Today's blog comes from Ashley Chesnut, who works on staff at The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, as part of the Local Disciple-Making team. She is in her last semester of seminary at Beeson Divinity School. (Yay!) She has spent the past seven summers as a CentriKid staffer and is passionate about discipling girls of all ages and equipping them to be disciple-makers. ----------------------------
“One of the girls in my small group finally Facebooked me first, and she asked for my advice!”
Audrey is a college student who serves as a small group leader for eleventh grade girls at our church. For the past nine months, Audrey and I have been praying for the girls in this small group and for Audrey to be able to build relationships with them, and her statement reflects a breakthrough moment recently experienced with her slow-to-warm group.
Building Relationships
Discipleship, especially with girls, requires intentionality, and making disciples necessitates spending time with people outside of the one or two hours a week that you see them at church. Audrey has begun to meet with these girls one-on-one outside of small group in order to get to know them, to find out about their families and where they stand with Jesus, to pray with them, and to talk to them about their quiet times and if they even know how to study Scripture.
What Audrey is doing isn’t radical or new. She’s following the example of Christ who spent three years living life with the twelve disciples. Their ability to spread the gospel and lead in the early church stems from the time Jesus invested in them as He served, taught, healed, and interacted with all types of people.
Being with Jesus
Equipping the Twelve was a time-intensive task, and with the block-headed disciples, it required great patience on Jesus’ part. Yet He continued to love them and to teach them. And while it was obvious that the disciples didn’t have seminary degrees or even college educations, people later recognized that their power stemmed from having been with Jesus (Acts 4:13).
Knowing Jesus intimately – this is what makes the difference as we make disciples (Jn. 15:4-5). It is knowing Christ that compels Audrey to give up time studying and hanging out with friends in order to invest in a group of eleventh grade girls. It is knowing Christ that gives her the wisdom and the discernment to know how to teach and what to say to these girls, and it is her knowing Christ that will have an impact on them.
“Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus.” –Acts 4:13
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