Discipling and retention

[Digging4Truth]

Great thread Rhoni...

Our churches revolve around the spirit.

WHOoooooooooooooooooooo the spirit moved last night. That is the measure of a good service.

If a preacher is going to be in demanded... he had BETTER be a high spirited one because that is our drug of choice. That is what we want. We want the high of the spirit.

But the high of the spirit does not help you when you put one foot in front of the other tomorrow. It is the teaching of the word.

And I'm not talking about that YOU CAN DO IT... GOD IS GONNA MAKE IT HAPPEN... JUST YOU WAIT AND SEE WHAT GOD IS GOING TO DO... RUN AROUND THIS CHURCH IF YOU WANT A BLESSING kinda stuff either.

I am talking about teaching that deals with our attitudes... the way we interact with others... TEACHING FROM THE BIBLE about the ways that we dress ourselves and conduct ourselves (Yelling for an hour about why you are going to go to hell for doing this or that is NOT teaching.) Of course teaching many of these things from the Bible is difficult since some of it isn't in there so yelling for an hour how you are going to hell is about all they've got.

The very fact that we have new converts does say a little bit about how the regular services have moved away from foundational, one foot in front of the other, this will help you tomorrow in the real world kind of teaching.

We want to get drunk... we don't want to learn something new.

We want to hoop and holler... we don't want to find a new way we can change who we are into more of what He is.

When the Religion Lite no longer does it for them and they can't pretend that wallering on the floor for half an hour didn't really change the battles they were facing inside they decide that THEY must not have want it takes and they go away.

The interesting thing is that a couple of months without any hooping and hollering assuming that this is accompanied with a couple of months of solid teachings about what the word of God has to say about the most basic things in life might just bring about revival. I'm not against hooping and hollerin'... I just think we need a time of refocus.

The spirit has become the main focus when, interestingly enough, the spirit is given to us to give us the power to live the WORD. The spirit is an engine... raw power.. good stuff. But the word is the transmission. It is what the engine was built for... and without it the engine is nothing more than a show of power with no forward movement to show for it.

When there is a reviving of the word within us... there is no greater definition of revival. When the word touches people where they live and changes their very lives... retention is not a problem. Space is.

Whoda thunk it.