Grand-kids are the best!

We recently had the tremendous privilege of spending a couple of days training some young adults, who in just a few weeks are heading overseas to church plant among unreached people. We started the training by saying that we had no interest in training the people sat in front of us - but rather, in seeing their spiritual grand-children and great-grand-children trained! The training we offered was for the benefit of those they would lead to faith in Jesus, and equip in turn.

For too long we have settled for so little. Seeing one individual come to faith is awesome - after all, it gets heaven partying - but in the context of the millions facing eternity without Jesus, are we really going to settle for that? Surely not! So not only must we set out to train every follower of Jesus we can, we must ensure that they in turn can train others in the same way.

Some of us feel threatened by this, as it can undermine our status and position, but our attitude should be that of John the Baptist - whose role was to point forward to  Jesus, of whom he said, "He must become greater; I must become less." (John 3:30) Our desire must be that those we train go on to far greater things than we ever will!

You will probably know the story of how Andrew, upon meeting Jesus, immediately went and told his brother, Simon Peter (John 1:40ff), but of course the story does not end there. Through various connections, sermons, conversions, mentoring relationships and church planting, we see a chain that runs from Andrew - Peter - Barnabas - Paul - Timothy - Epaphras - Archippus - Nympha who hosted a house church. It makes a fascinating study.

If we are to reach NoPlaceLeft, then we need to be constantly training trainers who train trainers, who...