At Good Shepherd, we talk all the time about inviting all people into a living relationship with Jesus Christ.
But what exactly is a living relationship with Jesus Christ? What does it look like?
Early on, we narrowed it down to seven “marks” or “measures.” Here’s what they look like in our Next Step workshop curriculum:
As our Next Step sessions begins, I typically ask the group if they can connect recent sermon series to our different measures (thereby demonstrating, I hope, that we actually have a plan behind what we do). As you can see from my notes above, the class that began this past Sunday evening was quite adept at the exercise.
In fact, at one stage, one of them was better than I was.
I say that because as we discussed the recent One Sixty-Seven series, I confidently declared that it reinforced the measure of Moving To Maturity. As the goal of the series was to grow our suspicion of the world’s wisdom and our appreciation of God’s, it was obvious (to me) that it was a discipleship series — one that helped people move to maturity.
“Oh no,” said one woman. “It was all about how the faith ‘Starts At Home.’ The way y’all got whole families doing the exercises and discussions together and the way you talked about kids on devices … it was definitely ‘Starts At Home.'”
There was only way way to reply to that.
“You are exactly right.”
And so a Next Stepper knew better than I did.