My Normal Life and my Great Commission Life are the Same (Part 3)
Post by Spring Church pastor, Matt McCoy
Note: As the title might suggest, this is the third installment of a series on how my time at Regent College influenced and improved my reading of the Great Commission. Here you can find Part One and Part Two. Part Three continues this theme of how I discovered that discipleship happens as I go about my normal life, rather than as something separate that I have to attend to.
I asked Iain if he would mentor me, and he said no. And then he offered me something better.
Iain was one of the first people I met at Regent College, in the summer of 2009. I met Iain not because he’s older than me (by 20 years) or because he’s wiser than me (by a gap too far to measure), but because he knew where to go fly fishing in and around Vancouver, BC. My introductory words were, “Are you Iain? I’m Matt. I hear you fly fish. Me too.”
Throughout that first year, there wasn’t much fishing, but there was a lot of reading, writing, studying, and exams. Also that first year there was the beauty and struggle of my family settling into a foreign country. We struggled with the kid’s school. Finding a church was exhausting. In November, everyone except me caught the H1N1 flu. I found both great joy and great loneliness everywhere I went. By the end of the first year, well, I was just grateful to be done with it.
Returning from a fishing trip in May of 2010, Iain asked if I’d take a peek at his deck, because the railing was rotting and falling over. I took a peek, and it looked like a rotted out wood deck rail. Denise and I talked about me helping out Iain with fixing it, and she observed that it had been a very stressful year for me, and doing something physical, outdoors, and familiar would be a great way for me to spend a few days. (This blog tends to highlight Denise’s great insights, and today is no exception.)
Jackson and Iain fishing together on Norman Maclean’s (author of A River Runs Through It) favorite fishing hole.
I process my stress physically, so having a few days of framing with Iain was fantastic. I loved the rhythm of measuring, cutting, problem solving and feeling proficient at something. That “feeling proficient” bit was especially significant, because as we worked I also verbally processed the stress of feeling like a failure as a father and being confused as the foundations of my faith were being reformed. Regent was changing me, and Vancouver was changing our family. Those few days we worked a lot, and I talked A LOT. As the project wrapped up, I wanted to keep this relationship going.
I asked Iain if he would mentor me. And what I had in mind was a fairly specific experience to mentor relationships I’ve had in the past.
All Christians everywhere are invited into a life that includes:
So I was thinking that we would get together on a regular basis and pray, read scripture together, and explore what my connection to the church was like. And I wanted help learning how to be a better husband, father, neighbor, and friend: How do I teach my kids how to pray? How does our church cultivate a relationship with our neighborhood? And so on.
I asked Iain if he would mentor me, and he said no. And then he offered me something better.
He offered me friendship.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but his response confused me. I didn’t yet realize why I was confused, but with the benefit of hindsight I know that I had separated out my Great Commission Life from my Normal Life. The command to “Go and Make Disciples” was something that I had to stop my Normal Life to go do. So “Discipleship,” (both the giving and receiving of it) was something that had to be set up, explicitly named, and given it’s own meeting time and place.
Now, in fairness to myself then, I have always been blessed by having friendships with people in a variety of ages and stages of life, and so I already knew how to be friends with someone twenty years older than me. And, in fairness to myself now, I still find a great benefit to having small gatherings that meet for a season to focus on a particular aspect of discipleship.¹ And I still love meeting with others to explore the disciplines of following Jesus. Mentorship, as I’ve portrayed it in this story, is still quite valuable in certain times and seasons.
Iain’s observation, which helped me walk away from an unhealthy separation of my Great Commission life from my Normal Life, was that mentoring is something that happens best within the context of friendship. And we embodied mentorship and friendship in a way that became more clear to me. We had both, at the same time. We talked about how to teach kids to pray while we cut deck boards and we examined the scriptures alongside framing supports for the railing.
Look, I realize that I’m describing this experience in a way that could make it sound like I had some sort of holy, mystical deck framing come-to-Jesus sort of event. And that is the exact opposite of what it was like. It was a normal deck framing. And I’ve had many friends in my life who are older than me who have done normal things with me and talked about a life of faith along the way. The thing that the Spirit used to change my heart was having Iain offer me friendship instead of mentorship, and in so doing, this integrated my Great Commission Life and my Normal Life in a way I found incredibly beautiful. These words in Deuteronomy, which used to sound heavy and directive and ominous, all of a sudden sounded light and easy and as natural as smiling at the sunset:
Deuteronomy 6:6-9: Write these commandments that I’ve given you today on your hearts. Get them inside of you and then get them inside your children. Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home or walking in the street; talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night. Tie them on your hands and foreheads as a reminder; inscribe them on the doorposts of your homes and on your city gates.
FOOTNOTES
1- To learn more about a focused weekly discipleship group currently happening at Spring Church, you can check out Heading North small group here.