BCMB 040 - Global Discipleship.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

BCMB 040 - Global Discipleship.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Joan Godard:
It was like they recognized it, and they recognized it to to the point where they said, we are so attracted to the light and our family represented light to them, our lives represented light to them.

Trever Godard:
We saw from the book of Matthew how Jesus was always on mission with his disciples out on the streets, in the mountains, wherever he was. He was always kind of class in session, and there were often these people that were interrupting and coming up and and and Jesus would use that as a teaching moment and help the person, heal a person.

Speaker1:
Welcome to the BCMB podcast, Pastor to Pastor. This is a podcast by the British Columbia Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. We want to help equip and encourage pastors, churches and anyone else who wants to listen in and be more effective in their ministry. This is episode 40 Global Discipleship with Rob Penner and Trever and Joan Godard.

Rob Thiessen:
Hey, everyone, thanks for joining us today. My name is Rob Thiessen, I'm the conference minister, conference pastor, something like that for the BCMB churches, and I'm happy to have you join us for this podcast today. Really excited to have a couple of guests with me who are friends from a long time, way back - Trever and John Godard. Thank you for coming down, they're down from Cawston, traveling through and here in the office at BCMB at Columbia Bible College. So and then online on video, Rob Penner from Willingdon Church way out there in Vancouver. Rob, thanks for joining us. So we're going to see how this works. A conversation where three of us here are in person and Rob's online. But our topic today is I want to hear and I want I want our listening audience to be able to just glean a little bit from your experience because because all of you have served the Lord oversees globally and you're back here now and you're involved in ministry, love to hear a little bit about what God's doing in your lives these days. But you've you've all spent lifetimes working in other cultures and making disciples. And in our time right now during COVID pandemic, the topic of discipleship is is fresh and being asked in a new way. So all of our pastors, listeners, churches asking questions well, if we're if we're restricted from gathering and we can't do Sunday mornings the way we're used to doing them, what does that say about church? Like what? What is what is our church and are we making disciples? And then what if? What if things really went badly? Like, what if the government actually shut us down? And so these are causing us to have really good discussions. And for North Americans, you know, this is a hardship. But I think in other parts of the world, you know, this is like Tuesday, which is how I think it was Johanes Matties said in Eastern Europe, he said, Oh, COVID, that's like Tuesday, he said. Because that's like, that's life. We always are in some kind of place of shut down or obstacles. But for us, it's a big, a big deal. And so I really welcome you and thank you for making the time to be here. So the way I usually start these podcasts, you guys introduce yourselves. Tell us a little bit about the community that formed your faith. And so I'm going to start with Rob. He's online and Rob, so hopefully the folks can hear you, but share with us a little bit about your journey and the community that shaped you.

Rob Penner:
Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me here, Rob. I've I grew up in Abbotsford and a Christian family, a large family, and I'll probably skip through my teenage years. When I was 20 years old, I stood up in an evening service to receive a call to missions. And I remember we sang when I survey the wondrous cross that night, and that song has always been kind of a theme song for me in my life. The following, well that very year I went to YWAM and did a YWAM discipleship training school. And then the year after that nineteen eighty one, I went to Hong Kong, intending to stay for six months. It turned into about 40 years in the Chinese world. Up until last year, when I finally moved back to to Vancouver, which is kind of the Chinese world as well. But I would say most formative for me, I would probably cite to, I guess, well, the first would be an organization or group Youth With a Mission. I think that's where I really learn how to be a follower of Christ. We were strong in spiritual disciplines and the prayer life, paying attention to God's word, taking it seriously, risk taking obedience, understanding my calling, being given an opportunities to do things I could never imagine doing at such a young age. And I did that until I was age thirty four and then I came back and went to seminary and became a pastor, and I've done that at a few different churches. But YWAM youth with the mission has really helped shape me. The other one would be an author who I've read every word by I think Eugene Peterson, and he has been just a major shaper for how I understand God, how I understand who I am before God and the world that God has put me in. Hmm. Yeah. So I think that would be the two, probably the two things I would cite mostly.

Rob Penner:
That's awesome. That is quite a quite a breadth of influence there between those two things there's. Yeah, that's great, Rob. Thank you. And Trever and Joan, tell us a little bit about who's going to go first. Joan.

Joan Godard:
Ok, so I also grew up in Abbotsford, and my parents were mennonite brethren here in this, in this community. And my dad was very much an influence on my life. He had had polio as a child and was paraplegic, but his faith was, it just superseded everything. It engulfed everything. And he was well known in the community for that faith and for such a genuine form of evangelism. And I believe it was discipleship at that time. Even though we didn't, that wasn't a buzz word. But then, well, I went to MEI and at the school I remember a class we had that was on Anabaptist peacemaking and or the faith, the Anabaptist faith. And I remember thinking, like, what on earth do we need to know about peacemaking here because we live in a very peaceful community and environment? But fast forward, through several numerous years, God led Trever and I to Columbia, South America, which at that time was known as the most violent country in the world. And wow, did it ever collide with my, my head knowledge? Because all of a sudden it's like, What do you do with all of this? How do you how do you actually be a peacemaker in an environment of such incredible violence on every level? And so I would say the community that most shaped me and this is so unlikely. But it was a group of young men who came to live with us, who were all from gangs. And I don't even say they were ex gang members because they were in the process of becoming ex gang members. But their world represented such darkness and heaviness. And when we became friends with them and eventually they came to live with us, some of them, and they introduced us to their whole world, this dark, cavernous kind of world. It was like they recognized it and they recognized it to to the point where they said, we are so attracted to the light and our family represented light to them. Our lives represented light to them. And so they to me, that was the influence. It was all of a sudden, OK, how do we live as peacemakers and teach them to be peacemakers in such a dark world that they've come from and that they live in and and a violent world? So I'd say my faith was most shaped by these young people, not just the men that lived their whole world around them. It really deepened my faith. It made me realize I have nothing if I don't have Jesus walking with me, teaching me, giving me wisdom to say, to know what to say and how to say it and how to live.

Rob Thiessen:
And that's awesome. So that is surprising, but how God, you know, puts us into it. It's like a place where your faith was forged, right? Yeah. Under fire. Yeah, Trever. Yeah.

Trever Godard:
Thanks, Rob again for inviting us here. This is this is a neat experience to be together and talking about something that's definitely on our hearts. Just I grew up in Saskatchewan and not Abbotsford, so have a different context for for many things. But just fast forward to nineteen eighty seven when we arrived to Columbia and the churches there are mennonite brethren churches chose one, two or three of their key young people to be given to us for a span of two years that we had left in our first term there. And literally our assignment was to make disciples out of these 15 young adults and we hadn't. I mean, they were studying or they were working, and so we could only really put them into small groups and meet them once a week, and we did what was kind of just natural. Let's do a Bible study with them. And after doing that in the course of those two years, we started to realize there has to be more to disciple making than just a Bible study. Jesus was was with his disciples, all practically 24/7, and we realized that our lives need to intersect with them on on several different planes. And so we started looking for ways to get out with our disciples, go to sporting events with them, go on picnics, trips, mission trips, whatever we could do, get outside of the four walls kind of thing. And there was a verse that really stuck out to me from Luke 6:40, where the student will become like the teacher, and that really challenged me to examine my own life because I knew that we were close enough to these disciples, that we were influencing them in many different ways. And did I want them to become like me as I was? And that was a motivation to be more like Jesus so that they wouldn't they wouldn't become like me, but would become like Jesus. And so over the course of the next 30 years, we spent 15 years in Colombia and another 15 in Mexico. In between that four years teaching at Bethany Bible College, where we really made it our goal and our intention to to not just disciple with our words, but with our lives to give our lives to them and to to get let them be a part of our family. That's why we had people come live with us. That's why we ran the discipleship training program in both of those countries. We started in our house. They could see our family see our marriage. And and it went both ways. We were I was greatly impacted by their lives, by their stories, by their questions, by their commitment, in a totally different context. And so that that really did shape me in the way I went forward from there.

Rob Thiessen:
Well, in your sharing about your lives, Trever and Joan you're jumping into the topic too just about discipleship and disciple making. It strikes me you're talking about a family model in a lot of ways, right? You're and Paul sometimes writes like that in his letters. You know, I was like a mother to you. You know what happens that I'm not concerned about you like a father or whatever he he he speaks like that. So you had a unique, unique kind of discipleship family model. You invited people into family and you did family with people, all kinds.

Trever Godard:
Mm hmm. Well, Paul says in Thessalonians that, you know, we we gave you the message, the gospel, but we also gave you our very lives. And that I think that's a definition of disciple making you. You can't separate them. We disciple with our lives. And so if it's going to be effective, they really need to see a part of us in in all kinds of ways and places, right?

Joan Godard:
It's also always struck me that Jesus didn't call the whole masses his disciples, although we know there are more than 12, you know, there were others, too, that were following him, but he really focused on a small group of people compared to the crowds, right? And and by doing that, he was able to walk with them. I mean, it was I just think of discipleship as a walk. It's you don't you don't stop until you are at a place where you say, I'm done now and now you can walk with somebody else, you know? But it's not. It's not just a step in and step out.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah, compartmentalize. Yeah, yeah.

Joan Godard:
It's a it's a whole life experience and I'd say our our lives, you know, maybe you think of discipleship that way. It's very inconvenient. Well, that doesn't fit with my family model and all of that, and we certainly ask those questions as well, except we felt compelled to do it that way as we saw Jesus' model and Matthew, especially in the Gospels. Matthew, we really focused on and and said, Well, this is how Jesus lived, right? And so he challenged us to do the same and we went for it.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah, I think I want to make a note to get me to get back to it in our conversation. But I think probably lots of pastors too have thought about that too. But there's there's something about the context of life here that doesn't lend itself to what you're describing. It'sike, I got a family, I had a job, I got this, they got their family. Those people have their assignment, their work. So our lives are compartmentalized. And I just want to shift over Rob as you've listened to to what they were sharing and the model of family and you were, you know, you did will.i.am, obviously for a while. But and maybe you want to speak about that, but I know YWAM is also is kind of a new journey together for X amount of months or a year or something with a group of people. But then you shifted into pastoral work in Hong Kong, which I think is an incredibly busy city. You could talk to us about that. I think it's probably more busy than any of us western, you know, North Americans are used to. But how do how did discipleship take place in in in in the Asian context? Like, can you do? Can you share your life this way with people or how does that work when people are all busy running around making money or doing whatever?

Rob Penner:
Yeah, yeah. I guess there's a whole bunch of things to say about that. I'm thinking, as Trever and Joan are talking, about more about my time when I lived in Beijing and I was getting to know younger church planters. And of course, in a in a place like that, we can't live communally. You know, there's all these security things that we have to be careful of and restrictions. And so there's lots of lots of issues for us to think about. But you know, one of the things that comes to my mind when I moved there and I got to know the guys that I spent, oh, 13 years and I'm still spending time with them to this day. Now we're doing it by distance because of COVID. The the relationship was very much like an older brother to a younger brother, father to a son, and so, you know, in the context of those relationships, I thought I thought a lot about the language that we use and in and in the Chinese culture, it's a very patriarchal culture. So titles are important. To this day, I'm called Teacher Penner and or Pastor Penner, or if people want to be, you know, just they'll use some kind of honorific like that. So I had to work hard at just being a friend and in the friendship of an older brother to a younger brother or for a lot of the guys, it was really a father figure and, you know, father and son kind of relationship, that was our context of discipleship. And as I've reflected on that, I feel like however we can form those relationships, how we construe ourselves together as brothers and sisters is key. And I think there are words that kind of separate us. Disciple is a great word. I'm all for using the word disciple. Discipleship is key, right? In the gospels and of course, in mennonite brethren, it's a very important part of our language. It is interesting that when you get the Paul's letters, the language of discipleship disappears and we see more of a democratization or the sainthood of believers. But it can easily create distance between somebody who is higher up and somebody who's lower down. So I'm going to disciple you and bring you up to my level and then mentor and coach, I think, can those words can can also create that kind of gap. And what I see happening in Jesus as he came into the world through the incarnation and humbling himself completely was to put or put himself at our level. And we call him Lord, the only one we call Lord, but he put himself at our level in humility. So what I had to do as an older guy, and by this time I had a few master's degrees. When I went to China, I was working on a PhD in Old Testament, which I never finished. I had all these things to bring and but I had to work really hard at practicing the humility of Christ to enter into those relationships. And even when people in that culture would honor me with the title, you know, not to refuse it, not to say no, no, don't say that because that's part of this, the cultural ideal. But to go beyond that and truly engage as as an older brother to share my life openly and allow them to share their lives openly. So that kind of, I'm much more as Trever and John were describing those family relationships, that's that's really for me to how I look at the ideal in the body of Christ as we disciple one another. The family relationships are key.

Rob Thiessen:
Hmm. Well, that's. That's good. So you you're describing the words. It sort of practically, Rob how how how do you work that out in a like that's the relationship, father, son, friend. The posture that you take, how much time are you able to spend if you - in contrast to say how Trever and Joan did it where everybody moved in together - but how does how does this work out in a given week with the people that you are in that kind of relationship with?

Rob Penner:
Yeah, I mean, we would see each other pretty much every day, depending on the kinds of training programs. So we would operate on the basis of gifts. So I was the teacher and and they they called me that. So I developed courses and training materials, and we we went through a lot of a lot of training times together, a lot of retreats together. We would find places to do retreats, safe places. We would always try, we would have for some programs, weekly training get togethers. Others would be every day. I think you came and joined us, Rob, for one week. You and Janet did for one week and spent a whole week in training with our guys. I can't remember if that was in our place we rented or if it was in a retreat center, but we managed to get significant time just to connect in relationship.

Rob Thiessen:
We went to an old folks home. You remember that?

Rob Penner:
Uh. Yeah, that's right. We did one of our training. We did several trainings in that old folks home.

Rob Thiessen:
That was interesting. Yeah. So you just you're describing just adapting and touching people to to what, what, what the circumstances allow, right, and and just working with it, so it's both the posture, the relationship that seems to me. I mean, you didn't touch on that so much, but you obviously to to open your home up to to gang members, and you're you're signaling we're going to be your mum and dad here for a while. And that must have been very profound to people who probably didn't, I'm guessing that there were a lot of broken homes. Maybe I'll just shift the question and let's just get specific. If you - are there, are there particular mentoring relationships that sort of stand out to you? Maybe there's a name or an individual if you don't want to share their name that you've journeyed with that, yeah, where you just saw that change and saw the Lord work in people's lives and that, you know, looking back, you go, that was just really one of the one of the discipleship relationships we valued.

Trever Godard:
Yeah, I'll share one that kind of fits with what we're talking about here, different from living with us. So we got to Columbia. I was playing tennis with the missionary friend regularly and and we were at a baseball diamond and saw these people playing baseball and we're going, Hey, I wonder if there's a league here and we checked it out. And long story short, we joined a financial institution kind of baseball team softball, and we were the only non two employees on that team. Two weeks into playing with them, the president player of that team approached me and said, I just need to understand something here. You're a pastor? And at that time, we were associate pastors of a new church plant, and I said, Yeah, he goes, I just can't imagine playing baseball with my priest. And it kind of, whoa. Yeah. So he obviously coming from a Catholic background. And then he then he kind of just put the question out there, he said, Could I come to your church and we're going, this is like a fish jumping in our boat. Yeah, for sure. And he came showed, you know, a lot of interest in the gospel. And and so I started to be very intentional with him for two years. We met every Thursday for a two hour lunch time, one time at our place, the next time we his place and we started reading the book of John. And I call this just a very informal, discipleship time. But I was able to, you know, I think both of us have a huge influence in his life, led them to Jesus, baptized him in our church there. And he was an HR guy in his big financial institution who later became a lawyer. And every time that we've gone back to Columbia, that's the family that we connect with the most. He continues, he just recently was writing me, you know, just thanking me for all that he's learned and he's applying it. I have to be so careful when I share a verse with him because he just gobbles it up. And everything now centers around that verse for the next month or two in his life. And and it's really special. But that was almost like an accident that happened. But I think there are opportunities like that if if we're kind of alert to them and and can take them, you know?

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah. Now, Joan, you have one.

Joan Godard:
Well, we lived in a very religious environment, but people didn't necessarily know Jesus. They they didn't understand the person of Jesus or the work of Jesus, the transformational work that he would have in their lives. And so almost everybody, when they come into that relationship with Jesus were first generational. You know, they didn't have a background, like many of us have in terms of ancestors who have walked with God. And one person that really I've loved walking with her is because she is a second generation believer in in Jesus. And she came from a pastoral family in the country of Colombia and wonderfully artistic and creative and everything. But when she came, she came to one of our discipleship training programs in Mexico, and she came with such a desire to know Jesus deeply because already, as a second generation believer following Jesus was not so much about following Jesus, but it was a practice of a faith. And she really wanted to know what it was like to go deep in her relationship with Jesus. So she became so hungry for for Jesus and for the walking in the way of Jesus. So to me, that was a delight. It was very different than the previous. That was just a few years ago, and that was very different from the previous 25 years of discipling people who who really have no knowledge of the word of God even.

Rob Thiessen:
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Rob, any any standout individual sort of stories?

Rob Penner:
Yeah, lots and lots. But I will just share about one guy that you have met, Rob. His name is Tim and Tim, when I met him, he was twenty six years old, but I got to give you a little bit of context. So Tim comes from the countryside in a village in China, and I met him in Beijing, is one of them at that time three hundred million migrants who had moved from villages into the city, in the eighties when I first wanted to go to China but wasn't allowed, in the 80's revival was sweeping through the villages and a lot of people became Christians. It was at that time that Tim's parents became Christians and and then migration happened. People moved into the into the cities, and it was the children of this first generation of Christians, a lot of them who had this call to do church planting to be pastors. Tim, at a young age had this call. So coming into Beijing, he and his buddies began knocking on doors and church planting. They were teenagers, and they started doing this by the time, by the time I met them, they already had six churches. But we met in a in a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beijing. It was one of my offices and just listened to his story. I'd learned enough Mandarin to be able to build a relationship by that time. And there's much more to this story. Tim was an answer to a very specific prayer I'd been praying for several months. And through him, I was I got got access to, oh, 20 to 30 guys around his age who were church planting all independently, mostly independently. But Tim is representative of the group, and he's somebody that I'm still very close to today, we talk quite often. He's raised in in a culture where there is essentially no affirmation on a young person, an educational system that gives no affirmation and a family system that offers very little affirmation. He just never had it. And then to have a relationship with a guy who's 20 years his senior just had meant the world to him, and he devoured time together. He devoured when I could encourage him and his gifts. What I would inquire into his life and find out about, ask him about his weaknesses, that there's actually somebody in the world that is interested just about who he was as a person, not as a function. And it was just God's gift to me to be able to get to get to know Tim. And like I said, he's representative of dozens of others. And to build a depth of relationship that just has lasted over time.

Rob Thiessen:
Yeah, that's awesome. What what - talk about the role of the Holy Spirit in making disciples like, you know, I think you've touched on a lot of things that are going on things that are beyond your control. You mentioned, you know, it's like a chance encounter. And and then you talk about the transformation that happens in people's lives, like how much of this is, is God's work and you're just watching it and how and how do you how do you like, how do you keep in step? What kind of a life is is in sync with the Holy Spirit and and how do we not work at cross-purposes with the Holy Spirit? What what messes that up? So maybe just talk to that, rob, why don't you start? In China I know there's a lot, it seemed to me that when we were visiting you in China and then even the way you describe connecting with the churches and all these planters. And I thought, boy, here in this country at any one point in time who could possibly know everything that God was up to unless the Holy Spirit was organizing it, you know, because yeah, it's just, yeah.

Rob Penner:
So when we were in Beijing, I was pretty much I had a kind of a it was all open for me. I didn't I didn't go with a script and I had some thoughts and ideas, and I knew kind of who I was and what I might like to do. But I had been there. Oh, maybe about a year or so, and I had learned Mandarin well enough to, you know, to befriend people and to form relationships. And at that time, I felt like just one morning, a very clear word from God very clearly in my heart, a very clear prayer request. I want you to pray for three people that would like to church plant among migrant people, about the migrants in Beijing had five to six million migrants and had no idea where to begin. And there are all the security issues and everything. And so I just made that a prayer request and prayed it every day for three months, and I would tell people I was praying this prayer and I didn't know what was going to happen. Sometimes I'd try to piece it together myself and think, maybe this guy, that guy, that guy, because I knew some fringe people, I could bring them in, but I felt like I wasn't going to work at it, just to pray for it and see how it would happen. So some months after praying that I did meet Tim, he was the first one that I met and he told me his story. And then he said, I'm part of a, at the very end of our conversation, he said I'm part of the team of three guys who are church planting and migrant communities. And it was obvious then that that became the answer to the prayer that was put on my heart. And and then that led to building relationships with many others. But you know, it's true. There's there's a million things you can do. There's a million activities you can do in a nation of over a billion people. You know, there's just just a million things to do. But I felt like at that stage in my life, late 40s by then, rather than engineering it, I just really wanted to see, you know, how God would be leading. We ended up starting a few things together. We started a mission together. There's a group of 20 guys and became a mission, and it became a sending church planting mission. Again, I was on the treadmill one day and God said, I want you to give 10 years to walking with these guys. That was in two thousand ten. And so that time frame, it was it was the Spirit's timeframe, and it proved to be true over time as things developed, as as the political situation changed, as my own role in the country had to be nuanced, it became really clear that that was the timeframe. And God like told me 10 years in advance, so in 2020, just before that time, two years before that time, we began the exit strategy. And so that mission is still going on and thriving. And but yeah, partnering with the spirit is kind of everything.

Rob Thiessen:
Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, that's that's a great perspective. So even in the forming of plans or being directed and making disciples, the leading of the spirit is important. What about the Spirit's work for you guys in transforming people like, how did you see that?

Joan Godard:
I'm just immediately thinking of one circumstance. And I mean, there are just so many stories, we could be here for days talking the stories of the work of the Holy Spirit and people's lives. But we were in this very threatening experience in in Colombia, where literally our lives were being threatened. We were being held in our home and by somebody we knew who we had helped and who had lived with us for a time, one of those gang members. And he was just really angry with God over some other circumstances in his life and came to threaten our lives. And at one point, he he was one of the other young men living with us, said, What are you doing? Look at these. We all love you. And he turned to his, this young man turned to his friend and said, shoot him. And I had this thought go through my mind, which I know is the spirit of God saying, don't allow it. And so I stepped between them and and said, no, nobody will be shot here today. And the guy put down his gun and and and then I had this very distinct word from from the spirit also say to me, turn around and look at the girl over there. They brought this girl along with them, who was helping them in this robbery and threatening experience. And I turned around and looked at her and I was filled with the love of Jesus for her, for this girl and walked up to her, put my arms around her, my hands on her shoulders, and I asked her name and she gave a name. And then she said, and I said, Do you know that Jesus loves you? And looked her in the face. And she was startled and long story short. Three months later, we had the opportunity to have contact with that same young woman, didn't know her, you know, had had no reason to have contact with her. But but it happened and we realized that she had come to know Jesus through that and the way she came to know Jesus was, she got a phone call one day and she'd been wrestling with this idea that Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me. Really, really. And she had seen the love of Jesus, apparently in my face or my eyes that day. But a woman phoned her and asked for a certain or phoned her phone number, asked for a certain person, and that person didn't live there. So Marcela, she asked, she said, no, there's nobody by that name here. The woman said, Well, don't hang up. I just have this distinct question on my on my mind. And that is Jesus, prompting me to ask, Is there anyone here who wants to know about the love of Jesus? And Marcela said, That's me, that's me. I want to know about, well, Shirley is her real name. And she she this woman shared Christ with her, and she received Jesus over the phone. Never heard from the woman again. But that's how she came into relationship with Jesus, who but the spirit of God can do those things can make all of that happen?

Rob Thiessen:
So even in the crisis, that's another other places just you realize, Oh, we're out of our league here. Yeah, and being able to go to the spirit and to the Lord and say, OK, what what now? Yeah.

Trever Godard:
Just picking up on what Rob said about not engineering circumstances to try to fit in with what we think God is doing so in our disciple making programs, of course, we have Bible teaching in our in a controlled kind of environment, in our house or in the center. And usually you can predict kind of what's going to happen there and how you can kind of control it. And I mean, there are times for sure when God surprises you with something. But when we were, we we saw from the book of Matthew how Jesus was always on mission with his disciples, out on the streets, in the mountains, wherever he was, he was always kind of class in session, and there were often these people that were interrupting and coming up and and and Jesus would use that as a teaching moment and help the person heal the person. So we we made it our plan to take our disciples out regularly to the streets. And I tell you, when you do that, you have no control what's going to be happening out there. We would pray and say, Father, Holy Spirit, come and lead us and just make us be your witnesses today. And as Joan said, we could go on for days talking about different encounters we had not planned by us, only by the spirit of God. And it's beautiful to see how those would shape our students, probably in more impactful ways than than than my carefully crafted Bible study.

Rob Thiessen:
Well, it reminds me, Rob, you, you probably you, you'll know this better than I do, but I think it was maybe some materials from Joy Dawson or something, but in the like sort of foundational things with YWAM to say, you know, when they're reaching people or, you know, to teach people to listen to the voice of God to to to to respond to the Holy Spirit, right? Because if you're you want to make them a disciple, you have to teach them to be dependent on Jesus, not on you for instruction. And I think that's what you're getting witness to. Do I have that right? Is that was that was that from Joy Dawson's material?

Rob Penner:
Yeah. Joy Dawson might have touched on that as as would have several others. Donna Jordan teaches quite a bit on on hearing the voice of God.

Rob Thiessen:
And yeah, I know we said we sometimes get, you know, pastors are cautious about that because we've seen it abused and know people about how they hear the voice of God. And then people are into all kinds of, you know, whatever meditation approaches or something. But then we out of our fear of doing something weird, we rob people of just the simple ask and seek, you know, pray and see how the Lord guides you just like you did, Rob asking the Lord just about your discipleship to say, Well, what shall we do now? So I'm just going to shift. So I don't know if you've thought about this, but you've been back now in the North American context, Rob serving at Willingdon Church there. Rob, why don't you tell us what you're doing there quickly at Willingdon?

Rob Penner:
Yeah, I do a couple of things. I do theological theological education so that the responsible for the different training programs that we have, to training programs that we are running in, then the other thing that I do is work with our international language ministry leaders. So we've got 10, Willingdon is a multicultural church, we've got 10 different language groups, 10 or so because there's a few that are sort of language groups as well. And so I work with the leaders of those groups and, yeah, get to hear tremendous stories of of their journeys not only from other countries, but their journeys and Christ.

Rob Thiessen:
Mm hmm. And Trevor and Joan, you guys are still sort of sorting out your way coming back from Mexico, even, it's been less than a year since you've been back in North America, and I know that settling in and getting a home and connecting with your kids is a big priority right now. Tell us what you're doing, maybe I summarized it all right there, but what's up for you guys these days?

Joan Godard:
We we still are working part time with Multiply, so I'm working with member care with Multiply and Trever is also you can say what you're doing, but we we distinctly had this nudge from God two or three years ago that we should start the transition kind of back to Canada. And part of it was that we have discipled young adults, primarily young adults for all of our adult years, and our children are now, you know, in their parenting years themselves. And we felt like God was inviting us to enter into not just grandparenting in a sense of, you know, the joys of that. And that's tremendous, but really into intentional discipleship relationship with our grandchildren and our children as well. And so, and I know that that that's another whole, like that could be another whole podcast, right? How do we disciple within family? But we're choosing to live the same model that we lived in Colombia and in Mexico as well, within discipleship, within the family context and just bringing it back home.

Rob Thiessen:
No, that's good.

Trever Godard:
We're living in between two First Nation bands and almost all the people driving by the road, that's that's who they are. And they're just a beautiful people and they're they have so much more focus on relationships. And so I'm out in the yard, we're building a house, and so I'm outside quite a bit, but they'll they'll stop quite often. And another gentleman stopped the other day and or just two days ago, and they just have all the time in the world to chat. And so we're really looking forward to getting to know them more and being Jesus to them and at Multiply and working with missional leader training, helping develop curriculum and assignments, practical assignments for these courses that are being taught in our 20+ plus member conferences around the world.

Rob Thiessen:
So in our context here and for our listeners, pastors, church leaders, you know, as you've observed the North American church and I know Rob, you've been back and forth and over the years, we've, you know, we've visited as you come back from Asia and you pastored actually in Vancouver for a while, which, you know, maybe it was like Asia in Canada. But Trever and John, you as well. You've stayed in touch. So what would you say to to Canadian, BC pastors about discipleship and what the church is and isn't doing? Or just how would you encourage them to think about discipleship and making disciples for for their lives during this time? Any thoughts on that? That's a big question.

Trever Godard:
Oh yeah. How do you wrap something up like that? I guess for me, I would encourage you pastors when we look at the mandate that Jesus has given to us to go and make disciples, if if our church structures are getting in the way of that, then we really need to refocus and figure out how can how can we do church in such a way that it allows me to to actually choose a few people that I want to invest in and find ways to be with them in more context than just a Bible study once a week, to be going out with them in community activities and events. And for this to happen, one has to be very intentional. It's just not going to happen by chance. And so to make that a focus and make it a prayer and say, you know, to really make it, make it my kind of mandate to fulfill what Jesus has given to us to go and make disciples and to look for ways to do that with your life. And again, we can be creative in that and make it happen. But that would be my encouragement.

Joan Godard:
Something that I've consistently prayed because I don't presume to know any new situation we we move into, but I pray that from Ephesians 1:17 through 19, but that first part says, I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ and glorious father would give us his spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we might know him better. And I I just I think that knowing God better positions us to do the things that he wants us to do, to be where he wants us to be, to be invested in the lives that he he's appointed or he's chosen for us to be a part of. And that's daily. Like, it might just be somebody that we're consistently seeing in the grocery store or, you know, or in our neighborhood or or wherever. And I, I think we have compartmentalized our lives far too much so that what we do in church doesn't spill over to who we are in and what we do in the rest of our lives or society, even in our families. And so my great encouragement is that. We become as pastors, leaders, missionaries, you know, within this context, we become the people that know God so well that it becomes that his life in us is our discipleship life with others.

Rob Thiessen:
Mm hmm. Yeah, focus on, you know, being before doing, and that's good, that's good, it's certainly easy, like Rob was saying in China, a million things to do and here to with the internet, a million things to read, a million things to respond to, a million videos to watch and and and then one day just rolls into another. And we don't we don't, actually, we're not actually with people. Rob, what about you? You're you're part of the machine there at Willingdon.

Rob Penner:
It's a very nice machine. Well oiled at times, but but quite nice. And I guess I don't want to critique of I don't want to critique my well, certainly not critique my church or the culture that I'm, you know, that I've moved back into, culture is what it is. But I think one thing that's probably true of North American culture more than other places that it's utilitarian. And so people are functions. They they fulfill some role. And it's easy then for us to think about our task in discipleship as a utilitarian task. And then people are projects and we need to get them through classes and get them to know this information and so on. We're doing this course right now together with MB Seminary called missional discipleship and a lot of our ILAM leaders, people from different countries are in the program. And the thing that most attracts them about about the model of discipleship offered in this course is the personalized approach. And as I read their papers that they write, they have to write papers for this this program, they they will all refer to that over as opposed to a programmatic approach, the personalized approach and that limits you right away in the numbers of things you can do and the number of people you can know, like how many relationships of depth can we can we truly have? I guess that's one thing I would say living in the in an Asian context where life is more communal, like an urban context, it's not. But at its core for for Asians, life is communal and relationships are key. So as the church truly expresses this brother and sisterness of being among themselves, that's felt, I think, in a more palpable way than than it would be naturally, and, you know, in a culture that extolls the nuclear family or individualism. So, yeah, that personalized approach to discipleship just working taking people where they're at looking at the particulars of their lives, getting to know them, well, going deep in relationship. You know, I think that's something that's key for for us anywhere. But the other thing I'd say, Rob, just I don't want to talk too long, but my friends and in other parts of the world have been become practiced, I think, in carrying the cross and walking in the way of death. And as I think about the gospel story, Jesus, I don't think ever called us to grow. He called us to die. And you know, and I think that watching our brothers and sisters in places where they've had to die daily, die regularly and then to watch life that comes out of those choices to bear the cross in very real and practical ways. That has to inform, I think of discipleship everywhere. And I think that's something I'll take with me for the rest of my life that my call today as a follower of Jesus is to learn how to die. Well, in this day that I'm I'm living today.

Rob Thiessen:
Well, that's really good, Rob, that kind of as we wrap up this conversation, it just it reminds me of the season that we're in, right COVID. I think there's a lot of pastors that feel like they'd like to die or that what happened to my church, it died or my ministry died or like it feels like something's died in their churches, right? Because a third of the people are gone or half of the people are gone. So there's really a sense of loss and discouragement among pastors today. And maybe for those listening today, you just feel like not even empowered or interested because you feel like you've lost so much. And and so Rob's reminder today that, well, maybe, maybe, maybe that's exactly what one of the things that Jesus is teaching us to, to let go of something and to embrace the season and saying, OK, maybe churches, you know what, there's something dead. But but Jesus never let, there's always fruit that comes out of it, you know? If a seed goes into the ground and dies, it bears fruit. And the discipleship calling, I think, is also a lot on our minds. Like we began at the podcast, we're asking questions. So what? What does ministry look like for me? And I think before we started recording, I shared with you that thing that I heard Jim Putnam say a couple of years ago when I went and visited his church there in Idaho, big church, whatever six or seven thousand people, but really known for disciple making. And, you know, a big church, big attendance. Big big crowd in America, after all, you know, and Sunday morning, they all want to hear Pastor Jim Putnam preach. And he looked at a group of pastors there, and I was sitting there in the back. He said, You know, preaching is not the most important thing that I do. And he said, I make disciples, you know, I'm a disciple maker. I meet regularly with with a group of leaders and I'm walking with them. And I thought, I've never heard of pastor of a large church, say something like that, and I've often reflected on that. It was a courageous thing to do, but it was indicative of what he had prioritized in his life, which was relationship with people. And I think this isn't an easy thing for leaders. I'm sympathetic, especially the larger churches. A leader is thinking about the group, thinking about systems. Rob, you know, you have to think about it, that it Willingdon, right? That's part of the tension, right? So a lot of people do. How do we how do we how do we scale this thing up? You know, how do we leverage efficiencies and and those are reasonable questions that they ask. But, they can run at cross-purposes with actually being with people. Yeah, and and I'm afraid it's like really like really a rampant problem in North America because we're really big on efficiencies. I mean, did you guys watch the movie about McDonald's? What was that called? Well, yeah, by Ray Kroc, right? Yeah, and how he designed the whole thing to efficiently put and it's it's American, it's amazing. It works. And you think, Yeah, that's what we should do with church. Let's make that puppy burn. You know, let's let's move them through. And and that's really attractive to to Americans, especially and Canadians.

Joan Godard:
You know, like, I just think of the example of Jesus who's a good portion of his time was taken up with the multitudes, you know, with tending to them in in one way or another for one purpose or another. But who did he focus on as far as those who had become the ones that would shift the...

Rob Thiessen:
Multiplication and the multiplication came somewhere else, right?

Joan Godard:
Yeah. And I think we kind of screw it up a little bit by by looking at the multiplication first and go, How can I get to the, we're going to reach the the most, the greatest number possible? But Jesus just said no. My my example is that I am going to live with and and commune with and teach and train the small group and they're going to go out and do the same.

Rob Thiessen:
That's good. I think that's a great place to start. We're going to give you the last word, Joan. That's awesome. So thanks so much. Rob, thank you. And for anybody that heard me call Willingdon the machine, that's full disclosure, I grew up at Willingdon. It's my, you know, it's a church, they're very dear to my heart. I was on staff there four years ago and stuff so, no tongue in cheek there. It's not a machine, it's a godly place that God is using. So bless you all, thank you for giving the time here today. And for those who are listening today, thank you so much. Hey - let people know if the podcast has been a blessing to you so we can bump our listenership to over ten, five of which are my family. And you know, and let's get the word out. But I know there's a lot of good places to get encouragement these days. So thanks for being with us and I'll see you guys all again soon.

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