Forge Intensive Saturday - Mark Sayers

I thought I'd post up my raw notes from the intensive ... totally unedited I'm afraid, so please excuse anything wrong, offensive or unintelligible.
Mark Sayers. Discipleship.
This intensive about our heart's motivation, not only our heart's but the heart's of those we seek to lead.

There has been lots of reshaping of how we meet and what we do, but very little discipleship, very little radical follower-ship of Jesus.

Are we producing robust disciples for our missional environment?
- often it seems that discipleship is measured by attendance at church programs.
- maybe we don't really have much of an idea about what a disciple of Jesus really looks like in the western world today.

Often the people who are leading emerging missional churches are on fire, but the people they are leading aren't that keen. So the key is to be able to engender in people a missional excitement, not just trying to to do it all yourself.

Our culture is full of supposed freedom, seemingly endless pleasure, but the reality is that people are often trapped.

So people in our churches hardly remember their call (conversion/call to mission) and they are distracted by this world that seems to promise everything but delivers very little.

The beginning of radical discipleship is by taking steps out into the unknown to begin with. People are standing back where you were, looking out at you walking into the unknown and wondering what to do. How do you encourage people to follow you out into the unknown? How do we challenge people to come with us on the dangerous journey into the unknown?

Often people grew up with a view of God that is either about Control or Conversion. God's love is linked to either of these things. But maybe now people have a more Contract sort of view, if I give to God then I'll get such and such back from him. A Contract view of relationships turns other people or God into tools for the individual to use.

We need to move away from the Contract view towards a Covenant mentality. Contract is based on 'if' - if you do this for me then I'll do this for you. Covenant says that each party will deliver on their promise regardless. The Covenant is done in a spirit of submission, a Contract is done in a spirit of greed. The Contract is about what you can get, the Covenant is about what you can give. A Covenant is about all of life, a Contract is limited. A Covenant is almost anti-individualist. A Contract is begun with the end in mind, a Covenant is eternal. Covenant is principle based and Contract is sort of law based.