Courtesy of Desiring God, I ran across a quote of Billy Graham’s from over 40 years ago that seems greatly prescient to me:
I think one of the first things I would do would be to a get a small group of eight or ten or twelve people around me that would meet a few hours a week and pay the price!
It would cost them something in time and effort. I would share with them everything I have, over a period of years. Then I would actually have twelve ministers among the laypeople who in turn could take eight or ten or twelve more and teach them.
I know one or two churches that are doing that, and it is revolutionizing the church.
Christ, I think, set the pattern. He spent most of his time with twelve men. He didn’t spend it with a great crowd. In fact, every time he had a great crowd it seems to me that there weren’t too many results. The great results, it seems to me, came in this personal interview and in the time he spent with his twelve.
When I read this, I thought of small groups as we see them today, but even more I thought of Alan Hirsch and his ideas outlined in “The Forgotten Ways”. It especially echoed the ideas that our faith should be focusing on making disciples, embracing the missional-incarnational impulse, and doing so in real community. So much of what Hirsch has been fleshing out in real detail over the last few years is seen in Billy Graham’s insight from many years ago. To me, this is a nice verification of ideas I want to embrace and live out in my community.
Tags: forgotten-ways, Graham, Hirsch, missional
