Written by Peter Blanch
“Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.”
It’s a great saying. The essence of this saying is that it is inadequate to help someone by simply providing for their needs. Real help comes in training them to look after their own needs.
This thinking has been applied to Christian ministry. Jesus says “Go and make disciples.” And with God’s help we love to be a part of making disciples for Jesus. When Jesus made disciples in his own ministry here on earth he trained his disciples to go and make more disciples. He didn’t just give a man a fish, he taught a man how to fish. In fact, he did even more than this. He trained his disciples to train others to make disciples.
So Jesus took the saying even further to become “Teach a man to teach other men to fish.” We want to get to the point where everyone can train others to catch fish. Or in Christian ministry, where every disciple is someone who can make disciple-making disciples.
This weekend, our WWEC Youth Group is holding their own weekend away [Youth Camp] out at Glenfalloch near Holbrook. One of our core aims for our group of youth is to train them to become disciple-making disciples. Yes, we have fun at Youth Group, but our goal is muchmore than fun. Our aim to train disciple-making disciples shapes everything we do.
This means that at the heart of Youth Group each week is listening to and following God’s Word to us in the Bible. Just like here at church on Sunday and in our Growth Groups, WWEC Youth – as their steady biblical diet – works through books of the Bible. In order to emphasise the main point from the Bible passage for the week, our games usually underline the main teaching point.
We also have a segment each week called “Following the King.” Week by week we investigate what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus in the world we live. It is where we spend time encouraging each other to stand up for Jesus and follow him in every aspect of life. Sometimes we hear stories from where our youth have put Jesus first at High School, among their friends and teachers, refusing to be ashamed of their Saviour.
WWEC Youth Group is a great bunch of young adults from all sorts of backgrounds. Please be praying for our Youth Group – both the youth and the leaders over this weekend and into the rest of this year. That there would be great opportunities for them to mature and grow this weekend and through the rest of the year.
But please don’t limit your prayers to the immediate opportunities! Pray also for the future. Youth Group at the moment is relatively small with about 10-12 people involved on Friday nights, but we are hoping in the coming years that it will grow significantly. There are already quite a number of youth coming on Friday nights that are not regular here at church with us each Sunday. They have been invited by friends and have joined us at Youth Group. If our youth continue to invite friends, we will continue to reach more youth with the news of Jesus. And as more and more of our children grow out of our children’s ministry into our youth ministry we are looking forward to them bringing their friends along to Youth Group and church as well. The opportunity for our evangelism together among the youth of Wagga is enormous. Please pray that over the next decade we will see many youth in our region converted to Christ and finding a future of solid hope in Him.
But again – don’t stop there with your prayers! Please be praying that out of our youth there will grow an army of “disciple-making disciples”. That among our youth we would find a new generation of missionaries, church planters, evangelists, pastors and teachers. That out of our youth God would be pleased to provide godly leaders for their generation and beyond – that they too would give of themselves to make disciples who make disciples. So that the great name of our God would be magnified more and more as each year passes while we wait for Jesus to return.
Peter Blanch
