Discipleship

Ecclesiology

I’m not a big fan of big words, but some really do matter. Ecclesiology is one of them.

Over the past couple of years I have been engaged in conversations with a lot of pastors who seem to be saying the same thing.  Over and over I hear, “The most important question for me is ecclesiology.”  Pastors are consistently asking how churches should gather.  It’s an important question to ask.  If our gatherings produce little fruit, is the problem the message or the structure.

Thrive is built on the Jesus Model.  Jesus gathered twelve people together to engage the Way of Jesus.  He made it very simple but highly effective.  He assumed that we needed a support group to do life together, to practice love together, to pray together, and to wrestle through our obstacles together.  He assumed we needed people who had developed a high level of trust together.

This type of gathering is not traditional.  It’s not a small group that gathers together to study a book.  It’s a highly intentional way of gathering.  If your church is looking for a very different, but effective way of gathering, consider the Jesus Model.  And we can help you with that.

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Skye Jethani On Discipleship

Alan (Hirsch): “Are you hopeful that we can recover an authentic discipleship ethos in the church given our enculturation by consumerism?”

Skye: Yes, I am hopeful. I’m an apprentice of Jesus Christ—hope is what we bank on. As I outline in The Divine Commodity, I believe the church in North America is dreadfully imprisoned by the worldview of consumerism. But as the church continues to lose its privileged position in our culture, as outlined in the much talked about Newsweek article last week, I believe an opportunity for renewal is occurring. But this renewal will not come through massive upheaval or aggressive church initiative within the political, cultural, or commercial spheres. I believe the recovery of authentic discipleship will happen life-to-life, relationship-to-relationship, disciple-to-disciple.

From Shapevine

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Change Vs. Growth

I meet a lot of people who are so tired of change.  I get that.

Following Jesus is a journey.  It means stepping out of oppression into some form and engaging a more wholistic life.  And initially that feels like change.  But often what I see happen is that people are resistant to growth because they assume it just means more change. They confuse growth with change.

Change is shifting from one thing to another.  It’s the idea that if we just change this or that, life will be different.  And it is different, but it isn’t necessarily better.  We change outfits, or diets, or even churches expecting a different outcome.  The subtle, embedded promise in change is that life will get better.

But often what happens when we institute change on our own, we end up with something different but no better.  We’ve changed the scenery, the information, the process, or even the paradigm, but our lives aren’t really different.  Once the aroma of new wears off, we realize that it’s actually more of the same with different lipstick.

And what often happens is that we learn to assume change is just more of the same.  So we eventually resist it because we’ve been there, done that.  We’re tired of trying…and failing at change. And so when we stumble upon the footsteps of Jesus, we’re so tried of change that we miss the possibility that is before us.

The call to follow Jesus offers us something much different than simply change.  It offers us growth.  And at first this growth looks like change but it is radically different.  We didn’t institute it.  We just surrendered to it.  We yielded to the work of God in our lives and watched it happen, which at first doesn’t make sense.  How can it be this simple.  We’re supposed to earn it, aren’t we?

Change is shifting stuff on the outside.  Growth is shifting stuff on the inside.  It’s becoming more of what we are already designed to be.  And that looks like Jesus. Change requires our own energies.  Growth requires the work of Holy Spirit moving and changing us from the inside.

In many ways growth requires actually doing less than change.  Change requires a lot of activity.  Growth requires very little activity. It only requires the act of trust.  Doing less then is actually doing more.  And the cool part is that we get to be the space where growth happens.  We get to participate in something wildly good.

If you are interested in change that leads to growth, we’d like to invite you to consider following Jesus. Contact us today to get a free digital copy of our leadership manual.

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Jonathan Brink is the Managing Director of Thrive Ministries. He is all about change that leads to growth.

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Three Years

One of the things that people always ask about Thrive is, “Why does it have to be three years?”  It’s a great question.

The truth is that no group makes a commitment for three years.  We broke up the process to engage a commitment around quarters, or eleven weeks on with a two week break in between.  Each quarter is a covenant period that the group commits to.  And this process helps create a rhythm that groups get used to following.

So why the three years?  When we originally started we had no idea of how long we would meet.  But we knew what we were doing was good.  We were discovering healing in ways that were astounding.  We were learning what it meant to trust.  We were learning what authentic community and communitas looked like.  We were in essence finding our tribe, and it was good.

In the traditional experience the door to community was revolving.  We were used to seeing people come in and out with little to no expectation.  But in our tribe that intentionality and time created a space to work through what it meant to trust, to resolve conflict without abandoning the relationships, to work through our own issues without running away from our obstacles.  We were in essence engaging life together.

And as we began to explore God’s mission, we discovered that God was interested in restoring relationships.  This was the mission.  And as we began listening to what Jesus did, something became clear.  Jesus simply gathered a group of rag tag people together to practice engaging God’s mission together.  And he did it for three years.

What was interesting is that the first iteration of the original group lasted four years.  But at the three year mark something happened.  We began to get restless.  Something wasn’t working.  We wrestled through what it meant to break up and go out to make more disciples.  And the decision was tough.  What would it mean to leave our tribe and go create new ones.  And in the end we realized that what Jesus had created was a space to work towards healing but also required going out and helping other do the same.

What we discovered was that the stepping out to create new group who would practice following Jesus by engaging His mission was the Great Commission.  And the process was continually recyclical.  There would always be people looking for healing, wrestling with love and trust, and longing for community.  To go and make more disciples was the natural next step.

But we weren’t going out into thin air.  We now knew what we were doing because we had practiced it for more than three years.  Was it scary?  Sure.  But it was worth it.

If your church is wrestling with the “make disciples” part, we can help.  Contact us today to get a free digital copy of our leadership manual.

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What Is Missional Discipleship?

When Jesus said, “Come Follow Me,” it must have sent a chill through the spines of those who were hearing these words.  What would it really mean to follow this man who seemed to capture our attention in a way that was unlike anything we had ever seen.  He healed people, disrupted people, changed people, and angered people.  He refused to be boxed in.  He talked about a Kingdom that was within us but not of this world.  His invitation stirred our hearts, bringing out a longing we didn’t know existed. It was a longing for wholeness, for life, for something that spoke of love and trust and what it meant to be whole.

What would it really mean to follow?  What would it mean to lay down our life only to find a new one?  What would it mean to love the loveless, our enemy, our broken neighbor?  What would it mean to step out of our comfort zones and protective shells to discover a life filled with risk and love, joy and suffering, peace and suffering, courage and trust, and so much more?  What would it mean to participate with him in the restoration of our hearts, our neighbors and the world around us?

These are the questions that we, at Thrive, have been asking for more than a decade.  What would it really look like to follow Jesus in today’s world?  What we’ve come up with is what we call missional discipleship.  It simply means to follow Jesus into God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation in the context of a tribe.

This process of following is not a one-time event, but a new life to live into.  Some call it a journey because we’re always stepping into the unknown.  It constantly leads us out of an old way of living and into something entirely new, something whole, something restorative.  And this process calls us to trust so we can engage love.  By following Jesus, we can discover our true Father, who then gives us His Spirit to live a life like Jesus.

But where do we begin?  We begin with a willingness to participate in God’s mission, to follow Jesus.  We’re not just trying to get to heaven, but to help reveal His kingdom here on earth.  We’re not just going to church. We’re engaging love and trust as entirely new practices.  We’re learning to engage our hearts, our stories, our wounds, and our wholeness.  We’re learning what it means to follow His leading because it leads to a life worth living.

And we don’t attempt this journey alone.  Jesus offered an approach that is deeply effective.  He gathered together a tribe of people who were willing to engage God’s mission together.  He brought them into a liminal space of trust, unlike anything they had ever experienced before so that together they could discover a life they were always meant to live, one that looks like Jesus.  And the value of this tribe was having people deeply committed to each other’s restoration.  It was deeper than just an authentic community.  It was a family.  It felt good because we had people we could trust.

This mission was all about restoring relationships.  These included our relationship with God the Father, and our own self.  We’re learning what it means to get honest with reality, and engage forgiveness on a regular basis.  We’re learning what it means to redeem our story and leave our junk at the cross.  We’re learning what it means to be love so we can love.  And this restoration led us to begin restoring the relationships around us.  It could include the person on the other side of the world, but likely began with our neighbor.  It meant stepping into a third way that was restorative, and had a distinct ring of the divine.

Central to the mission was understanding God’s story in Scripture.  We’re not just practicing random acts of kingdom, but aligning ourselves with an entirely new Kingdom.  We’re not just selecting principles for living. We’re engaging an epic story of a God bent on restoring humanity, a story that answers the fundamental questions of what it means to be a people created in the image of God.  We’re not just following some guy, but the very image of God that reveals who we are designed to be.  We just want to participate in what He’s already doing.

We’re asking these questions because we believe there is a group of people who really do want to follow Jesus in today’s world.  And we’ve been documenting a potential path for you to engage what that means.  It’s not THE path, but A path.  We’ve created a specific way of operating in an intentional community.  We’ve developed practices to engage, teachings to read through, leadership materials to learn from, and exercises to help engage this mission.

So consider this your invitation to follow.  We’re looking for leaders who would like to create their own Tribe, who are willing to take the risk to follow Jesus in today’s world.  If you think this is you, contact us.  Let us know.  If you would like to know more about what we do, don’t hesitate to ask.  We’re here to help.  We’d like to offer you a free digital copy of our Leadership Manual.  Just send us an email.

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