PULL UP A CHAIR: Stories on Passion

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the fourth week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

Jeff VanderLaan (no relation to Ray, for those of you familiar with my teachings) is the Vice President for Impact Campus Ministries and has become one of my closest friends. He has served with ICM for over 24 years and knows our organization and its DNA intimately. Jeff was discipled by ICM's founder, Dean, and knows these principles in ways that few of us do. I could think of nobody else to close out this year's blog posts then by having Jeff share his perspective on PASSION. 

“Will you pursue God with all your heart, mind, body, and soul?” 

It was the fall of 1994, and I was a senior at Michigan State University attending His House Christian Fellowship when Dean Trune asked me that one question. That question was the whole application and interview process to join the first Impact Campus Ministries campus ministry plant in Albany, NY. There was no written application, no reference checks, and no skills assessment. All Dean cared about was if I would have a passion for God.

For the next 15 years, while Dean was my boss, the question about my passion for God led every conversation and was included on every report I had to turn in to the organization. Often my answer would start with ministry success stories. Dean would politely listen, then re-ask about my personal relationship with Jesus.

Dean knew what I needed to learn. Ministry is hard. It would be easy to lose focus on God and get distracted by the ministry. It was not that Dean was anti-ministry. He just knew we cannot control “making an impact” or “fruitful ministries,” but we have absolute control over developing intimacy with God. He would say, “We must not allow ‘ministry for God’ to crowd ‘intimacy with God’ out of our lives.”

Dean knew that passion for God would naturally lead to ministry. Actually, it would lead to a ministry where you would willfully do more than is required to do. It would lead to a ministry driven by more than enthusiasm or excitement when successful. Your passion for God would lead to an ambition that is materialized into action through the good times and the bad.

Dean was right. We called the first year the year of tears. It was hard. Between Satan opposing the expansion of God’s kingdom to the University at Albany through campus ministry, and God’s appreciation of my choosing to serve him, I discovered the need for God to refine me to be a more usable vessel. It was never clear if the blow was from Satan trying to stop me or God trying to shape me, but I was sure it hurt. Yet passion for God gave us the strength to continue into year two and eventually through year 15.

Through the years, Impact’s value of passion for God has continued to teach me so many things.

• When I focus on ministry, people will be drawn to ministry. Focus I on God, people will be drawn to God.
• When I focus on ministry, I often take the credit. When I focus on God, I often give him the credit.
• When I focus on ministry, my weaknesses limit the ministry. When I focus on God, his strength empowers the ministry.
• When I focus on ministry, I often choose the direction taken. When focusing on God, he directs the ministry.

There was so much learned from such a simple concept.

Impact Campus Ministries values passion for God. May this value continues to underlie everything we do and continue expanding our understanding of what it can teach us in the future.

PULL UP A CHAIR: Stories on Church

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the fourth week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

For the last two years, Alex VanDuyne has served as ICM's team leader at the University of South Florida in Tampa, FL. Alex, Emily, and Samuel have demonstrated a very thoughtful presence amongst the students at USF and have been very intentional about their engagement with the local church and its ability to help them minister to young adults. I knew that with Alex's passion for teaching and communication, he would be a great staff person to ask to share his thoughts about our value of church. 

I love the theology of the church universal. Almost everyone believes in it, though some people talk about it more than others. It means that the Church—the “big C” Church—is the communion of all Christians, across every country, across all time. We are an incredibly tiny part of a great chorus of praise to God that involves every Christian who has ever lived and ever will. But part of the beauty of this idea is that it’s so big and abstract and that it does not actually require anything of us. It’s just a certainty. It’s clean and beautiful like looking at the earth from space.

For our purposes, for the practical now, the “real church” is the local church. This is where the action happens. Our local churches are the hands and feet of God. The local church is much different. It gets messy and dirty and complicated. Churches are inherently messy because they’re made of inherently messy people. Sometimes we act like messy churches are a sign that the gospel isn’t working, but messy churches are like hospitals with sick people—neither surprising nor something to condemn, but entirely natural.

Churches are where God lives. We think of the Holy Spirit as living inside each believer, but the primary metaphor for the Holy Spirit dwelling within us is not as individual believers, but as believers assembled. We like to say, “We don’t go to church, we are the church.” This is partially correct. It is better to say that we become the church when we gather as the church.

The local church is to the universal church what a brick is to a wall. It’s what a cell is to a complex organism. It’s what a nutrient is to a meal. The local church is the least common denominator, the base unit that makes up the greater Church. And this is simply the way it is. There’s no alternative. No competing design. God has ordained to work primarily through local churches. And thus so do we as Christians. And thus so does Impact.

There’s no biblical precedent for a solo believer. Neither the Bible nor church history suggests that a Christian should be a Christian apart from membership in a local gathering. Are there exceptions? Probably. Thought experiments show it to be possible. Life certainly yields people on the outskirts who cannot leave their home or who live in countries with few believers. But these people are the exception, not the rule, and certainly not the ideal.

Impact values church. We value church because church is the native language of God. Church is primarily how he speaks and acts. We cannot preach “Pursue” without calling people to do so in the context of a local body of believers when possible. And it’s nearly always possible. For our staff to say we are pursuing God if we are not invested in a local church is problematic at best. Students, more than anyone, require the stability of a healthy, multigenerational church if they are to nurture a serious and significant relationship with Jesus. Impact doesn’t try to supplant this because it’s fundamentally impossible. A student who treats Impact as their church is a like a sick person on a ventilator. Sometimes it is necessary, and it might be helpful during times of crisis, but eventually you need to start breathing on your own.

Ultimately I have not done my job if I don’t direct our students into the local church. Ultimately one of the clearest signs of whether I have been successful with students is whether they insist on membership in a flawed, messy, beautiful local church after graduation. My own serious input on a student’s life lasts only about two and half years. I hope this sets the foundation for a lifetime of church membership, where my own strengths and failures in each student’s life will be rounded and smoothed and balanced out in the beauty of Christian submission.

This hard commitment to churches made of broken people is one of the core signs of Christian maturity. But it’s also one of the key paths to Christian maturity. Church is where we learn submission, and submission means submitting to not only those we acknowledge are right, but also to those who we think might be wrong, and those who are definitely wrong. We have to work out what submission means in each instance, but it usually means staying in your community and fighting for unity, peace, and a passion for God. Remember, Christ’s great act of submission was not submitting to the crowds who called for him as a king, but submitting to the crowds who called for his murder. This is the model for the backward gospel ethics that we learn about in the Bible, the model of life we call students to at Impact, and the attitude we learn to live out in the local church.

A DAY IN THE LIFE: Bema Trip

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the second week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

I have recently returned from my third student trip to Israel and Turkey. I call these study tours “BEMA Trips” as they are a part of my larger BEMA Discipleship program. I try to lead study tours every other year as an opportunity to allow students to engage the world of the Bible experientially. If you followed the other series on my blog this year, you might remember this post on MODE for Impact Campus Ministries. The BEMA Trips are a great example of how I try to pursue MODE with my students.

This year (2018) was the final instance of a combined trip to Israel and Turkey. The three-week experience was an incredible time — designed for students who only had one opportunity to do this and limited funding, the bang-for-the-buck of one trip ($5800) was something that couldn’t be beat by the price (and time commitment) needed for two separate trips ($4300 each). However, as my job has taken me further from students, and as I have lost a scholarship fund that allowed me to give out $50,000 of support to students who wanted to go, I have needed to shift my focus.

In the future, we are planning for two groups on separate trips to Israel and Turkey. While this will be more expensive, it will be much more feasible for the typical participant who has a job and can’t get three weeks off of work. It will also enable us to have different focuses for each trip. Everything being said, the trip participants are pretty tired by the time they approach the end of a three-week adventure where we hike 7–12 miles a day with over 1800 feet of elevation change. We are beat up physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Oh, but we are also filled up like never before. It is an opportunity that I thank God for every year. It really is my version of living the dream and I am blessed beyond belief to have the opportunity to do it!

But if this is something that only happens once every other year, is it really something that belongs in the A DAY IN THE LIFE series? The answer is yes, because of all the ongoing work needed to make these trips a reality.

After I return from a trip, I commit to my participants one year of focused, pastoral follow-up. I want to use my experience and the experience of my past alumni to help students make the most of their opportunity, so I will offer them some provocative guidance to help stimulate growth and appropriate responses (e.g., new habits, new community, new disciples) in their lives. I will also be available to them should they need to ask questions or wrestle with new efforts to become a more devoted follower of our Rabbi.

As that year comes to a close (and even a little before), I begin recruiting for our next trip. When we are ten months out, we open official registration and I am busy collecting information, paperwork, funding, and sending our preparation videos for those participants. Simply put, I am always doing something in preparation for or in response to a BEMA Trip.

Want to experience a little taste of our trip? I made a video with some snippets from each day of our last time in Israel and Turkey. (I even remembered to shoot a few introduction videos in Israel!)

Top 12 of CiHD: #4

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

This month in the Top 12 Blog Posts at Covered in His Dust, we’ll look at the fourth most viewed post. Sort of. You see, when I constructed my “Top 12” list in January, I apparently did not count well, because I ended up with a baker’s dozen. (Hey, cut me some slack — they didn’t make me do math in bible college!) So in order to make the list work, I’m going to talk about two posts that go together here at #4. Surprisingly, they were both about trees of the desert. The first was called “Trees of the Desert: ACACIA” (you can find it here), and the second was called “Trees of the Desert: AR’AR & TAMARISK” (you can find it here).

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think these posts got so many views; why were others drawn to them? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

I would assume that these posts got so many hits because of the tree names. But not only did we get biblical interest in the posts, we also had some other key search engine words in the titles, like “desert.” At the core, though, we had trees that would have been very commonly searched for: acacia tree and tamarisk tree. There would have been much interest for these trees beyond the biblical content, so that probably skewed our results for the “fourth-most-viewed blog post.”

However, I would say that these lessons continue to be some of the most poignant that I teach to my students. I can remember how these lessons hit me originally. The word pictures contained in these lessons are so strong and visually profound that they were stunning to learn in their context. Obviously, the lessons of the desert are so meaningful for so many of us because the “deserts” of our lives are so defining and shaping. Anything that helps us relate to and understand these experiences is powerful.

Even though the newness of those lessons has worn off for me, the power of them in the lives of others hearing them for the first time is still significant. I have recently returned from a trip to Israel and Turkey where the first few days are filled with time in the desert. These lessons still impact the trip participants in the same way they impacted me years ago. So maybe all of those page views aren’t coming from a bunch of botany enthusiasts on Google.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

I hope the reader found encouragement in their deserts. For too many of us, deserts are just a metaphor for our spiritual experiences. I can vouch for the ability to walk through the deserts of the Bible and the ability to connect those very real physical experiences with very real spiritual seasons in our lives. The connection is palpable and the images of the desert provide comfort that words, explanations, and theology just cannot. In a sense, these physical pictures are like God’s “artwork.” One of the profound things about art is its ability to speak and communicate things that words cannot. I find the same to be true about the images of the desert. I hope, for instance, that people can put up a picture of an acacia tree (whether literally or figuratively) and let it remind them of the reasons why we walk the path of spiritual practice with faithfulness.

I also hope the lessons give the reader a call not just to receive the comfort of God in the desert, but to physically participate in that comfort for other people. So often the fruit we bear, the shade we provide, the tamarisks trees we plant for others — these are things that we experienced once from God in our deserts, but the experience also equipped us to be able to serve others in those same places. Oftentimes we received the desert provision of God through other people. Why not be that desert provision — the vehicle God uses — for others?

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

For one, I might be more quick to point out how thick the debate is about identifying these trees in real life from the ancient Hebrew. I was recently reading a book about the botany of the Bible and realized how many of their conclusions differed from the lessons I was taught. Like I stated in the first “Trees of the Desert” post, I based my work on the conclusions of Nogah Hareuveni, who in many circles is considered the leading authority on the plants of the biblical world. I have been told that his work is still the textbook for studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Anything else I would say is probably best consumed by listening to my most recent work through the BEMA Discipleship podcast. I spent time discussing this in Session 1 about Torah. You can find that specific podcast in iTunes or by going to this link. If the conversation about acacia trees and spiritual discipline intrigues you, I would recommend listening to this conversation and a follow-up conversation here.

PULL UP A CHAIR: Stories on Teach

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the fourth week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

Tom Neyhart is the Lead Campus Minister for Impact Campus Ministries in South Bend. I love to watch Tom grow in his passion for discipleship; he is a model campus minister in his work to develop his young student leaders and teach them how to do the work of leadership. When I thought of ICM's commitment to TEACH, I immediately thought to ask Tom to share his thoughts on the idea here.

I love working with college students! They can sometimes be frustrating, but more often, I am simply amazed as they grow in their faith. Our mission statement focuses on three things: pursuing God, modeling that pursuit in front of others, and teaching students in furthering the discipleship process. In many ways, this is like the ripple effect when you drop a stone in a still pond: the rings continue moving outward, one after another. When we instruct others to further the discipleship process, the idea of pursue, model, and teach continues to grow outward.

But if we leave the Teach out of the process, then we lose the ripple effect and we have a crucial problem. We end up with “disciples” who may grow in their own faith, but that is where it seems to end because of a struggle to apply and integrate their faith on a consistent basis. For me, vulnerability is a key aspect. How do I walk with a student through their current struggles if I am not willing to be vulnerable enough to let them see how I walk through mine? I believe those whom we disciple need to see us walking through the fire while relying on God and relying on spiritual disciplines to keep us moving forward in our own faith. It also requires us to show them our failures, even though it is uncomfortable. I have learned more lessons from my failures than my successes.

It is really a matter of understanding more than just knowing how to study and read biblical Text, how to pray, or engage in other spiritual disciplines; it’s also knowing why it is important and how to take the truths discovered in it into everyday life. It will not do much good if my students only know how to read the Text and it doesn’t filter into their lives.

There is another aspect to Teach that is crucial to our vision. If my students can’t further themselves in the discipleship process, they will not have much impact on students around them (impact the U) or have a lasting impact when they move beyond their campus (impact the world).

When I meet with students, I usually ask some leading questions that allow them to break down their day or week. What was good? What was bad? Where are you in your reading or what have you been reading this week? Usually they will talk pretty freely about what has affected them in school, at home, or at work, which gives an opportunity to bring it back to the biblical Text.

A few weeks ago, we were on a weekend retreat when one of the students I disciple, Spencer, had an opportunity to speak into the life of another student. It was unplanned, but God opened a door and Spencer took an approach similar to what I have often used in listening and allowing this student to share his heart and struggles. More importantly, he built a bond with another student, shared a bit of life with him, and was able to encourage him. Spencer took an opportunity to positively encourage and influence another student from another campus. That is exactly what I want to happen! When students start to grasp the pursuit for themselves, they begin to model it and connect to other students in a way I will never be able to as a 49-year-old Campus Minister.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Teach

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

We started this series by introducing our definition of discipleship and the role that imitation plays in making disciples. We begin to expand on those concepts in our mission statement, to pursue, model, and teach intimacy with God on the American university campus in the context of Christian community. This is the kind of imitation we want to create space for. First, we want to intentionally engage spiritual practices in our own lives; we want our staff to be pursuing a certain level of expertise in this area. If we are trying to make disciples through imitation, however, we also want to be pursuing God in front of others. But there is still one more word/idea expressed in our mission statement that is important to this process.

We define “teach” as instructing others in furthering the discipleship process.

In order for imitation to find its fullness, it needs to transcend the mere work of mimicry. It is possible to mimic an instructor and still have no real concept of what you are doing, why you are doing it, or how it works. I can remember being a much younger preacher and imitating the sermons of my favorite preachers. I would mimic them to perfection. This was problematic in some ways and incredibly beneficial in others. This happened for a season of my life and then I continued to grow. My point is that during that season, I was mimicking incredibly well, but I did not truly possess the content. I was not intimate with the teachings in a way that the original teachers were; I had not done the work and taken the material through my own heart.

The same is true for our students. They can mimic our pursuit of God as we model it for them. This is good and a part of the greater process, but we ultimately want them to own and possess the pursuit for themselves. We don’t want them to simply mimic intimacy with God, we want them to truly have intimacy with God! And this means we must be ready and able to TEACH.

As with everything we’ve been talking about, this needs to begin with our pursuit of God. What does your pursuit of God look like? Maybe you memorize the Text and pray with a prayer journal. How intentional are you? Do you truly understand and “possess” those disciplines? Do you know them well enough that you could explain to your disciple how you memorize? Most students of mine will say, “I’ve tried to memorize… I just can’t do it!” What is your next step? We must be ready to do more than shrug our shoulders and say, “Keep trying!”

We need to know how to help them learn the essence of the discipline. That might involve learning how they interact with information and what kind of a learner they are. It might require immersion in the discipline. It might be as simple as a step-by-step approach. The first thing you need to do is this, and the next is that. The same thing would be true for a prayer journal. How do you interact with your prayer journal? What do you write? When do you write it? How do you use it?

Do you see how critical this is? It’s certainly not theological “rocket science,” but our typical discipleship methods are too often void of these crucial elements. We meet for coffee on Thursday morning and ask, “Did you read your Bible? Did you pray? What are you learning from God this week?” These are fantastic questions! But did we teach people how to read the Bible? Did we teach them how to pray? Have they ever seen us pray? There’s a good chance they are at home, trying to pray, completely frustrated, thinking, “Is this how everyone else does it? I don’t feel like it’s working!” And then, too ashamed to admit the struggle, the discipleship process breaks down. Did we ever teach them how to “learn from God” or hear His voice? How many people reading this understand these concepts? Probably very few — and at some point, none of us did.

I know I learned how to listen for God and learn from Him daily because of spiritual mentors who taught me how to do it and helped me ask questions and deal with the frustrations. They shared real life stories and experiences with me and it helped me find my way.

But I might even go one step further and say that this principle goes far beyond our spiritual practices. True discipleship happens in absolutely every facet of life. We should be pursuing, modeling, and teaching all kinds of aspects of life as their spiritual mentors. It needs to begin with and be centered around our pursuit of God; everything needs to flow from that time spent abiding in the Vine (John 15). But it also needs to influence our relationships and our work ethic. Our disciples need to see us model healthy relationships and boundaries with others. They need to see us repent, say we are wrong/sorry, and forgive others. They need to see us submit to authority with humility and grace. They need to see our character and integrity.

And more than just modeling, we need to be able to teach them all of the things mentioned above. Can you teach somebody how to forgive? We need to be able to. Are you prepared to take every opportunity to talk about why you dress a particular way at work, turn in paperwork on time, and say no to work and yes to family? These are things that must be taught! We have an entire generation suffering from a world that just expects them to do these things —  a world that is unwilling to teach.

And yes, this even gets down into the business of sacred vocation. This work of discipleship isn’t only for church leaders and Bible students. This work is for all people in every facet of life. Let’s say you are a mechanical engineer. Do you know why your job matters? Do you know how it is holy and sacred work, blessed by God? Do you see yourself merely as an “employee” of Such and Such, Inc.? We need to be able to disciple people in their vocation. And I’m not just talking about how we try to be hard workers and nice to others (although that is important; see the paragraphs above). I’m talking about the actual work we do. Every job is, at its essence, about the proper ordering and stewarding of God’s creation. That means my work, my art, is a craft, and I need to disciple all of the potential I can out of others by pursuing my craft, modeling its proper engagement, and teaching others how to excel (even beyond my own abilities).

God has placed each and every one of us here on this earth to impact the world. Becoming absolutely everything we were designed to be is critical to being part of a beautiful story that God is telling in history, because we each have a role to play.

It’s all holy, sacred work.

It’s all discipleship.

A DAY IN THE LIFE: Disciples

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the second week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

It is the most meaningful work I have done in over seventeen years of ministry.

It has not drawn crowds of hundreds and it doesn’t involve speaking from a stage. It isn’t something I do by leading trips across the world or being an important leader in our organization.

It is the daily pursuit of discipleship in the real lives of real young adults. They are the people who go on to impact the world. Now, for another series, I wrote about discipleship here. I won’t repeat myself, but I remember coming back from Israel and Turkey in 2010 and praying that God would give me the opportunity to make just one true disciple. I got into campus ministry and knew I would be running ministry programming and probably finding different places to serve as a teacher of the Text. But what I was really convicted about after my time in Israel was experimenting with a more “rabbinic” discipleship model.

A real “come, follow me” approach to mentorship and spiritual formation.

I didn’t want a hundred disciples or even twelve. I actually didn’t even want three. I prayed for one.

God started by giving me two: students named Megan and Nate. They raised funds for a full-time, paid internship and walked with me every day as I did my job. They lived life as closely as they could to me and learned how to mimic my every move. Life eventually called Nate on to new things within the year, but Megan continued working with me for the next couple of years. (You heard from Megan in the guest post last month.)

And so I was left with exactly what I asked for — just one disciple. Megan poured her life into the work and the art of discipleship; I poured my life into her development and personal growth. In the end, it paid off in ways I still struggle to explain. It is… the most meaningful work I have ever done. We walked to class and drove to events. We debriefed at staff meeting and worked together on projects. But what really made an incredible difference was the “regular ol’ life stuff”: talking about roommates and conflict, character and integrity, hospitality and generosity — not for job purposes, but for a real conversation about who we were becoming as people.

I say “we” because the process of discipleship has been as much about me being vulnerable as a leader and working my own stuff out in front of others as it was about me sifting through all of their baggage. Sometimes I think the best things I did to help them was simply work through my own struggles with determination, resilience, and — on my better days — humility. And they taught me with their youthful willingness to do the right thing all the time, even if it was crazy and not lining up with “social norms.”

It continues to be the most meaningful work I do.

God has brought different disciples into my life, family, and ministry at different times and in different ways. After Megan transitioned on, there were two, then there were a handful. I took what the LORD gave and tried to do my best with what was in front of me.

Eventually, it came down to two disciples. Tyler is now a full-time associate staff member at ICM; thinking of him as a “disciple” may not always be the best fit. He’s often more of a colleague, but I still appreciate our relationship and discipleship walks. And Kevin is still here, hanging out with the rabbi and following him around Moscow — rain or shine, snow or sun. I caught myself even this last week thinking back over the last few years and my time with Tyler and Kevin, realizing how meaningful the work that we do is. It has been more deep and true and profound than any sermon I have preached, homeless dinner I have served, or BEMA Trip I have led.

I am proud of all my disciples and the people they are becoming; I’m proud like a father is of his children.

I am humbled, honored, and privileged that I get to do this work every day.

Here is a fun video diary I made of our time in discipleship this year:

MAKING AN IMPACT: Model

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

We’ve covered our definition of discipleship as being imitating a mentor who imitates Jesus, and we’ve even hinted at the fact that, for years, we’ve had a mission statement that serves this end by providing us a roadmap to discipleship. For a long time, we have said ICM exists to pursue, model, and teach intimacy with Christ on the American university campus, in the context of Christian community. In our last post we spoke of the first word on that roadmap — pursue. We spoke of having an intentional pursuit of God and defined the word pursue as intentionally engaging spiritual practices.

But is this enough? Is it enough to pursue God, creating space for Him and letting Him bear fruit?

On one hand, yes! If we truly pursue God in a way that resembles the “abiding” of John 15, the idea would be that God will call us to do what He wants us to do. The “fruit” is a natural (or supernatural) byproduct of our intentional pursuit of God — without a doubt.

But God also told us to do a lot of things. The Bible is a big book full of a lot of big ideas, so there are probably a few more things we can use to give us guidance. Of that whole big book of God’s dreams for this world, which ones do we use to give us direction?

Fortunately, this is where our purpose of making disciples and our definition of discipleship serve our mission very well. If we are to make disciples who make disciples, and we have defined that as a process of imitation, then the next word to come is only natural: MODEL.

If we really believe that pursuing God will lead to intimacy with God (what we define as success), and if that intimacy with God is what He uses to bear fruit that will last in our lives and ministries, then discipleship is the process of teaching our students how to do this well. Our job becomes one of pursuing sustainable spiritual formation. In this regard, it is not enough to simply pursue God and create space for Him in our lives. We also have to show our students how to do this. We’re going to show them in a very literal fashion… by modeling it.

ICM’s Vice President, Jeff VanderLaan, has one of my favorite sayings in relation to this topic. He likes to say, “Just because you’re wearing clothes, doesn’t make you a model. A model is somebody who wears clothes in front of others for the purpose of being seen.” This is a fantastic metaphor and drove us to define the term ‘model’ as pursuing God in front of others.

This is also a natural progression from the rabbinic idea that discipleship is about mimicry and imitation. You cannot imitate a rabbi or a mentor if you don’t have a model to mimic. I would never have learned how to tie my shoes without a model to follow and a teacher to imitate. I would never have learned how to do a load of laundry without imitating my mother’s example. Why do we think others can learn ideas like memorizing scripture or taking a sabbath by merely talking about it? Aren’t these things that need to be seen?

Now, some very astute Bible students will be quick to point out, “We aren’t supposed to do our spiritual deeds to be seen by others! We’re supposed to pray and pursue God in secret, without the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing.” And this desire for secrecy is a good point and certainly worth addressing. The reference comes from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6) and reads as follows:

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

But we would be wise to remind ourselves of words Jesus spoke as part of the very same teaching in the previous chapter:

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

So what gives? Obviously Jesus taught us that the way in which we live is to be seen by others so they can know and glorify God. But what we have to be careful of is our motivation. Jesus says not to do these things “to be seen.” If this is the reason you are doing them, you are going to be disappointed in the reward you receive. You’ll end up with the praise of others as your reward, but not the mission of God (i.e., disciples).

And so we model our pursuit of God on purpose in front of our students. We pursue God in front of them so they can see what a healthy pursuit of God looks like. We do not do this in order to be seen, but to instruct them and help them develop as maturing followers of Jesus.

But speaking of instruction, is pursing and modeling the whole of the process? Is it enough to merely mimic our instructor? Or is all of this imitation a part of something bigger?