Action!

The whole idea of 21st century people observing their way to faith (see my last post) is incredibly important to understanding evangelism and discipleship. This is one area that keeps spinning me out in terms of our Bunbury experiment.

We made action an important part of our group from the start. This has included things such as a street-side awareness campaign on child cocoa slaves in West Africa, and collecting money (our weekly 'offering') to give to local organisations involved in helping people at the street level. We also talk about it a lot at our meetings - why it's important and the way it's intrinsically linked to the message of Jesus.

It's really exciting to see these values rub off on the young blokes, and even more so to see them willingly and actively taking initiative in their own lives in this area. It goes to show how critically effective the "observing and talking" side of things is when compared to the more traditional discipleship approaches.

I think when we try and separate action from discipleship (someone recently commented that action wasn't "spiritual") we end up with a lopsided, ineffectively narrow version of the gospel - one that may make sense on an academic level but is difficult to apply to life in the real world.

It's also really encouraging (although not essential to our commitment to action) to hear the stories we get back from the groups we have helped. Stories of making a real difference in individuals lives. These stories spur us on and encourage us to keep doing, in Jesus name, the things we are doing.