In church we often speak of ‘the great commission’.

We think we know the great commission pretty well. Do you?…

Just try and recite it now… "Go into all the w…

Over the last week I have asked people to tell me Matt 28:18-20, not trying to be a smartarse, but just to see what comes out. No one has got it right and invariably it is something like this I hear:

"go into all the world and make disciples, baptising and teaching them and surely I am with you always"

Now, maybe its become incredibly obvious to me because I am seeing it as a problem everywhere at the moment, but did anyone pick the key two words that are missing from that rendering of those verses?

In case you are wondering the missing words need to be inserted after teaching and they are ‘to obey’. I am starting to realise more and more that in evangelicalism we have been very obsessed with teaching, but not so concerned with obedience. We pack people’s heads with knowledge and call that discipleship, when in reality if we are not teaching people to actually do what Jesus says then its all just a waste of time.

Its one of the problems we have with sermons. We preach new ones every week, and the poor buggers in the pews haven’t got round to doing last week’s sermon let alone having the energy to ‘do’ another sermon.

Perhaps it begs a whole new way of approaching discipleship?

Maybe we need to go a bit slower and actually start to do more and be less concerned with how much we pack into the brain?

download things we lost in the fire dvd

Not rocket science, but still this is what I reckon has been at the core of the problem for the church in the west. We have some of the best educated non-disicples in the world in our churches. If we are going to swim upstream then its got to be about what we do not what we know…