Following on from my last blog about playing 2nd fiddle, I have been thinking a lot about how Jesus acted and how often we are so different. Ok, reading the gospels we see how crowds seem to follow him everywhere because of what they had heard of him – the things he said and did. Yet how often (not always though) Jesus said to people ‘don’t say anything about this to anyone’.
He could have talked to Zacchaeus there in front of everybody but said he would go to his house and chat with him (in private). Many times we read of how Jesus went apart from the others on his own to pray and think. When the crowd was so big he was forced into a boat, after talking to them, he set off for the other side of the lake. When he went to the house of Jairus, he told everyone to leave the house so he could talk to the daughter himself.
I wonder if he were here today how we would approach his preaching and actions, particularly his healings and miracles.
No doubt there would be big campaigns organised over a number of days and nights with a lot of spectacular advertising about miraculous things he’s done; there would be stewards prepared to deal with the ‘seekers’; there would be offering baskets ready to raise funds for more outreach; there would be specially invited worship groups to lead us all into the time when he would speak to us and it would all be recorded on discs for posterity – which of course you could buy for a reasonable amount of money.
But Jesus had a different way of doing things. He often went away with his 12 close friends to spend time together and talk of kingdom things. As with Jairus’s daughter, Zacchaeus, the mad man among the tombs, the Samaritan woman at the well, Nicodemus who went to see him at night (and many more) it’s about friendship and relationship one-to-one.
Is it because he is showing us that relationships are more important than organisation; that kingdom priorities are not so much about structure, big campaigns and slick advertising but about lives being changed? In large, organised campaigns lives are sometimes changed and I accept that. I have both attended and been involved in many such events over the years but can’t help wondering if the spirit in which it is all done has sometimes become somewhat removed from what Jesus intended.
4 comments:
The proof of the pudding is in the eating on this one I think Mavis. People often point to big churches and there numbers joining, but how many of them stay? How many of them leave through the back door, so to speak? How many of those who stay, stay because of relationships and not because of the big event that may have drawn them in?
You're so right Joanna. I know that the big event is often a way of reaching as many people as possible with the gospel (as indeed Jesus spoke on many occasions to the crowds)but I think that it's our attitude to such things that's important. And even after the big event people are less likely to stay if there is no close relationship made. At the end of the day it's about a personal relationship with God.
You might remember Carlos Anacondia, an Argentine evangelist sometimes compared to Billy Graham, and indeed, a man of God. After one of his cruzades in Cordoba, I met a family who had attended those meetings, their names had been taken at the altar, but... nobody ever visited their home. They had not been introduced to the person of Jesus.
Yes I remember the name but what you say is very sad. Makes you wonder why? More questions!
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