In this Take 5 interview we catch up with Rob to get an update on their church in Bradford Ontario, their discipleship model and how they are working at implementing it. We specifically talk about the "questioning" part of their process and how maybe making room for people to process what they are learning will allow greater development.
In this Take 5 interview we catch up with Rob to get an update on their church in Bradford Ontario, their discipleship model and how they are working at implementing it. We specifically talk about the "questioning" part of their process and how maybe making room for people to process what they are learning will allow greater development.
Transcript of Podcast by Multiply Network
Created to champion church multiplication, provide learning and inspire new disciple-
making communities across Canada
2019 – Rob Good
Paul Fraser: We are really happy to have Rob Good from Promise Church, a new church plant in Bradford, Ontario. Pastor Rob, welcome.
Rob Good: How are you? Thanks for having me here.
Q. It’s so good that you’re on and why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey this last year with Promise Church, exciting stuff happening.
A. Yes, it is really exciting. We started on September 16, 2018 and we’re just at a great spot. We’re in a public school called Chris Hatfield Public School. It is a brand new school. God has just allowed this community to start to form in a big way. They warned us, when the summer came, they said oh, look out, because attendance is going to drop. But in the summer we hit five record attendance amounts.
Q. Wow.
A. We’ve been growing and celebrating a ton.
Q. That’s so good. And I just love the fact that you guys took the risk and congratulations on getting to your first year. It’s always a tough push; the pre-launch season and then the launch season. Great stuff happening in Bradford.
What I want to chat a little bit more with you today in our short time we have is I love your discipleship model, and specifically one part of it. But I’ll let you kind of unpack it quickly and then maybe we’ll dive into that one part that I’m pretty interested in.
A. Sure. Right. So the discipleship model is actually built on a cycle of experience. So we call it Experiential Discipleship. When I was studying the Bible, especially the Old Testament, I was looking for, is there a place where the narrative of God has disappeared, is there no cultural understanding of God or massive narrative of God, meta narrative of God. And I found it in the person of Abraham. And then I asked the question: What did God do to introduce himself? Because I recognized we are in a post-Christian world and I recognized that God used the motife of promise to introduce himself. So God said here’s a promise and he asked for a response of trust. So we go from promise into trust. That’s the first transition. And then we go from trust into following, that trust that you place in God, transitions a person into an action of following. Their life orients around that trust. We saw Abraham do that as he continued to move westward towards the Promised Land.
And then trust or that following piece gives way to a really unique part of discipleship that happens again and again in the Bible and in Christian experience because following leads into questioning.
Q. We’re going to come back to that because that’s the one thing I just love about this model.
A. Absolutely. So questioning allows us to explore the infinite God and start to question some of the doubts that we have, some of our presuppositions about God so that God can grow us from there into seeing his mission in a greater light.
And then from mission what happens to many Christians and it happened throughout the Bible in the character stories, is God leads a new promise. Sometimes we use the word calling but sometimes we just use the word new promise, a new revelation of God that requires us to experience trust.
Q. Yes.
A. Yes. So I’m constantly experiencing the same thing that a non-Christian is experiencing, you know, that tension between these stages of trust and rest and boredom and questions and moving into something greater.
Q. Yes. So let’s get back to that question please because I’ve just never heard or read and maybe I just haven’t heard or read a lot, but this idea of making room for doubt, making room for questioning. Why don’t you kind of unpack that in the time we have left?
A. Sure. There are a couple of thoughts. One of my professors really influenced me. He said that an unquestioned faith is an immature faith. And then another big impact was St. John of the Cross when he talks about the dark night of the soul. The basic idea of a dark night of the soul is that your foundation of God is too small and God changes your situation in order to allow you to expand your foundation of who God is. And in those times I think it is really important that pastors recognize that people can be going through cataclysmic shifts in their understanding of God and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Q. Um-hmm.
A. In the past we’ve taken that as a bad thing and I think that if a pastor leans into those pastoral moments, even organizationally we can really get into questioning. So what we’ve done is we have incorporated technology to keep stuff organized. We use tablets and there are a lot of pastors, there’s a trend towards text messages at the end of the service and that’s a wonderful thing. We do that. But we take a series of four weeks and on the fifth week we have a forum where people get into discussions. We ask questions out to the congregation. They discuss and then they generate questions and they throw it back to a panel using our technology. And these places for questions have really allowed people to grapple with their own understanding of what God is saying in his word.
Q. Love it. Thanks so much for jumping on today because I just think people need to build that into the discipleship process. Give space for people to ask questions. Thanks, Rob, for doing this today.
A. No problem. Thank you.
--- End of Recording.