1 Feed My Lambs

When we start to explore the Bible's teaching that Christ is raising up people from among the believers to lead the churches, people will often feel inadequate.  How can I possibly lead God's people? I can't even get my own Christian life in order, so how can I lead others?

Well, the NT does say there are qualifications.  Questions mainly of lifestyle.  If you are a drunkard, or dishonest in handling money, or you are hot-tempered, then you are not yet ready to be an elder in the church.

But, having said that, God is not calling perfect people to be leaders in the church.  If that were so, there would be no leaders for the church!

No, we see clearly in John 21 that the one Jesus appointed as the leader of the apostles was himself a notorious failure.

All church leaders are failures. The leader of the leaders was himself a failure.  But they're forgiven failures. 

John 21:15-19
Notice that Jesus asks Peter basically the same question, but three times.  This was no doubt a way of rubbing salt into Peter's mental wounds.  He had denied Christ three times.  And so Jesus asks him three times, do you love me more than the other apostles do?  Peter had proudly proclaimed that he would never deny Jesus: “Lord, I’m ready to go with You both to prison and to death!” (Luke 22:33)
He felt he was the bravest, the most loyal.  But in the heat of the moment, when the likelihood of persecution and death loomed before him, he denied Christ.  Even before a servant-girl.

So, that's the first lesson.  We don't begin with technique: 'Bible-handling skills'.  We begin with our own frailty and self-love.  None of us is 'cut out' to be a preacher.  We all love ourselves too much to be qualified as shepherds of the flock.  But if we confess that we are fearful and easily deceived- indeed that we have often denied our master by our words and our living- then we can start to be people Christ can use in his service.

Secondly, our task is very simple.  True- the Bible is a complex book in some ways.  It will take every fibre of our intellect to grapple with it and be able to teach it to others.  But our commission is so simple it can be said in three words. "Feed my lambs"

Let's take them one by one.
i) 'Feed' - we feed Jesus's lambs by teaching his word.  Exercising hospitality will be part of our task, so serving rice and lentils may actually be something we regularly do.  It may keep some poorer members alive.  But we are supremely to feed people's souls.
Isaiah 55:2 tells us that the eating that really counts is listening to God's word: "Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and you will enjoy the choicest of foods."
JOb declared: "I have not departed from the commands of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my daily food." (Job 23:12)

'My' - If lead a Bible study or plant a church I am not gathering together 'my' flock.  They are Jesus' lambs.  Or take Instagram: it tells you exactly the number of people who have viewed and Liked your posts.  Hopefully some reading this have many social media followers and tweet, instagram and Facebook to the benefit of many.  But those 5k, 50k, 500k followers: don't be deceived.  These are 'my' lambs, Jesus says.  Likewise, don't be discouraged if God chooses to grow someone else's church more than yours.  They're Jesus' lambs.

'Lambs'.  A lamb is a baby sheep. Obviosuly.  But Jesus chose that word, even though normally the Bible speaks of a shepherd and his sheep.  Jesus wanted to give Peter a clear vision for teaching fragile, young believers.  Praise God- he caught that vision and ministered tenderly to the least and weakest.  "Like newborn infants," he wrote,  "desire the pure milk of the word, so that you may grow up into your salvation." (1 Peter 2:2).  In the way we prepare our messages, we should always consider the one with least BIble knowlegde, the one who can't find his way round the Bible, the one who can't read at all.  The one who is so vulnerable to scandalous sins like drunkenness and sleeping around.  Feed my lambs, Jesus says.  By all means push the mature to think deeply, but include plenty of plain statements and stories in simple language so that there is food there for the simplest lamb with the shortest attention span.  Three words for a lifetime's ministry.  FEED MY LAMBS.

Feed My Lambs- Introduction

Duhok, 31 March 2020

Dear Friends,
Lockdown has given me the opportunity to blog some biblical meditations about preaching and preachers. Like the apostle Paul in prison, I am prevented from seeing people face to face but I have more opportunity to write.

This opportunity comes at an exciting time. Here in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Kurdish people have been coming to faith in Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the Saviour, and I have been trying to train them to faithfully teach the Bible for themselves, rather than be dependent on Westerners to be their teachers.

I remember vividly how this training material came into being. A couple of Kurdish believers came over to visit us at Christmas time 2018 and, sitting down on doushaks, we looked together at a series of verses I had hastily chalked up on a Google doc. They came to my mind from all over the Bible. But they came to have a certain shape to them and so I now give them the title ‘Feed My Lambs’. This, I will argue, is the commission Christ has given to teachers in his church.

I hope to somehow make this material available to the Arabic and Kurdish speakers in the churches here in Kurdistan, but I will try first to write up my thoughts in English- any feedback you can provide might sharpen my thinking and so make it more of a blessing to the fledgling churches in Kurdistan.

Praise God: a movement has gathered momentum to train people in this region how to do expository preaching.  These are valuable skills and I was delighted to be able to attend the Simeon Trust workshops in Dubai.  However, we need not just skills in exegesis, but we need to understand the bigger picture of why we give ourselves to preaching.  And we need to be ourselves changed if we are to be fruitful preachers.  As is sometimes said, it's not so much about examining the Bible; we need to let the Bible examine us.

If the church in Iraq can in this way somehow be a blessing to sister churches in the West, that would be sweet. As I so often say, we must not believe the narrative that the BBC and many secularist media outlets put out that the church in Iraq is gradually dying. To the contrary, the living church in Iraq is growing and people who had not heard of Christ are now hearing his wondrous good news announced to them in their own languages.

She who is in Babylon, we might say, greets you (see 1 Pet 5:13).

Kindle or pdf?

Training People to Treasure Good Books

We are just coming to the end of our 3-year dictionary project.  Now comes the exciting development where we can use all the research we've done into the Kurdish language to produce quality Christian resources in Kurdish.

But we're on the horns of a dilemma, and I want us to act wisely here.

We will aim to print and sell hard copies of God's Big Picture, but in addition...

Should we make books available as free pdf downloads, or rather sell them on Kindle?

In the West, Christian publishers generally sell e-books, so you might think this is a no-brainer. After all, it is often said that what people don't pay for they don't value. I agree.

However, there are other players, notably HeartCry and 9Marks, who put out their Arabic materials as free pdfs online, as well as selling them.  I respect their ministries; they have good reasons for making pdfs easy as pie to send from one device to another.

However, many book pdfs do the rounds here in Kurdistan and they are not really treasured.  Consider these factors:

1. It's not easy to bookmark on a pdf where you're up to.  Pdfs are great for skimming and searching, but less good for reading from cover-to-cover.
2. They look cheap and worthless.  They often come without a nice cover.

We have an opportunity to sell God's Big Picture for about $3 as a Kindle book.  It might be the first ever Kurdish book on Kindle to be published in Kurmanji, Behdini and Sorani in one volume.

There are some arguments against the Kindle approach though:

1. Some say Kurds don't use Kindle.  I don't think this is a clinching argument. In any case, we're dealing with a tiny community who would read Christian books, and they could easily be persuaded to start using Kindle on a tablet or phone if they're not already used to reading English or German books for example on Kindle.
2. How would they pay? There are many Kurds in the West- so they can use a credit card.  But even within the Kurdistan Region, the Fastpay app is now available and allows people to buy online.
3. Translated books are not ideal.  It might be better not to make a big splash by recommending God's Big Picture to all Kurds as if this was the must-read for all Kurdish believers.  I have noticed that the same story that is so well told in GBP can be much more powerfully told in terms that actually relate God's kingdom purposes to the Kurdish people.  For example, Abraham travelled through Kurdish territory; Jews were exiled by the Assyrians to what we now call Kurdistan; those Jews heard the gospel at the Day of Pentecost, coming from Media, Mesopotamia etc.  So there is a case for regarding GBP as a useful training tool for Bible teachers among the Kurds, best instantly accessible as a pdf, alongside the Arabic which will be available as a pdf- not least in establishing the spiritual language that is needed to teach the Old Testament.  Furthermore, we are not the publishers.  Heartcry are the publishers and they will probably post the Arabic pdf on their website; so it could make sense to go along with their policy for other languages.
   
   Although God's Big Picture has sold well and been translated into about 30 languages, probably we shouldn't expect it to be the classic book that will grab the hearts of lots of Kurds.  Perhaps that book that we pray for- tailor-made for a Kurdish readership and taking into account the archaeology that is all around Duhok and Erbil- would take another 3 or 4 years to produce.  That will be the one to sell on KIndle and say Invest Your money in it: it's really worth owning and reading carefully!