Learner’s Circle p3

So a few friends and I are taking several months to work through discipleship in a way that is memorable and in a way that can be passed on to others. One of the things that we are using is a visual aid called the “Learner’s Circle.” Check this blog post for a recap of the whole thing. For the next two weeks I’m going to break down the Learner’s Circle into 7 more detailed posts.

Part I: I want to look at the basic idea of what is a “disciple”?
Part II: What is a “kairos moment”?
Part III: What does it mean to repent and what are natural movements that are a part of it?
Part IV: What does it mean to believe and what are natural movements that are a part of it?
Part V: Take Jesus’ Teaching during the sermon on the mount and illustrating how they are full of “kairos moments”
Part VI: Take those “kairos moments” from the Sermon on the Mount and illustrate real life examples and what they would look like to process.
Part VII: Look at why a timeline for a Christian’s life and why it shouldn’t look like a straight line with events listed on it but more like a stretched out slinky.

So let’s begin with a picture of the Learner’s Circle and post number three on what does it mean to repent and what are natural movements that are a part of it?

Part III: What does it mean to repent and what are natural movements that are a part of it?


Repentance:
A complete change of mind and heart. A process of transformation that take place within a person.

Observe:
Stop, look, and listen to what actually is happening in your kairos moment.

Reflect:
Ask yourselves questions about what you see and hear—understanding is the goal!

Discuss:
Get other people’s perspectives on your observations and reflections. This is so you can be sure you are on the right track.

Ok, suppose that I recognize a kairos moment in my life. I realize that the kingdom of God has broken in and in some area of my life I need to respond. Where do I begin? How do I know how to properly respond? If I am a guy and struggle with lust then do I go the route of Jerome who castrated himself? Perhaps you have had a friend or two that has had a radical conversion to Christianity and they way that they have responded to these kairos moments seems over the top or in some cases unnecessary. How do you properly begin to respond when you believe that God is showing you something?

While a “kairos” moment is an event, “repentance” is a process with steps.

The word that Jesus first uses in telling us how to respond to the kingdom of God is repentance. Not a very warm or affirming word right? We instantly think of cold hearted people or at the very kindest we think of very devoted people who don’t care what anyone else thinks. We think of people who say things like “turn or burn” or “get right or get left behind.” People with kitschy phrases on bumper stickers like “if you are living like there is no god you better hope you aren’t wrong.” We think of vehicles with miniature billboards announcing God’s wrath upon unbelievers.

Let’s clear the air. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to recover the religious baggage attached to this word but lets try. Repentance is essentially a word of allegiance and a word of grace. The word is Greek is metanoia and the Hebrew word is Teshuv. Teshuv means to turn around. Metanoia means to change your mind. What both of them imply is that someone is calling you home and that the door is open. Someone is willing to accept you. The path has been paved, the cost has been paid. You can come home again. I don’t care where you have gone or what you have done. You can come home again. They are also words of allegience. They are words that mean that the same voice that welcomes you home gets the final say in your life. Repentance is simply calling something the same thing that God calls it.

There are three parts to repentance. Hopefully these will help you deal with lust, if that is your issues, without castrating yourself: Observe/Reflect/Discuss

Observe: This is taking time to observe our reactions, our emotions, our thoughts. Sometimes it is hard in the moment because you are reaction, feeling and thinking. This is a time where you look specifically at the way you responded.

“We must be honest in our observations. We have to see things as they really are if we are to change inwardly. This is not the time to look at how others have harmed us or insist that whatever happened is someone else’s fault. It’s not the time to say that what we’ve done is not as bad as what so-and-so did or that no one was hurt, so it wasn’t all that bad. If we don’t make honest observations, we don’t move another step around the Circle.”-Mike Breen

Reflect: This is taking time to ask ourselves why we reacted as we did, why we feel as we do, why a certain event brought these emotions to the surface. Why did I get angry and blowup at my roommate? Why did I feel this sense of embarrassment that made me feel it was necessary to lie?

“If we are going to make that inner change, we need to look at what the event tells us. We ask questions about the kairos event. Why? Who? What? When? How? Why am I feeling this way? What make me say that? When did I decide to do that? How did this happen…That’s repentance—when you are drawn into asking those kinds of questions. Once again our answers must be honest if real change is going to happen.”-Mike Breen

Discuss: It is important that we have others in our lives we can discuss our observations and reflection with, and who will be honest in their response to us. These are trustworthy friends, who will stand with us, pray with us, fight alongside of us, but will not flatter us with empty words.

“Reflection should provoke conversation and discussion. The only time our observation and reflections get anywhere is when we invite others into the process. Following Jesus was never intended to be a private thing. We were never created to live in isolation; we were created to share the significant moments of our lives with other people. We need to discuss the event and our responses to it with someone else. We need to choose people who will be completely honest with us, even if the things they say are not what we want to hear.”-Mike Breen

So the first part of responding to a kairos moment is with repentance, an acceptance of the call of grace to come home and an allegiance to that voice that has called me.

“Repentance is necessary if we are to grow as disciples, but it is not always easy. Facing our failings, our pain, and our fears is something we want to put off, like a trip to the dentist or bathing the cat. As we step into the process of observing, reflecting on, and discussing our sins and shortcomings with others, we are not only opening up the ugliness of our lives for others to see, we are opening it up for us to see.”-Mike Breen

“A spiritual community consists of people who have the integrity to come clean. It is compromised of those who own their shortcomings and failures because they hate them more than they hate the shortcomings and failures of others, who therefore discover that a well of pure water flows beneath their most fetid corruption.”-Larry Crabb

Next Post: Believe-Acting Upon Your Repentance

Discipleship Circle

Discipleship Circle—Choosing to Learn from Life—Continuous Breakthrough

One of the things we are processing into the life of Ecclesia is how we can do discipleship better. The tool that we are going to use for this is called the Discipleship Circle. I first heard about this by being referred to a website called 3dministries. The LifeShape thing seemed gimmicky to me so I didn’t do much research. However, recently I heard Bob Hyatt teach on the Discipleship Circle at an Ecclesia Network Gathering and the simplicity of it and the potential lifechange it can facilitate really blew me away. So I already posted my general understanding of the discipleship circle here. To understand this conversation you will have to have the big picture in mind.

What I want to do now is take 7 posts and break it down even more.
Part I: I want to look at the basic idea of what is a “disciple”?
Part II: What is a “kairos moment”?
Part III: What does it mean to repent and what are natural movements that are a part of it?
Part IV: What does it mean to believe and what are natural movements that are a part of it?
Part V: Take Jesus’ Teaching during the sermon on the mount and illustrating how they are full of “kairos moments”
Part VI: Take those “kairos moments” regarding: anger, lust, speaking the truth and how we treat our enemies and illustrate real life examples and what they would look like to process.
Part VII: Look at why a timeline for a Christian’s life shouldn’t look like a straight line with events listed on it but more like a stretched out slinky.

Discipleship and The Circle

So one of the things that I walked away from the Ecclesia Church Planter weekend was rethinking discipleship. One of the things that was said several times during the conference was “if you focus on planting a church you may or may not get disciples. But if you focus on making disciples you will always get the church.”

The two main questions that were brought up time and time again in regards to what it means a disciple boiled down to “What is God telling you? What are you going to do about it?”

Church planting and discerning God’s will sound like something we sit back and let experts or professional Christians or those who are “really serious” about their faith do that. However, what we talked about this weekend was a tool so simple that anyone who can draw a circle can also disciple someone. No special degree needed.

So the first step is to simply draw a circle. At the top of that circle go ahead and put an X. Next to that X go ahead and write Mark 1:14-15 which reads ” 14After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15″The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!”

4 Words are important for working with this circle.
Time/Kingdom/Repent/Believe

There are two words for our word time in the Greek. The first is “chronos” which deals with sequential time. Whenever you peer down at your watch while someone is droning on or you are checking the date when signing a check you are observing “chronos” time. This, however, is not the word that is used here. The Greek word used in “kairos“. This is a word used for the moments that take your breath away whether good or bad. These are the moments where it seems like someone has hit the pause button. Maybe a promotion or loss of job. Maybe a moment of success or failure. It could be a recent conversation or revelation about yourself or someone else. These are moments drenched with meaning.

Jesus arrival was not just a sequential moment (chronos) in time but his arrival was drenched with significance (kairos).

Why?

The kingdom has arrived.

The kingdom is an eschatological reality. It is God’s future promised to his people. A future without pain, sickness, suffering, sin, sorrow or satan. There is no shortage of abundance with the kingdom. And Jesus declares that in some way that the kingdom, God’s future, is here. It is close enough that we can reach out into God’s inrushing future and experience it on earth.

That’s a kairos moment. The kingdom is here and now I have to choose what to respond to it. A promotion or job loss is big. A success or failure is big. But the kingdom of God arriving and within reach is the ultimate kairos moment.

So how does one respond to the Kairos moments in our lives. Well, Jesus says to repent and believe.

Repent and Believe
These words have some baggage to them. However, to repent means not just having a good cry but a call to turning around and a call to shift your allegiance. The kingdom is a message of grace that says we can come home again but it is also a message that says that all of your priorities have shifted from yourself to the kingdom.

Belief isn’t just about believing in your heart of hearts that someone exists. In the ancient world you wouldn’t say I believe that Caesar is Lord in the sense that I know that in my heart of hearts that he exists. No, to say Caesar is Lord demands that you respond by bowing the knee, offering allegiance, paying taxes. Belief is very real. To say that you have belief in Jesus isn’t just to believe certain propositional truths but to let your whole overflow of life be a response to the new inner reality of repentance.

So how does one Repent and Believe in Response to Kairos Moments and align them with the Kingdom of God?

Well think of Repentance as being the right half of the circle with 3 moves.

Repentance is in the perfect present in every location that is mentioned. It isn’t a past event. It is a continuing process. It is a lifestyle. The word that captures it the best is mettanoi which means an inner change that manifests itself in an outer reality. In your heart, inner being, something has happened. There is a change of our inner life and inner being.

Movement 1 of Repentance is Observation:
What happened and how did you react/feel? What was the kairos moment that got your attention this week? I think if your eyes are open you probably have a dozen pivitol things happen each week. Run the scenario through your mind.

Movement 2 of Repentance is Reflection:
On your observations. Why did you feel the way you did? What does that say about you? Is there a pattern?What might God be saying through this event. A word of correction? A word regarding priorities? A word about the direction or new stage of life you are entering? Hold your kairos moment up to the lens of the scriptures and the kingdom and ask what might be the kingdom framework for this kairos moment.

Movement 3 of Repentance is to Discuss:
Seek the wisdom of others. Do your observations and reflections make sense? Do you discern an opportunity for growth? This is where you bring others into the conversation. Instead of saying that “God said this or that to me” you gather others around you say, “I think God is saying to me…” What do you think of the situation?

So hopefully in these three moves you have discerned the Kairos moment. You have taken this incident and you have held it up the light of the kingdom of God with others to discern what is going on. You have repented. You know that grace is there for you and you want to reach into the kingdom, God’s future reality and offer your allegiance to it.

Now you act. You believe. You want your inward change to be evidenced by outward actions. You want to have an active transformation. It means a certainty that has developed within that has become intentional activity without.

Go ahead and put Believe on the left side of the circle.

Movement 4 of Belief is Plan:
How are things going to change financially? How are you going to change in your behavior regarding the opposite sex? How are you going to respond differently to anger next time? In light of grace and allegiance to the kingdom what is the next step that you are going to take?

Movement 5 of Belief is Accountability:
Accountability isn’t finding someone who’ll listen to you so you feel like you can get something off your chest. Accountability is challenge and support. Accountability is about tranceparency. It is about the inward life of repentance taking on flesh and blood in your actions. Accountability is about having others who will help you take and be faithful to your plan of action.

Movement 6 of Belief is Action:
Jesus talks about someone who builds his house on a rock and someone who builds his house on the sand. When the rain comes the house built on a rock stands while the same storm demolishes the house built on sand. Both people heard the teachings of Jesus. Hearing the teaching of Jesus wasn’t the deciding factor as to whether the house stood or fell. The deciding factor was whether the person put the teaching of Jesus into practice.

The discipleship circle boils down to asking the question again and again, “What is God saying to you (kairos moments) and what are you going to do about it (repentance and belief)?”

This is something that anyone can do at any stage of their walk with Jesus. Spiritual maturity is defined as the length of time it takes to respond to what God tells/shows them. You don’t need a bible degree or years of experience (although they can add wisdom) to do that.

Here is an example of a Kairos moment regarding one’s mounting credit card bill:
Then the cicle might go (Observation) what I am buying each month? do I need all this stuff? has this been going on long? (Reflection) what does this say about my sense of identity? why do I feel the need to buy this stuff? (Discussion) “hi Joe, I’m feeling that money has a bit of a hold over me – can I get your thoughts?” (Plan) need to cancel all but one card and limit myself to 400 per month spend (Accountability) “hey Joe, can you ask me whether I am under my 400 limit every month?” (Action) cut up the credit cards!

Future Shapes to be discussed: