have a family.

Most of my time, I've been studying models where they take ex-cons, ex-convicts, people who have spent decades in prison and have made these men upstanding citizens who can hold a job, who can care for their families, who obey the laws.

What if somebody were dropped into your church who was an ex-con, who was out of prison for doing grand theft or murder or something like that? How would you try to transform them? Generally speaking, I have been disappointed that secular organizations have taken on the role that the church is supposed to have played. The church is supposed to be the place where people come to be transformed.

That's very clear, I think, from the New Testament, that the church is a place where prostitutes and tax collectors and soldiers and all of these people who are far from the kingdom are completely changed. And yet, we have yielded that ground to secular organizations.

When they think about, "Oh, I need to be changed. I need to be transformed," their impulse isn't, "Oh, I need to go to the church to get my life in order." They think, "I got to call AA." Or, "I got to call one of these groups." That's a sad state. Jesus said in Luke 16:18 that the children of this world are wiser than the children of light.

I believe that this is an example where we need to stop and think, "What is going on? Why is there this proliferation of groups and success that has had such effectiveness there?" What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you four points in my remaining 15 or 20 minutes here of lessons that I believe synthesize passages from the Bible with good wisdom that we can see from the fruits of people that have been transforming people. And I will use this as an opportunity to challenge us. All right. The first point, embrace that discipleship is the main vocation of your life. Embrace that discipleship is the main vocation of your life. It is your main job in life.

It was Mark Twain who said that the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

If you don't know why you were born, I'm going to tell you. Here on August 24th, 2018, I will tell you that the reason that you were placed here on this earth is to bring glory to God by making disciples.

You were placed here on this earth for that purpose.

The command of Genesis 1 to fill the earth with people, Jesus has modified that in Matthew where he said that the purpose, the grand command that we have is to fill the earth with disciples. The first command of Genesis has changed into Jesus's last command. So you were placed here on this earth to make disciples. This is especially true of stay-at-home mothers.

Stay-at-home mothers, I'm convinced, are disciples in that they are given these young lives, these precious little lives, and have the calling to make them into hopefully great men and women of God. But this is true of all of us, every last person in this room. And I want that to be very clear in our minds.

People are incredibly broken. I mentioned that I was speaking at a Bible school in Ohio a few months ago, and I had a survey done where I asked just the men. So there were 31 students there, but there were 15 or 16 men. And I asked them to fill out an anonymous survey. How many of you have looked at pornography in the last year? How many have looked at pornography in the last three months? These are the cream of the crop, some of the best-playing young people that we have. 60% said yes to look at pornography in the last year. 43% said yes in the last three months.

Interestingly, when I asked questions later on, they said, "Nobody wants to talk about it. People aren't addressing this. This is festering in the darkness." Again, people are sort of sitting around hoping that somehow you'll figure it out and that somehow you'll live a sanctified life. But that's not working. It also doesn't simply work to tell people, "Try harder."

That's a pretty discouraging thing to tell somebody, "Oh, just try harder." What we need instead are tools and ideas and people to encourage us and structures and all kinds of helps to push us towards that goal. When we were first coming into plain settings, this was in 2005, we had moved. We physically sold our place and moved to live near a conservative Mennonite church. And the main goal that we had was to learn how to raise children. We had one at the time. We were expecting twins. So that would have been our second and third. Now we have six children. And as we went and asked people there and in many other places, we would say, "Tell us.

How do we raise children?" I would be so frustrated because one of the most common answers that I would get was, "Just mind the Lord. Just mind the Lord." And I thought, "I need more than that. You got to help me out here.

I sold my place. I moved here. I need a little bit more than just mind the Lord." Well-intentioned, but we need more. One of the things that they do in these groups, which I find just fascinating in these groups where they rehabilitate ex-convicts, is they completely reframe even the language that's used in these groups.

So they have a requirement at two of the centers that I've studied where you're not allowed to ask the question, "How are you?" Interesting. If you ask the question, "How are you?" that's considered a violation, and there's fairly severe penalties that they attach to that transgression. Instead, the question that you are allowed to ask is, "How is your crew?" It's no more, "How are you?" Instead, "How is your crew?" They turn a me problem into a we problem. They call it 200% accountability. And they have found consistently that these people who have been living their whole lives concerned only for themselves need to be rewired in a very profound way such that you have to even change the questions, even the way that you engage with one another.

Now, we are all wired as humans to flourish when we are relationally attached to small groups of people. This is, again, another reason why discipleship should be the main vocation of your life.

Second point, loving relationships are the channel of discipleship. So if I were to ask you, "Who are the people that have made a profound impact in your life?" if you think about from the time you were young till today, "Who are the people that have made a profound impact on your life?" Well, I won't ask you to do this, but in your mind, just consider, "Who are the two or three people that have truly shaped you the most?" Most likely, they would be people who have invested a lot of time, a lot of energy. They care for you. They've shown that they love you. They've initiated contact with you.

I've consistently noticed in my years that the people who make the greatest impact in the world are those who are the most caring, the most warm, the most outgoing. They're the most influential. That's true in businesses. That's true in churches. That's true in all of life.

So how are you faring with respect to fostering these relationships where if somebody were to ask you, "Who are the people that you are pouring into?" who are the people today that you can just rattle off and say like, "Yeah, these three, these four people, I am just pouring my life into?" They know it. I know it. There's a mutual relationship there.

There's a similar parallel in the world of parenting. So my six children, my oldest is 11, my youngest is two. So we think about this a lot. And I was at a homeschool conference not too long ago. It was in May. And at this homeschool conference, I was walking around in the booths, and there was a little book area there where I went and was flipping through some books with my children. And there was a little sign on the wall that I absolutely loved. And the sign said, "No app can substitute for your lap.

No app can substitute for your lap." I mentioned to you that I believe mothers have one of the highest callings as disciple-makers, understanding very well that this is one of the most powerful ways to nurture a child, to put them on your lap, to read to them for hours and hours and hours, and to build that connection, to look at people, to learn how to look at people in the eye. It says in Mark, when Jesus interacted with the rich young ruler, it says, "Jesus looked at him and loved him." How is that with us? Have we learned even how to look at people in the eyes? I'm always telling my children, my boys, "Look at people.

Let your eyes communicate warmth. Take initiative for face-to-face time so that you can have a key to people's heart." Point number three, grow in the ministry of admonishment. So this was a phrase that I coined a while back because I was trying to help a particular group that was struggling with some problems.

The ministry of admonishment is something that is very unnatural for almost all of us. So we were told when we were children, probably by our mothers, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." Right? And I think that's probably true when you're a small child. When you're a small child, I accept that as a rule. But that's not a good rule for adults.

In fact, I think what has happened is that many of us are still living like children. We are not willing to step out and say hard things when we see that there's a problem. Time and time and time again, this is one of the main themes of my life. I have seen situations in churches and even in businesses and small groups where there's a problem. There's a clear problem. People see it. Nobody says anything about it.

We have to grow in this ministry of admonishment. In fact, this is one of the dominant commands of the New Testament. This is not one small thing here or there. It's actually one of the dominant commands in the whole Bible. I'm going to read to you a handful of verses. This is just a sampling. I could stand here probably for half an hour on passages here. But one is from Leviticus 19:17. It says, "You shall not hate your brother in your heart." Reasonable. Don't hate your brother in your heart. So here's what you're supposed to do. "You shall surely rebuke your neighbor and not bear sin because of him." So it says, "Don't hate him.

Rebuke him." That's how you're supposed to deal with the problems in your heart that you have when you look at people that you don't get along with. And it says, "Not bear sin because of him." You incur sin if you don't go out and rebuke him.

I think of the example of Eli. Hopefully, many of us remember him who had these sons, these wicked sons. And you know what his problem was? He didn't say anything. He just let them go on messing around, sinning, defiling the temple, defiling or defiling the tent of meeting, defiling their bodies. He didn't say anything. And look what that did for him.

There are many verses in Proverbs and in the Psalms where it says that one of the great dividing lines between wise and the fools are that when you rebuke a wise person, they love you. If you rebuke a foolish person, they hate you. It's a powerful way to get rid if you want to get rid of fools in your life, start rebuking.

So it says in Proverbs 9:8, "Do not correct a scoffer unless he hates you. Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you." Proverbs 15:31, "The ear that hears the rebukes of life will abide among the wise. He who disdains instruction despises his own soul. But he who heeds rebuke gets understanding.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful." Proverbs 27:6. You know, David actually prays for rebuke. This is a great prayer. I actually think we should add this to our prayer list. This is Psalm 141:5, "Let the righteous strike me. It shall be a kindness. And let him rebuke me. It shall be as excellent oil. Let my head not refuse it." All right? I want you all to add this to your prayer list. God, please let somebody rebuke me. I want somebody, some righteous person to come rebuke me. Okay? This is a sign of maturity.

Those are just Old Testament passages. I haven't even started in the new. All right? So I'll just give you a few from the new. I have wow, I have too many here, and my time is running short. This is Paul in Acts 20, "Therefore, be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years, I did not cease to admonish each one with tears." Paul characterizes his ministry in Ephesus for three years as one of admonishing night and day.

First Corinthians 4, "I do not write these things to shame you, but to admonish you as my beloved children. And concerning you, my brethren," this is Romans 15, "I myself am also convinced that you yourself are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able also to admonish one another."

There are so many. Which one should I pick?

All right. I'll do this one. Colossians 3:16, "Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God." Do you ever think about that? You're supposed to admonish people with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. And you say, "Hey, we were singing this song, and I think this had relevance to you, brother or sister. Have you considered that impacting your life? Has anybody ever done that, rebuked you through a song?" The Bible says.

Wow. There's so many more. I'll do one more. Second Timothy 4:2, "Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction." Interestingly, he has reprove and rebuke twice, kind of doubled. It's similar read words there.

The sanctification, the health of any group depends on admonishment. If you don't have a good ministry of admonishment, guess what? You're going to stay stuck in the same rut again and again and again because admonishment is the mechanism. It is the way by which we can move forward in our sanctification. All right? Isn't this common sense when you think about it? And yet, how many of us play nice?

I'll read to you an example from one of these prison rehabilitation groups, these ex-con rehabilitation groups. So one particular place has an exercise. They call it the Games. And they have this meeting every single week where they require it's a group of 10 people to come to this setting that they call the Games.

So it says this. I'll read you just selected quotes from one of the people on the board of this organization. He says, "Anyone can challenge anyone. If you think your crew boss is a jerk, you give him a slip of paper inviting him to a game. He must show up. And when he's there, you can unload on him to your heart's content.

Anyone from the CEO on down can be invited to a game by anyone else. Residents become better at sharing feedback. What doesn't change is that this long-standing ritual makes the right behavior inevitable. People don't like to confront others, particularly scary and powerful others. Left to their own proclivities, their own tendencies, residents would do what anyone else would do, toggle from silence, holding our complaints inside, to violence, blowing up in our verbal tirade. So the CEO turns feedback into a ritual, calls at the Games, and lets the Games begin three times a week without fail." So three times a week, if you live in this center, you have to assemble, and you get to just practice admonishment.

And you get to give a car if somebody offended you, you get to give a car, "Hey, I need to talk to you." And imagine confronting somebody. Picture this. It's like prisoners, right? These are big people. And you have to get good at doing this three times a week. I think this is a great idea for us to do, to practice doing this. We're way too polite.

Plain people have many strengths. But often, we can be too polite, too quiet, too quiet, too nice. All right. Final point. Structure your whole church around relational discipleship. We don't want to be known as places where they just serve cookies and tea, and we sit around, and, "Oh, how are you? I'm very fine." "Yes, I'm fine too. Thank you."

I've been to groups, and I've just felt like I was pulling teeth to get good conversations going where you're really getting at the heart. And instead, it's this, "Let's talk about the weather. Let's talk about work." No. That's horrible.

We are offering we should be offering people not just the chance for lemonade and cookies and some pleasant conversation. We should be offering the opportunity to not merely be a nice person, but new creation.

There were a couple of years ago at KFW, I gave a talk in one of the main sessions on small group discipleship. And if you haven't listened to that, I hope you can go back and listen to that. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we do it in Boston, and then I'll close with a final story.

So every five to six weeks in Boston, what we do is we meet together. These are all the brothers. And we sit in a circle. And we have begun by asking the question, "What marrs the image of Christ in me?"

And that is a powerful question to ask, to have people meaningfully say, "What is wrong with you?" Now, first, you self-report, and that's how we do it. The group will probably agree with what you said, but they'll also probably add some more things to your list.

And then we break up into smaller groups during the non-big group weeks, and we work on those. And we make goals. And we have accountability. And we structure our lives so that we're addressing those problems. The problems range from lust to weight loss to struggling with worldly entertainment to anger at children to being socially awkward. It's a tremendous opportunity for progress and for development. In addition, we have a set of four questions that we use every single week for baseline accountability. If you don't have baseline accountability, I really don't know what you have with respect to discipleship. The four questions that we use every single week I get asked these every single week myself. Number one, have you been zealous in the word, prayer, and fasting?

Okay? It's a great question to ask. Have you been zealous in the word, prayer, and fasting? And I put the accent on fasting as well. It's very easy to go for weeks, months, years sometimes and not fast and have nobody ask about that.

Second question, have you spent quality time with your family? This is obvious if you're a married person. But even if you're a single person, have you been connecting with your siblings, with your parents? Third question, when is the last time that you shared the gospel or your testimony with a non-Christian?

You need to be asked that question. If you are not being pushed on that, again, I think it's easy to go weeks, months, years, and have nothing to show for it. Fourth question, since the last time we met, have you looked at anything pornographic, foolish, or immoral?

These are baseline questions that I believe all of us need to have asked of us. You can tweet them. I'm sure there's plenty of great adaptations. But if you don't have this going on where every single person is having a meaningful conversation and for us, it takes us a good in our group, it probably takes 30 or 40 minutes just to unpack that. And that's three of us, just how it's going every week. And I love it. I love that accountability time.

Beyond that, as I said, we move into higher goals about becoming more Christ-like, working on whatever our weaknesses are. And as I said, I don't want to be a place where we're merely just not sinning. Okay? That's just like what I said before, the person who says, "My life goal is to not fall down." Right? Boring. I don't want that goal.

I want a higher goal. Now, I don't want to fall. I don't want to sin. But I want to my goal is to subdue the earth and to fill it with disciples. That's my goal. And I am bent. I'm absolutely bent. I wake up every day, and I go to bed at night thinking about that question.

It fuels me. And I want us to be a sacrificial group of people that is able to stand with Peter and say, "Honestly, truly, Lord, we left everything to follow you. Peer pressure. We left jobs. We left homes. We left family relationships to follow you, Jesus."

I'm going to close by reading a short excerpt from a story. It's a true story. It happened in 2009. This happened in Somalia. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Kenya and spend some time there with some Muslim converts. It was an incredible experience for me. And this true story is about a man whose name is Musa.

Musa lived in Somalia. And he was married to a woman named Halima. And he had three boys, Omar, who was 12 years old, Ali, who was 11, and Salat, whose name was who's 7 years old. And Musa had become a follower of Jesus.

And he was serving God nobly over the years. And of course, in Somalia, you can't have big church structures. They have to meet in homes. And they have to meet in a quasi-underground manner. And Musa's practice was to go and interact with the villagers regularly. And he would go and engage in small groups of people. And he would have these conversations hoping that he would see someone who would take an interest in the gospel.

Well, he noticed that there was a woman who would come regularly to these groups where he was sharing, having these Jesus talks. And like most Somali women, her face and her head was largely covered, so very reserved. But he knew that she was married to a leader in an organization called Al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab, many of you know, is a very powerful Islamic terrorist organization in Somalia.

Musa told his friend Ahmed that his prayer is that he would have the opportunity to lead her to Christ. And Ahmed said, "Musa, you're my friend. I love you, man. I honor you. But you are playing with fire. Do you know who her husband is?"

Musa's answer was, "I know that she's married to a leader of Al-Shabaab. But I also know that God's word teaches us to preach to everyone, to all creatures, to all nations, including ours. And I don't see any exceptions."

Ahmed said, "But you could be in danger. You could put your family in danger." Musa's answer was, "If nobody shares Christ with her, then her life is in danger. Her life is in eternal danger and more danger than us. We are not responsible for outcomes, Ahmed. We are responsible for sharing."

That night, Musa and his wife, Halima, prayed for that Muslim woman. Over the course of some time, Musa struck up conversations. And Musa asked her. He says, "I see that you have an interest. You seem to be stepping out. You seem to be inquisitive. Your eyes are listening." And she nodded. And Musa said, "I have a gift for you." And so he slipped her a Bible out of a bag. She whispered, "Thank you," and left quickly. About a week later, she told Musa that she had found a place in her heart for the Lord. And she said, "I am committed to follow him, not Allah."

And so Musa was very excited, obviously, beamed with pride at what God was doing in her life. However, the woman stopped coming to these groups where he would share. Finally, after some time, the woman did come. But this time, her head was bowed.

Her eyes were not quite as curious because the left side of her face was all purple with a bruise. Her husband had noticed a change in her and asked why. He figured out about her conversion, and he beat her.

A few days later, a group of Muslim men who worked for the woman's husband showed up at Musa's house and screamed at him for converting the woman. They demanded that Musa tell them where an influential Christian leader by the name of Mubwera could be found. But Musa had never heard of this person, Mubwera. He said, "We'll give you two days to tell us where he is.

Have Mubwera here when we return or else." When the men left, Musa's wife insisted that he leave Somalia. So he traveled, as many Somalians do, to a refugee camp in Kenya. Two days later, when Halima was making lunch for herself and the boys, the henchmen arrived at Musa's home. When they discovered that he had left, they grabbed Omar and Ali. You remember, those were two of his boys. They tied their feet together and blindfolded them. Somehow, the wife and Salat, the youngest boy, escaped and reconnected with Musa in Kenya.

But the two older sons would pay the price for what their killers called, "The sins of their father." They were beheaded.

When many people today want to play it safe to avoid suffering, when many people today want to have an easy life with a nice business, I think of verses like Philippians 1:29 where it says, "For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ, you should believe but also suffer for his sake."