Jack’s Buzz

Disengagement Signals Abnormality

Not to be engaged is to be weird. You do not want to be weird do you? You do not want to deny the image of God any more than I do.

Staying with Acts, Luke outlines a surprisingly unsophisticated, ongoing training regimen. He tells his readers that the early church met together to eat a meal, pray, and hear the apostles’ teaching (Ac 2:42). We do not know line-by-line the precise content of the apostles’ teaching, but we know that it results in apostolic engagement. The Christians consistently engage non-Christians with the Gospel.

Moreover, there is no sense that the engagement is in any way obnoxious or overbearing, for they enjoyed “favor with all the people” (Ac 2:47). Their engagement must have been engaging—they must have been kind. We know that the early Christians were heavily engaged in reducing poverty and healing the sick, often miraculously. Healing the sick and feeding the poor tend to earn the favor of one’s neighbors.

Even after the religious oppressors persecuted the Christians, the pattern continued in every town to which they dispersed. Apostolic engagement led to healing and freedom from demonic torment. Wherever they went, Christians normally engaged people with kindness and the Gospel of Jesus followed immediately.

At the beginning of this exercise, we noticed that most people asked about engagement think of different things, but do they really? I think not—not at the core of what we are all saying—because it is in our human DNA to engage people so that we might become related to them. The average person thinks of engagement as something that comes before the wedding. People engage, and then they become related. Evangelists think about trained witnesses engaging others with the Gospel. They witness to become related as brothers and sisters in Christ. Church planters do the work of the evangelist, and then add to that the relatedness that comes from gathering for worship and growing in discipleship. We all engage others because all want so badly to have relationships. We want those relationships because God designs us to need them.

To desire to remain disengaged from others is a sign that something is wrong. For a Christ-follower not to desire to engage and relate to others signals a malady. Something is wrong. Dare I say that a disengaged Christian is a hurting Christian? A Christian not engaging people who wander in darkness, lost without Christ, is an ill Christian. He or she has something wrong. The DNA wires them to engage, but the wiring broke, and we represent the Physician. Rather than sit broken, hurting Christians in classrooms, we might need to offer them healing and deliverance from their malady. If I have a brother or sister in Christ who disengages others (or has become habitually disengaged from others), a sickness holds him or her captive. Engagement helps sick Christians and sick non-Christians get well.

Perhaps you can think of other ways to engage people for Christ. The GPS web site offers ideas. Each of the four is worth exploring.

First, imagine trained Christ-followers effectively sharing the gospel as they go.[1] The biblical texts that we examined above demonstrate little about the training program of the early church. Perhaps they had no program, at least in the sense of the systematically organized modules that we see today. Still, the evidence indicates that believers consistently engaged non-believers, verbally witnessed their experiences regarding the resurrected Christ, and that many people, both Jews and Gentiles, put their faith in Christ as a result. The pattern of engagement is so consistent that one can only conclude that elder believers trained their younger brothers and sisters to engage people and tell them about Jesus. Simply stated, mature believers took new believers along as they engaged their communities. Do that.

Second, imagine starting small groups to intentionally present the gospel to lost people. Small discipleship groups form the heart of first century Christian engagement. Evidence suggests that the believers purposely chose small, mobile groups as their church model. A good exercise might include examining whether a person can join a small discipleship group without first committing himself or herself to Christ. Can one follow Christ without having made a commitment to him as Savior? Can a person be a disciple, in the sense that the word means follower, with the intention of merely investigating Christ? I want to say yes based on Christ’s many invitations to test his teaching and see if it is from God (Jn 7:16-17).

If a believing group accepts nonbelievers in their gathering (with the intention of witnessing to them at the appropriate time), they will engage dozens of people who will later commit their lives to Christ. The small, discipleship group method for starting churches may hold the most promise for growing Christ’s kingdom in the West. The obvious implication is that we need to start more discipleship groups faster. Waiting to send people out to start new groups until they complete training is like not planting on a windy day (Ec 11:4). Bad idea. On one hand, the Spirit can correct, and on the other hand, no one says that leaders cannot hold group starters accountable for their teaching. For that matter, where does the Scripture say that every group needs a teacher? It doesn’t; stop making excuses and start something.

Third, imagine starting new churches. All of us see the data that newer churches tend to engage and reach more people for Christ faster than even ten-year-old churches. Yet, the latest statistics indicate that only three percent of established SBC churches sponsor new works.[2] We cannot demand $250,000 in the bank or full-time pastoral staff to start a church when the apostles had none of that. Start discipleship groups with leaders who have jobs, and let them become churches. Start them.

Fourth, imagine believers living with a passion for lost people that comes out of the overflow of an intimate walk with God. The first century church spent enormous amounts of time in prayer, worship, engaging, witnessing, and running. They spent no time in seminary. Passion to see lost people come to Christ does not come from academic papers, books, sermons, or wishing. Passion for the things of God comes from the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit fills any believer who makes the time to be filled. Walking with Christ takes time, and God offers no substitute method. Spend time with God and look around to see what he is doing. Stop wasting time and resources on things God is not rewarding.

None of us wants to live unfulfilled, unproductive lives. We know that we will have a conversation with Jesus someday, and that he will ask us to make an account of what we produced with what he gave us (Mt 25:14-46, Ro 14:12, Heb 4:13). We all want a pleasant conversation. It seems important, therefore, that disciples creatively engage others.

God made us to engage. Jesus and the early church modeled engagement. We can simply act accordingly and creatively. I recently read that the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, calls for a complete reorganization of the medium (just when you learned to use the current iteration, yes?). He wants a new structure to engage the needs of a new generation.[3] Perhaps we should try to catch up to the secular culture’s engaging attitude.