EQUIPPING AT SKYVIEW
Being a member of Skyview isn’t some arduous task that involves a death march of volunteer work all the time. Evoking the image of a beast of burden harnessed to a kind master, Jesus did offer us his yoke, but he described it as easy, and his burden light. He does not want to crush us with ministry work, but he does call us to refreshing, fulfilling work in his Kingdom.
The Apostle Paul described a few capabilities that God gave to various kinds of leaders in the church, all of which were specifically for the purpose of “equipping the saints for the work of ministry, building up the Body of Christ.” The anonymous writer of the book of Hebrews asked God, in a beautiful closing prayer at the end of his letter, to “equip [you Christians] with everything good that you may do [God’s] will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever.” In both of these quotations, it is God that is making the people in his church more capable to do the work he wants them to do. At Skyview, we want to get in on the act and be one of the means God uses to equip his people for his purposes. We see equipping taking several forms.
The Reformed theological tradition has done a good job identifying what we call the “ordinary means of grace.” These are specific, identifiable activities that function as the primary means God uses to work in his people. These are things like preaching, prayer, baptism, communion, singing together, spending time with other Christians, and studying the Bible alone or in groups. When we do these things, trusting God to work through them, we believe God inexorably makes us more and more like Jesus over time. None of us would claim to be all that much like Jesus right now, but many of us can point to ways in which we used to be less like him, and that’s no small thing.
When we sit down to make decisions about how we want to be equipped, we find that the Christian life and the enormous intellectual and spiritual tradition behind it offer essentially unlimited options for us to explore. If we weren’t careful, our equipping would be all over the map, and might do a good job satisfying the individual curiosities and inclinations of our people, but an outsider wouldn’t be able to look at Skyview and say, “Ah, so they are into this.” We want our equipping to follow a carefully chosen theme, and so we must be strategic in making choices that give our people the skills they need to represent Christ in the particular environments in which they find themselves.
For example, people usually don’t walk into Skyview knowing the most compassionate, appropriate, loving way to help a homeless man who walks in off the street asking for bus fare. Is it best to buy him the ticket, no questions asked? Turn him away with an admonition to pull himself up by his bootstraps? Find some way to connect with him and learn the circumstances of his life to help him, through relationship, figure out how to reassemble some kind of wholeness in his life again? Ordinary people need some help in that situation. We want to equip our people to do this kind of thing well.
Statistically speaking, just about nobody is a full-time minister. Almost everyone in Skyview spends the bulk of his or her week raising children, practicing law, writing computer programs, installing electrical service, teaching students, making art, cleaning carpets, or doing any number of other things that don’t sound like Bible-preaching. At Skyview, we see every single one of these things as a divine calling God puts on his people for the purpose of restoring greater peace to a fraught and broken creation. We want to equip our people to do all of these things well, and to do them as Christians following God’s call on their lives.
Equipping is an enormous task, and requires a real commitment on the part of God’s ministers and laypeople alike. At Skyview, we take this commitment seriously, and are working to focus the training we provide to make us faithful disciples of Jesus and to help us love our neighbors in ways that our neighbors recognize. Join us!
The Apostle Paul described a few capabilities that God gave to various kinds of leaders in the church, all of which were specifically for the purpose of “equipping the saints for the work of ministry, building up the Body of Christ.” The anonymous writer of the book of Hebrews asked God, in a beautiful closing prayer at the end of his letter, to “equip [you Christians] with everything good that you may do [God’s] will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever.” In both of these quotations, it is God that is making the people in his church more capable to do the work he wants them to do. At Skyview, we want to get in on the act and be one of the means God uses to equip his people for his purposes. We see equipping taking several forms.
The Reformed theological tradition has done a good job identifying what we call the “ordinary means of grace.” These are specific, identifiable activities that function as the primary means God uses to work in his people. These are things like preaching, prayer, baptism, communion, singing together, spending time with other Christians, and studying the Bible alone or in groups. When we do these things, trusting God to work through them, we believe God inexorably makes us more and more like Jesus over time. None of us would claim to be all that much like Jesus right now, but many of us can point to ways in which we used to be less like him, and that’s no small thing.
When we sit down to make decisions about how we want to be equipped, we find that the Christian life and the enormous intellectual and spiritual tradition behind it offer essentially unlimited options for us to explore. If we weren’t careful, our equipping would be all over the map, and might do a good job satisfying the individual curiosities and inclinations of our people, but an outsider wouldn’t be able to look at Skyview and say, “Ah, so they are into this.” We want our equipping to follow a carefully chosen theme, and so we must be strategic in making choices that give our people the skills they need to represent Christ in the particular environments in which they find themselves.
For example, people usually don’t walk into Skyview knowing the most compassionate, appropriate, loving way to help a homeless man who walks in off the street asking for bus fare. Is it best to buy him the ticket, no questions asked? Turn him away with an admonition to pull himself up by his bootstraps? Find some way to connect with him and learn the circumstances of his life to help him, through relationship, figure out how to reassemble some kind of wholeness in his life again? Ordinary people need some help in that situation. We want to equip our people to do this kind of thing well.
Statistically speaking, just about nobody is a full-time minister. Almost everyone in Skyview spends the bulk of his or her week raising children, practicing law, writing computer programs, installing electrical service, teaching students, making art, cleaning carpets, or doing any number of other things that don’t sound like Bible-preaching. At Skyview, we see every single one of these things as a divine calling God puts on his people for the purpose of restoring greater peace to a fraught and broken creation. We want to equip our people to do all of these things well, and to do them as Christians following God’s call on their lives.
Equipping is an enormous task, and requires a real commitment on the part of God’s ministers and laypeople alike. At Skyview, we take this commitment seriously, and are working to focus the training we provide to make us faithful disciples of Jesus and to help us love our neighbors in ways that our neighbors recognize. Join us!
