During our ministry encounters with people outside the walls of the church, we build rapport. We accept and love people as they are. We don’t require them to change in any way before we minister to their needs.
To put myself in the right frame of mind, I think of the person coming to me for ministry as my new best friend. Thinking this way helps me to build instant rapport with those I encounter. In that frame of mind, I immediately like them. I want to understand them. I want to do what I can to help them.
“Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him…”—Mark 10:21 (NKJV)
During encounters with people, we begin to form relationships by demonstrating sincere care and concern and a willingness to help people through their problems—a willingness to help them find the answers they are looking for.
After our ministry encounters, we often invite people to stay with us, hang out, and join us for meals. Discipleship is birthed. Discipleship can begin immediately, during the initial encounter, and be ongoing from that point.
I was thinking about this near the end of one of our week-long outreaches at an extreme, radical, very non-Christian festival. Many of those who had received ministry during the week stayed around to join us at mealtimes.
Speaking with one of our leaders, I said, “You know, I feel like we are medics on a battlefield. There are wounded people all around us, and we are scrambling to get to them and bind up their wounds and bring healing and help to them.” After I related that feeling, I remembered this passage from Luke. The comment in parentheses is my own:
“And there were a great number of tax collectors and others who sat down with them. And their scribes and the Pharisees complained against His disciples, saying, ‘Why do You eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician (or maybe a medic?), but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.’”—Luke 5:29–32 (NKJV)
As we began to follow Jesus’ model for ministry, we began to experience similar results to those that Jesus experienced.
Father Greg Boyle shares similar experiences in his dealings with Los Angeles gang members:
“If you read Scripture scholar Marcus Borg and go to the index in search of ‘sinner,’ it’ll say, ‘see outcast.’ This was a social grouping of people who felt wholly unacceptable. The world had deemed them disgraceful and shameful, and this toxic shame, as I have mentioned before, was brought inside and given a home in the outcast.
“Jesus’ strategy is a simple one: He eats with them. Precisely to those paralyzed in this toxic shame, Jesus says, ‘I will eat with you.’ He goes where love has not yet arrived, and he ‘gets his grub on.’ Eating with outcasts rendered them acceptable.”—Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, p. 70, by Gregory Boyle, 2010. Free Press.
We weren’t too concerned about the level of commitment exhibited by the people who hung out with us after ministry. Jesus allowed anyone to follow Him initially, but at some point in the journey, each person had to count the cost and make an individual choice either to commit everything to Jesus and become a true disciple or to turn back and return to his or her old lifestyle. Everyone will come to a point of no return somewhere along the path.
