pat loughery

In my church movement, we don’t have much authority structure over us at the regional or national level, but we do highly value relationships. So in my area we have 15 or so pastors who gather once a month to have a killer breakfast, then we talk about what’s happening in our lives and churches, pretty informal stuff. Today was a good time.

After the meeting I had lunch 3 buddies who are pastors. We talked about the issue of discipleship, and an interesting comment come out. It seems that in today’s church environment, we trust the Holy Spirit for the moment of regeneration, redemption, salvation, conversion – pick your favorite lens. We realize that our own human intervention is (hopefully) helpful in the process of evangelism, but that the HS actually does the heart-change.

And yet when we think of discipleship, we tend to think much more in terms of what we, as individuals, are doing in order to become more Christlike. Or we think and talk of what we, as pastors, can do to fan into flame a person’s own desire to be a disciple of Jesus. But somehow, generally, evangelism is work of the Spirit, and discipleship is work of humans.

Inherently we realize that it’s all God’s work, we certainly approach the processes differently.

I thought it was interesting to chew on, at least.