This Friction Can Only Be Worn By Persistence
Crazy. I finished my latest read-thru of the Bible. One day early. At this point, it should be the 25th time I have read the entire Bible since January of 2020. But along the way you miss some days, and sometimes there are stretches where you don’t get any of it done. At a pace of 20 chapters a day, you can fall behind quickly and it can get discouraging.
This time though what happened was kind of helped along by a schedule. Two weeks ago, I was at the first Multipliers Operating System Cohort, which will be 3 two-day seminars through the next 7 months that will help some leaders look at what is it that keeps multiplication from happening in the American church. I’ll have some stuff to say about that in some future posts. I hope it will be helpful in letting us see how “multiplication thinking” can really impact the local church for the work of the Kingdom! At any rate, I was just getting into the New Testament in my reading plan while we were at the seminar. That was really helpful because a lot of times, the disciple-making movement is not as consciously referencing Scripture as I think we ought to. Jesus never goes without saying. He may be driving the discussion, and we may be trying to emulate His methods, but we have to be sure to keep coming back to the source! It was really helpful to be reading the Gospels and Acts around the time I was thinking hard about how multiplication will get embedded in churches.
I started this substack newsletter to enlist people to pray with me, to see multiplication of disciples, leaders, and churches, in and from my own church, and yours, too. So I have a specific prayer request today:
I have a list of new movers close to my home. I am going to send out Christmas cards to them, inviting them to our Christmas Eve service. Christmas/New Year’s is one of the most spiritual time of the year. People have a lot of spiritual questions and wonderings. Anyway, would you pray with me that these cards go out with a blessing from God? This will be an ongoing work, building up a list of the new people in my community, and reaching out to them in various ways over the coming year. Pray that some will come visit our church, and pray that seeds are planted in the hearts and minds of those who receive a card, that perhaps it bears fruit later, either in our church or another they feel led to! And if they are not interested right now… whenever they do have spiritual questions, I would like to be the one they call.