Pastoral Pings ~ The Initiation of the Initiator

          My morning time with God usually begins with some expression of wanting to know God better than ever before. Sometimes this is the general awareness that this is the way of life, that God’s children can grow up to know him better and better every day. Other times this is a very specific consciousness of something that is wrong with me, or hurting me, that makes me want to know God in the way that such a flaw, or hurt, or failure is longing to know him.

          Today this led me to one word: Initiate. Through the course of my prayer-journaling I used a variety of derivations of this word such as “initiates” and “initiator”. However, one thought wove everything together: one of the marks of maturity is that we become the people who initiate the care of others.

          For quite some time our home church has been exploring what it means to grow to maturity in Christ.[1] This maturity is primarily corporate, thinking of the one new man,[2] the one body of Christ,[3] growing to “mature manhood”.[4] This means that the church of any given community should be maturing in a consistent corporate way, while containing individual believers in a whole range of maturity levels.

          I say this because, if individual believers think everything to do with maturity is about how they themselves are doing, they will carry a burden that is just that, a burden! If every believer can see themselves inside this body of Christ that is maturing all around them, they can then rest in where they are at the moment, and simply grow up from there. The least mature should always have the most mature leading the whole church to maturity with “one heart and soul”.[5]

          While we must keep true to the plumb-line of God in our consideration of the one body of Christ, and each one who is a unique member of that body, today I was drawn to think about those members of the body who add the element of initiative to the life of the church. I do not mean by this the way that anyone can initiate an idea of something the church should do. Even the youngest among us have good suggestions of things a church family can do together.

          What I am referring to is the characteristic of initiative that belongs to maturity. Children can initiate the idea of a church ice-cream social, even thinking of it as something they could invite their friends to share. Likely there will be some senior saints who quite appreciate when a youngster in the Lord comes up with such a delightful idea. However, a child’s initiation of an idea does not call for us burdening him with the initiative to pull off the event. Event planning and coordination require a bit more maturity and knowledge than we could expect of an ice cream-loving child.

          The kind of initiative I was considering is that of the mature, who can initiate the oversight of the flock of God, or of members of the flock of God, and whatever ministry initiatives the flock requires. The mature are the initiators of care, of passing on to others what they have received in the Lord.

          To see this, let’s look at a summary of maturity levels beginning from the lower end of the scale, on up to the highest level of maturity: 

ü  babies require adults to initiate everything for their care

ü  babies grow into children who begin to think of things they can do for themselves

ü  children mature into teenagers who learn how to think of what others need in group settings

ü  teenagers mature into adults who are able to look at how they can contribute to the good of a group of people, like the church

ü  adults (often) mature into married couples who learn to put concentrated focus on caring for another person in the most intimate, personal, and responsible of ways

ü  married couples mature into parents who can work together to care for their children

ü  parents mature into elders who can oversee the gatherings of the flock of God

       As you can see, the more we mature, the more we need to initiate in relation to others. The elders of the church are those men who have developed to the maturity where they can initiate all the church needs to continue growing up to be the healthiest, most mature church a group of people can be on this side of heaven.

          I present this in the hope that you will see that you may need others to initiate the Soul Care you need, or you may be in a place where others have the right to expect you to initiate ministry for their Soul Care. Look in your heart. Do you see more of what you need, or more of what you are gifted to give. Ask God who he wants you to connect with so you can receive ministry they initiate, or initiate the ministry they need. The more we initiate what our level of maturity requires, the more we contribute to the growing maturity of the whole body of Christ.

          From my heart,

          Monte

‘© 2013 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.)

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[1] “Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity…” (Hebrews 6:1); “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (I Corinthians 14:20); “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).

[2] “that he might create in himself one new man” (Ephesians 2:15).

[3] “so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Romans 12:15).

[4] “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

[5] “Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common” (Acts 4:32).