The Navigators, making disciples

I had an insane amount of great discipling over the years. Graduate classes, short training courses, residential months-long courses, extended real-world projects with gifted mentors. Of course, all that was from my employer, in the business of engineering and leadership. In my Christian walk, 20 years now...not so much.

There are bright spots. Many churches have great classes, and the internet has made more teaching available to more people than ever before in history. But you can't do the "field work" of training with your instructor over the internet, you can't do Christianity alone, and true mentors are harder than ever to find anywhere in our secular and sacred cultures.

The Navigators at the University of South Florida (USF) over in Tampa seeks to be a bright spot for making disciples. I lunched with Chris Gatlyn this week. Chris encountered Navigators while he was a student at the University of Florida (in Gainesville). There, a Navigator guy named Andy befriended Chris and showed him in words and actions what it meant to love Jesus, to learn The Story from the bible, and how to make more disciples.

Chris and his wife Jana have ministered with the Navigators ministry at USF now for six years, after a few years working in business and teaching. For the last four years, they've led it. They're all about teaching students how to love Jesus...and how to make other disciples.

If each Christian simply recruits his replacement, so to speak, then Christianity never grows. In fact, if the replacement doesn't know how to recruit his own replacement, the whole movement is dead after two generations. But if each Christian recruits two new people who also learn to recruit two new people, then you have a movement which is self-sustaining; in fact, it's an explosive geometric progression.

Jesus said, "Make disciples." "Disciple" (mathetes) means "learner" in Greek. [1] Jesus lived with his disciples for three years, and 11 learners learned how to make more learners. (Follow that?) Is that what we usually do? I don't think so, because "education" isn't the same thing as "motivation." Learners are self-motivated; no one has to tell them to get up in the morning. People who learn to be like Jesus also become learner-makers. Why? Because he was, and is. And we become like the ones we admire.

Chris and Jana are livin' the dream. Why so passionate about investing in the lives of students? First, God made 'em that way. But second, along came a disciple-maker who understood that his mission from God wasn't just to teach, but to walk alongside people, life-on-life. Together, those ingredients multiply every investment that Andy and Chris and Jana make in the lives of those around them.  Please pray for them as they learn and prosper in this brilliant spot of light that God is shining down on this new generation.

[1] Run, don't walk, to the bookstore, church library or internet and order Ray van der Laan's video series In the Dust of the Rabbi, which can wonderfully change your life as a disciple of Jesus. Here in the West, we have no clue just how loaded that word "disciple" is - and Ray unpacks the culture and scriptures to show us the vistas and challenges God has put before us. (More on RVL in my blog post here.)

The other thing about this video is that it demonstrates how to study the bible on your own - look at what was said, by whom, when, citing what other scriptures. In that, it also gives you a glimpse of Navigators bible study, which is deep on practicing full-context bible study.