The Enrichment View of Ministry

______in his seminars on _______[] noted some interesting aspects of the process Christ used in his approach to the task of enriching the lives of people, enriching the life of the Synagogue, and enriching the life of the larger world outside the borders of Israel. In this view, Jesus might well be considered and "adult education administrative genius". ____'s observations are based on his superimposing the synoptic gospels on the framework of John's gospel to generate a rough outline of Jesus' three-year ministry. Mark was the first gospel written. Matthew used Mark as one of his sources and added some of his own material. Luke used Mark and Matthew plus other sources to write his gospel. These three "Synoptic gospels" therefore use the Markan structure for the events of Christ's life. John, writing last, filled in the gaps left by these three writers, focused on the issue of "so what?" rather than chronicling the events of the ministry, and included much of the ministry record from the central festivals which punctuate the life of that community. When the synoptics are super-imposed on John's framework with parallel events lined up, interesting insights emerge. The technique is not new. Every Theological Student spends time in ____'s Gospel Parallels which facilitate such a superimposition of text.

____moves beyond a simple textual analysis, which is the usual use of the comparative work done, to a re-construction of Christ's life and work, in order to tease out insights as to his operational process.

He notes that

• Jesus spent the first half of his ministry with only four disciples...two pairs.
• There was an initial period of "one-shot" campaigns prior to formally "calling" these four to work with him as a central focus of their lives.
• He taught them how to teach by mentoring them in context. All his teaching of the crowds was done primarily as a mentoring exercise. He would teach the crowds and then debrief his students afterwards. This was not an afterthought, this was the purpose of the teaching in the first place. Jesus was not doing a one-shot ministry, he was starting a "church" built on the explosive effects of geometric growth.

• When this core of disciples was trained up to a certain level he "called" from his followers, eight more disciples making twelve. That is, each of his four was given responsibility for a new pair, and each of the original four stayed in their pairs. Nobody ever worked alone. When something happened to one of the original four, Levi was plugged in. When Judas was lost later, Matthias was plugged in. These new pairs were trained, but again, Jesus not only taught them all in the context of a crowd, but also taught the original four how to teach the next sets of pairs. in the same context.
• He sent these pairs and their pairs to their home towns and circulated around helping them.
• Once that group were trained, he called from his followers the next sets of pairs for these twelve to mentor, the "seventy-two". These in turn were sent out on a mission (after an abortive first try) and it was on their successful return that we have the only recorded incident of Jesus being overjoyed...it worked.
• When he finally headed south to take his ministry into the central area of the country, just prior to his arrest and execution, we hear the next two figures. We hear that he appeared to about 500 people after he rose from the dead, and we hear that about 3000 were "converted" at the time of Pentecost when Peter preached. If you do the math, these figures reflect geometric proportion of teams of pairs. The growth factor of his organization was built in right from the first, with the dual task of enriching the life of the community happening at the same time as the training and mentoring (equipping), which in turn was followed by training the teachers to teach their own pairs.
• ____focused most of his work on examining just what types of things Jesus taught at different stages of his process, and has some interesting insights there as well. However, having the framework with which to re-visit the text does offer new insights along that line no matter what aspect of his teaching one wants to examine.
• Jesus assumed the existence of the synagogue system in the Jewish community so did not have to work to establish follow-up groups while teaching his initial followers. He was free to concentrate on part of the task and enrich the synagogues. This is actually parallel to today's situation where there are ample local churches which could use an infusion of "renewal".
• Afte Jesus rose from the dead he sent the disciples out without his earlier restriction of their work to within the borders of his home country. The process had been established by that time, now it was strong enough to move out to other countries. In those countries, local churches had to be set up to facilitate the ongoing growth of local people as the synagogues either did not exist, were hostile to the movement, or forbade the involvement of non-Jews unless they converted to Judaism.