Going through the motions

Last Friday, while Dru practiced football at a local park, Cooper and I went onto the baseball field to work on his pitching. Next year will be his first year in "kid pitch" so he wants to be prepared to try and pitch. Although I pitched very little back in the day, I do know the mechanics and motions of pitching and so I agreed to work with him. To put it mildly, the kid started off throwing like "Nuke" LaLoosh or Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn. He had all power and no control. After we worked on some fundamentals of his pitching motion, we were able to tame that wild arm that was hitting the back stop with more pitches than the catcher's mitt. What Cooper needed was some instruction on how to do things right and what he was doing wrong. What he needed was for someone to come along side of him and show him what he needed to do. This is similar to what is needed in developing new believers.

In Matthew 28:18-20 Christ commands all of His followers to "make disciples" of those who come to faith in Christ. Unfortunately, what we often times see is that when it comes to making disciples we will "dip" them and then we will "drop" them. This simply means we focus intensely on leading someone into a relationship with Christ and then once they are baptized and sitting in the church pew, we "drop" them and end our discipleship making process. What we do is we lead them into a relationship with Christ and then expect them to figure out how to develop that relationship without any help or guidance. We as individual believers in Christ and as churches need to make sure that we are doing everything we can to help new believers develop in their faith. It may be that we need to start a "Next Steps" class at our church to lead new believers into a more grounded faith. Maybe we need to individually mentor a new believer. Regardless of how it happens, we need to make sure that new believers have someone coming along side of them to show them how to develop their faith and live the Christian life. So here's a challenge for you today. Find a new believer that you can help develop in their faith. It may be a family member, friend, co-worker, or church member, but find someone you can help develop. Then get started. Don't wait or you won't do it. Make contact today and find a way to pour into this baby Christian so that you can help them mature in their faith.

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