[디사이플15기 목요일 저녁반 양준모 포이멘님] - "제자입니까?" 독후감 > 제자학교

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While reading the book, I had a lot of parts that I agreed on and disagreed on. But, mostly I just ended up having more questions than before about the state of churches in our current generation. I thought about the problems we have in our church, specifically I felt that pastors and leaders in our church are given too many responsibilities which reduces the availability they have to make disciples of their own. Of course, I don’t know the full situation of our church so I write this hoping that people will take this with a grain of salt.

While I was a small group leader for our young adult ministry, I ended up understanding why small groups were even needed in the first place. In Exodus, Moses was told by his Father-in-law to set leaders of the people to officiate smaller groups of the Israelites since there was no way that Moses could handle taking care of everyone all at once. 

This is the reason why, in my opinion, there has to be subset of leaders who can take care of a smaller group of people on their own so that not one person is given all the burden to bear. But, I always felt that we needed some kind of training for the small group leaders since at least for me, since I had no idea what I was doing. If I were to try to make disciples in my small group, I felt like I needed to be equipped to do so instead of just “keeping the current flow of the small group going”. 

At the same time, I felt bad to ask for something like this since our pastors are already given so many responsibilities and are taking care of a lot of individual issues at the church. Is it because of something that’s wrong with our system? I’m not really sure, but one thing that I did agree with while reading the book is that, the pastors should be focusing on certain responsibilities while being okay with letting go of other responsibilities.

This might sound controversial, but if every member in the congregation looked towards God and served each other as he commanded us to do so, there wouldn’t really be any issues at church. But, this is impossible for us since we are all sinners at the end of the day. Then, I thought of how I could potentially get started on contributing to solving this problem. Pastor Ortiz started small by, sharing his love with two or three people around him. Since it was realistically impossible for him to truly love the whole body of the church as Jesus did, he started with sharing that love with Pastor Smith. I think that’s what I will try to do. I’ll start small and try to truly love a few people around me. Even this part sounds difficult to me, but maybe if everyone was able to do that, maybe we could start to see disciples being multiplied around us.