What Does Food and Fun Have to Do with Discipling?

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Nov 132012
 

Finding a Friend while Hiking!

My second story is about Yoshie – a Japanese designer who loves the outdoors. I met Yoshie when I went hiking on Manly beach. We were both lost and trying to find our way back to the main road from the bush. Since finding each other when we were lost hiking, we have been texting each other about going hiking in other places in Sydney, but busyness in our lives had kept this from happening. Finally we re-connected when I invited her to my friends’ Halloween party. We left early to go search for food. In the midst of our conversation about culture, boys, work, and studies, the story of God and His Community came up. Yoshie was exposed to Christianity when she was in the States for few years, but some of her questions never got answered such as: “I don’t mind going to my friends’ church, but why don’t they come to my events? Why do Christians love me, but hate each other? Can I get to know God without going to a normal church?”

Trang's friend Yoshie enjoying food.

That night God taught me the lesson that everyone is curious about God (could be other Gods) and community.  Our job is to listen and ask right questions. How do we do it? We have the joy of walking with God everyday and asking Him what He is doing. I can’t wait to start forming a community with Yoshie around food, hiking, and beach volleyball. In the midst of working with God, He wants us to have tons of fun as well. This is my story of how the Kingdom of Heaven is happening wherever we go for fun and relaxation.

On the other hand, postgraduate school has been pretty intense. One of the requirements of my studies is that we have to do group projects with another person. I was praying for a good partner who would be hungry to learn and also have fun. God answered my prayer by sending me Adriana – a girl from New Zealand with Brazilian roots. Adriana has an amazing work ethic, and is very intelligent. We have pushed each other to achieve high quality work in school. After working on 15 projects together, we haven’t killed each other. This is a good sign. We have learned how work together and trust each other. In the midst of school projects, we take time to be each other’s therapist, and we have learned about each other’s family, culture, dreams and beliefs. I started sharing with Adriana about Jesus and what it means to be a Jesus follower. Through the trust that we have built over the last eight months, Adriana has opened up to me and shared with me her desire to seek out His Kingdom. I cannot wait to walk with Adriana through this journey next year over good food, wine, gardening, and business.

My last story is how the Kingdom of God is happening at work. Neil is my industry mentor for my consulting project at an organic certified business here in Australia. One day in the middle of our normal discussion about work the story of Jesus just came up. I found out that he has been curious about God for a long time, but disillusioned with Christianity because of how other Christians have failed him. To be honest, I am always nervous before having a meeting with Neil, because he is so intelligent and successful in the field of psychology and business while I am just a kid with a burning heart filled with God’s love. However, I could not keep myself from sharing with Neil about the love of Jesus, and telling him my story of what Jesus has done in my life. My hope is that God will reveal Himself to Neil in the language that he will understand.

Through this relationship I have learned that Jesus is not a math problem. Jesus is like a poem. A poem can be simply words every time we read it, but the layers of its meaning are only revealed when we spend the time meditating on it, and experiencing it. Poems speak not only to the head but also the heart. The only way we can experience the poem is to read it together through fellowship. This is how it is with Jesus. To really know Jesus, we need to experience Him through an encounter we have with Him personally and through His community. It is not enough to just know information about Him.

Yummy quiche that me and my posse of friends cooked up!

I hope that my four chosen short stories will encourage you to see how simple church, fellowship, and discipling can be. If you start looking to build relationships with not-yet-Jesus followers in the community that God has already put you in, you will be amazed at how many opportunities you will find. Relationship is the starting point of your journey with God and His community, because none of us live in a silo. Food is a great stimulus for relationships to flourish. If you don’t like food, you can find other things that you have in common with the people in your circles. When trust is established and when the Holy Spirit urges you to share; you need to obey and respond. “…To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.” (1Samuel 15: 22)

This is when the beauty of partnership with God shines through. I cannot put it in words how wonderful this feeling is when it happens. Start with simple acts of love, then practice listening, responding to what you hear, and praying together for and with your friends.  Pray simple prayers. Pray like you would talk to your father, mother, brother or sister. Please don’t use jargon and church language, because it doesn’t make any sense to your friends. Pray with the language of the heart which will powerfully connect with the spirit.

Delicious!

Working along side Jesus is definitely fun and rewarding, but you need to pay attention and do it intentionally. You need planning to be able to be flexible and spontaneous when the opportunity comes.

I cannot wait to hear your stories. Please share them with us when you can.

Blessings,

Trang

Application Questions to Practice:

Have you ever asked yourselves when would be the right time to become a spiritual parent? How long should we walk with Jesus before we reach out to others and disciple them? I hope that my experience can encourage you to go and search for the answer.

Discipling As a Lifestyle of Intentional Relationship

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Nov 062012
 

It is an honor and privilege to have our spiritual daughter Trang share with you some of her stories of her journey into a relationship with Jesus and His Kingdom, and how she is experiencing the joy of inviting some of her friends to meet Jesus and discipling them in the Jesus Way of living. I hope these stories encourage you that inviting and apprenticing our friends into the Kingdom is not just for the ‘super Christians’, the ‘jedi mentors’, those that have been Jesus followers for umpteen years. or those who are the ‘elite or wild, crazy evangelist types’, but the wonderful privilege and call of every Jesus follower.

As you will hear in Trang’s story, the journey of obeying God through intentional relationships is the slow way to disciple, but we believe is the most lasting and fruitful way! It is attainable for all if we simply listen to what Jesus is saying and obey. The Trinity is passionate about relationship, and placed this longing to belong, and a heart cry for community in the hearts of people of every tribe, stripe, and type. It may take a little re-organizing of our lives and priorities to simply be present where we work, play, live, and study! If you and I so choose, we will trip into some awesome adventures in seeing our friends where we live, work, study, and play trip into the Kingdom! We will by accident, yet on purpose, end up planting simple Jesus communities all over.

I hope to visit Trang and her simple Jesus community, and posse of friends who are on a journey to know Jesus and His Kingdom in the next year. Any of you out there want to join me? Let me know. You would be more than welcome to go see and learn together how Jesus is forming His Mosaic around the world.

Tim Schultz

 

Dear friends,

Trang doing what she loves!

As a daughter and a sister in Christ, I’d love to share with you my journey with Jesus, Tim & Esther (my spiritual parents), and my movable church. There are two parts to my story. The first one is how my discipleship journey began, and how God has trained me for the last ten years to be ready for His kingdom. The second part is the how the harvest is happening in Sydney after ten hard years of training.

I will start with my background first. I wasn’t born and raised in a Christian home in Vietnam, but I believe that God has known me from the beginning. He “created my inmost being”, and He “knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalms 139: 13).  He has given me an earthly family along with a love for cooking food, culture, and business. My search for the meaning of life started when I was 18. but it was not until I turned 19 that I got to know Jesus personally by living with Tim, Esther and through the Faith Vineyard community in Calgary, Canada

For ten years, Tim and Esther have been faithfully and gracefully coaching me, and walking with me through the process of how to create and build healthy community. For the first four years of living with them, I watched, copied, and asked questions about Jesus, the Kingdom, and how to form a Jesus community with my friends. Then I practiced by inviting my international non-Christian friends at school to come to our house for dinner and talk about Jesus and His Kingdom on Friday nights; as well as hanging out and having fellowship with them in their community. Some of my friends entered the Kingdom during this time in Calgary.

Then I went back to Asia working in different business projects in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It was a desert time with no Christian community around me, but I learned to get closer and closer to God because He was the only Christian community that I had. Getting on the phone and praying with Tim and Esther was not the same as praying face to face with them, but I survived and got through the desert. I started simple communities around me with non-believer friends wherever I was in Asia. Through that time God gave me confirmations about my gift: the gift of connecting with people regardless of their culture, ethnicity, education, language and social status. He also blessed me with the skills and knowledge in business in different industries.

At the beginning of this year, I decided to do a Masters of Marketing in Sydney with the intention of connecting with the business network here to advance in my career, as well as partnering with Jesus in His Kingdom work. I did not know where my journey with God would lead me this year, but I knew that we would have a fun adventure together working and connecting with the people He placed in my life here in Australia.

Trang with one of her new friends!

Here is a picture of where I was in February of this year to set the stage for the rest of my story. I knew nobody in Sydney. It took me two weeks to see around 30 houses to find a place to live. I was the only international in the marketing post-graduate program. I had no friends except some connections that Tim gave me in the Cabramatta Vineyard who live on the other end of the city. I had no business contacts or connections, but I had God with me and that gave me so much confidence to start my adventure “… surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Now I want to paint a picture of what is happening in my life right presently. I have many friends who come from different backgrounds, countries, ethnic groups, age groups, social statuses, and languages in all the situations that God has plugged me into. I have gained a good reputation among the professors at school as well as in some of the business communities in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. There are at least three simple churches (of two or three) that I am involved in every week. Yet I know that I am not the most successful person or on top of the world, but I have to say that by responding to God and working closely with Him everyday, I do mean everyday, God has given me a part of His harvest here to work on.

Here are some of the stories of how God has given me opportunities and how I have responded to Him. There are four places that I am in at the moment: studying (the university), working (business community), having fun (what I do for pleasure), and living (where I physically live in 2 places): my house and my neighbourhood).

Trang and Susan cooking together!

Let me start with where I live first. This is a story about Susan and her friends. Susan and I first met when she came to rent out my room in my old place. We had our first conversations about the challenges of living as a foreigner in this country, and also chatted about cooking and baking. I was looking for friends as well, so I thought we could encourage each other and be friends. We started our friendship around a baking and cooking lesson. Susan was amazed how easy it was to bake.  As well we would sometimes go out for supper together. After the first few weeks of hanging out, she asked me if I could be her older sister here. I was thrilled. Then one day God told me to talk to Susan about Jesus. I was excited and a bit reluctant at the same time, but God had a plan. Susan had heard about God from Morman, and she had been confused for a year about God, her culture, her previous beliefs, but she could not deny that Jesus was real. This is what Susan said when I asked her if we could start our discussion about God every Friday night:  “Trang, I knew that God would take care of me. Whenever I have questions He would send someone to me and you are that person now. Thank you.” I cried that night. I cried because God had done everything, and all I had to do was to obey by becoming a friend with Susan, listening to her story, and asking her questions. Our friendship has been growing since that point. Susan has taught me about her culture, her country’s history, Chinese ancient poems, and shared her passion to reach out to and care for other Chinese girls. Susan is still searching, but I believe she is already in the Kingdom and starting to work in the harvest without realizing it yet.

Susan inviting her friends into community.

Before I send this story out to you, there is another amazing story about Susan that I cannot wait to share. On her own initiative she has invited other girls that she knows to come cook and find out about Jesus. Yesterday I met Charlie for the first time. Can you imagine how many people Susan could reach out too? That’s all happened by just a simple act of being Susan’s friend.

I have more stories of what God is doing in Sydney to share with you in the next blog.

Trang – part of our Mosaic family in Sydney, Australia

Why Apprenticing is the Heart of the Matter: Part 1

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Oct 052012
 

Do as I do!

Over the years I have had the privilege of traveling around the world to coach leaders and their communities and teams. Again and again in every culture and context,  I have heard leaders lament over the dearth or lack of people who are willing to lead. Even Jesus said in Luke 10:2, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.”  Why is it so hard to find leaders? Whether in the business world or the church, we can get sidetracked by the discussions and debates around what are the right models,  programs, structures, systems, leadership styles and philosophy, and miss the heart of the matter.  These are important discussions, but they need to be preceded by addressing a couple more important questions: Why do we exist, and how do we pass on our way of life to others who pass it on to others?

For example,  Jesus makes it very clear in Matthew 28:19 that the raison d’etre for His followers is “Go and make disciples or apprentices of all nations.” He didn’t say go plant churches, or run meetings, or simply make converts. These things simply are the by-products of apprenticing people in the Jesus way of life that they then go and pass on to others. As I often say, leading people to Jesus is like having fun making babies. The long haul work is the journey of nurturing babies and investing in them till they reach  maturity. The question we need to be asking is: How are we doing at making apprentices that go and make apprentices?  I will be using different words such as mentoring, discipling, coaching, and apprenticing interchangeably to describe the same one on one journey of passing on a way of life.

As a pastor for many years, I put an inordinate amount of my time and energy towards planning a Sunday meeting, running the organization of church, and crafting 52 life-changing messages a year that I hoped would produce mature apprentices of Jesus who would go make other apprentices.  I kept doing the same old thing getting the same result, which some would call insanity! Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in and enjoy preaching and teaching as one small part of the continuum of  how we apprentice people in community. What has changed in me is that I believe that the deepest forms of transformation happen through an intentional relationship of one-on-one mentoring, where we can dig in on the core growth issues as we live out life together. The Sunday message or speaking to groups at conferences is no longer the locomotive driving how I disciple, but simply one of the train cars.

Many of us leaders need to go through a radical overhaul to re-calibrate and shift our priorities. Our priorities are revealed by where the majority of our time, energy, and money is going in a typical week. Thus my primary metric or measuring stick for evaluating my success as a leader is no longer how good of a preach or talk I gave to a crowd, though this is one of my gifts which I still value, but rather how many hours of a week I have invested in one-on-one intentional apprenticing relationships, to pass on the Jesus way of living.

Watch and learn.

My conclusion after years of coaching, leading, and pastoring is the following transferable, ageless, cross-cultural, and transcendent principle: Healthy organisms or organizations grow when they develop a culture of apprenticing where a way of life or the genetic code/DNA is passed on. Where there is a healthy mentoring culture there will be a multiplication of leaders who have caught the vision, values, and practices of that church or business, and are passing it on to the next generation of leaders. To develop an apprenticing culture will require a re-prioritizing of where we put our time, energy, and money! The seduction of rapid numerical growth, or the insecurity around being small and looking for the panacea to fast track growth, so quickly de-rails us from apprenticing. This initially is the slow way and is time intensive, but paves the way for multiplication that lasts.

In my next blog I will address the questions: Who do we apprentice? What is apprenticing? How do we apprentice people in our churches, businesses and communities?