- This past Sunday I shared a key verse for Wesley’s future, Matthew 4:19. “Come follow me an I will make you fishers of men.” In this short verse, we can find the three essential characteristics that mark us as disciples.
1. Come follow me: disciples follow Jesus and long to learn, know and follow his teachings and seek to replicate His behaviors and attitudes.
2. And I will make you: disciples understand that we all need transformation and we offer ourselves to Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit so that we can be changed. Our goal is to become like Jesus.
3. Fishers of men: disciples live out our lives on mission. Jesus’ mission to make disciples becomes our mission and we work diligently to live on purpose. We live to make and send disciples into the world who will make more disciples.
This past weekend, 17 people from Wesley attended a training conference, Discipleshift, to empower us and help us learn how to be a church that focuses on making disciples who make disciples. It was certainly the most practical and reproducible training I have ever attended and we are all so thankful and look forward to helping Wesley lead into the future. Already two who went to training have stared implementing what we learned. We now have a ministry for middle schoolers on Sunday mornings at 11. It went very well this past Sunday. Thank you to Kristine Johnson and Paula Walker for teaming up to make that happen. Jesus makes it clear that we are all called to make disciples and get connected to other people. Our mission is to make disciples and I want to encourage you in your journey. Soon we will be establishing the process we will be using for discipleship, called Real Life Discipleship. We will be getting a second team together to go to training in the fall, pray about this and see if God is calling you to be a disciple maker.
~Grace & Peace~
Pastor Ernie