Today has been a day of looking at mission.

This morning I drove to Coventry with Malcolm. We had a great chat on the way up about mission, God and stuff – some of which I am sure I will blog about in the not too distant future. Amazing, but it always seems that when you have someone in the car that the journey goes a lot quicker.

We met in Coventry with other YFC centres to look at how national YFC can help local centres take their evangelism/mission/whatever one step further. I think this is quite an exciting time within YFC as we try to get to grips with how we can support local sustainable mission which will result in well discipled and mature Christians a few years down the road.

Tonight was the third Reel Questions session. We looked at relationships and contrasted the relationships Jerry McGuire thought he had with his clients and colleagues and that between Sam and Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring. We also looked at the clip from Return of the Jedi where Darth Vader steps in to save Luke as an illustration of how strong the father / son love can be.

In the first two films I was struck by the contrast in shallowness of Jerry’s relationships compared with the depth of Frodo and Sam. Sam knew exactly what Frodo would do, but Jerry was not aware the guy he had been mentoring was carrying this burden of having to fire him – Jerry had not noticed. The contrast was relationship out of task/profit/personal gain compared with relationship out of love. How many relationships we have today are out of a desire for personal gain of some description compared with being from a genuine love or admiration of another person. It’s quite a deep and challenging question to ask yourself. Some of the answers might not be that comfortable.

The session went well and one of the guys decided he had learned enough by tonight to become a Christian. How exciting is that! The hard work of appropriate discipleship now needs to start. I am quite tired of seeing people become Christians, not get nurtured by church, and then kick God into touch. We hope that this time this will not happen.