Mentoring the New Believer - Lesson 1

Where did this class come from? This class came out of frustration. This is a pure frustration situation. When I left Gordon Conwell, I went back to Spokane and I helped start a church, and the church grew pretty fast. In fact, it grew too fast. You’re going to have rapid growth and not know how to do organizational things, and you can get yourself in trouble. But we were growing at the expense of other churches, which you all know is the worst kind of growth there is, right? The sieves opened up at other churches and they just poured into our church. And I knew the pastors of the churches; one of them was one of my best friends. And I said, “I’m sorry, your people are all leaving your church and coming to mine. We don’t want them. We would really prefer they stay and deal with their issues in your church.” And it was one day I was praying and I said, “Lord, why will you not send me new believers? Why will you not send us non-Christians? We just had a steady flood of people from other churches. I was frustrated (and I know based on the Psalms, it’s okay to be frustrated with the Lord and he’s big enough to take it). I didn’t hear a voice, but I got a message that was very, very clear. And that is, “Bill, what would you do if I sent them to you?” Well, that’s one interesting question. What? What would I do if we started getting… I mean, we’d had some people become followers of Christ. But what would have happened if we had a significant number? And I thought, well, I knew there was one woman and there was one man that had a real heart for this.

And what we had done in the past was just get them hooked up. And I just kind of turned it over to them to walk with a new believer. But I said, “That’s not a solution. That’s a finger in the dike.” I started looking for what’s out there. How can you help a new believer start his or her life, spiritual life well? And I was shocked. I couldn’t find anything. I just couldn’t find anything. I said, “I’ll take anything at this point.” And I went to organizations that are well known for being evangelistic. I contacted people I knew in the hierarchies and said “What do you do?” They had some short little booklets that, you know, you can read in about 10 minutes, and I said, well, that’s no good. And in the course of doing my research, I found that the statistics are somewhere in the 90 to 95% range. 90, 95% of the people who go through (and I’ll say it theologically carefully), go through a conversion experience, fall away. They stop following Christ. 

Student: What’s the percentage again? 

Dr. Mounce: Barna Report, 95%, and I can’t find the report. I wish I could put it in the book. When I was pastoring, I read these surveys all the time, and it helped me. You know, we teach in seminary to exegete the text, but do we teach you to exegete culture? And both are critical, right? And so I used to read a lot of surveys to try to figure out what do people think and what’s going on. And I used to watch TV programs I didn’t normally like, but they were popular. So I wanted to know what was going on. And that’s why I came across these surveys.

90 to 95% of the people who go through, and much the same experience. I’m not saying it was real or not, but, you know, they raised a hand at camp. They went forward on Sunday morning. They prayed the prayer, whatever be the case. Virtually all of them stopped following Christ. 

Student: What period of time?

Dr. Mounce: I don’t remember. As I recall, it was like a 2 to 3 year period. It wasn’t that long. And I started getting frustrated that there wasn’t something to help or not. Maybe I missed it. Maybe there’s some great stuff out there. I know Rick Warren’s wife did Foundations, but it’s a yearlong thing, and I wanted something that was shorter, but I wanted something longer than 15 minutes. So I finally decided, well, if I can’t find it, I’ll write it. And so what I did was I collected about 10 to 15 people in our church that I knew had a heart for the lost and a heart for new believers. I mean, this was their giftedness. They had proven themselves. It wasn’t an academic kind of, “Oh, yeah, I wouldn’t be interested in that.” One of the ladies said “I used to have a bathroom ministry and whenever any gal during a church service got up in tears and left, this person followed her out because normally it was convicting.” It wasn’t my preaching (I don’t think it). It was the conviction of the Holy Spirit. And this lady walked with a lot of people through the gate into heaven. I mean, she was responsible for a lot of leading people to the Lord, whatever phrase you want to use. And so people like her and others, and we sat down and I said, “Okay, what I want to do is I want to brainstorm, and I want you to tell me what are the 12 topics that every new believer needs to know? What are the topics that you just have to know if you’re going to get started and go the right direction?”

So we got together and we just brainstormed. It was a wonderful time, and we talked about topics. We talked about the order of topics. We came to a very pleasant agreement. I wanted 12 topics because I wanted to be enough; and I wanted 12 because I wanted to fit in a quarter, because the idea was that every quarter a new believers class could start up, and whoever become a Christian the last three months could get in the class, get with a mentor, and start walking through these things and learning what they need to learn and all the things that happen to new believers. 

That’s what you hold in your hands. All right. Everything’s free on the website in this area. So these are things that you can share with people who become Christians in the course of your ministry. What I did then was that we took the 12 topics and I preached on each topic, and that’s the video that’s online on the website. So I know our connection here is pretty slow. But if you go to Discipleship and go to New Believers, see where I am? This is the class that I’m talking about. And so you can go in, and so there’s your 12 topics laid out. And then when you go to any one topic, like the first one is going to be Conversion, and I’ll tell you why in a second. You’ll go to the actual lecture page, and I’m not currently logged in, so you’re not going to see everything on the screen that we have available, but it’s a video or audio of the lesson. And then there’s all kinds of handouts that if you’re logged in, there’s links here to download everything. What you’re downloading is what you have in your book, but you have to be logged in in order to get to it.

Logging in is free, so it’s not a problem. Here’s what we have. We have the workbook. The workbook is 164 pages and this is what the new believer gets. The reason we’re probably going to end up calling all this Life Is A Journey is that that is my most basic theological assumption, and it’s the metaphor of the entire book. We tend to think of Christianity, I think, as a series of isolated events. At least most people do, don’t they? You say, “What’s Christianity?” “Well, a Christian is someone who believes, or a Christian is…” And someone told my wife this on a plane. She asked him, said, “Are you a Christian?” And he goes, “Well, I celebrate Christmas, so I guess I’m a Christian.” We’ll come back to that illustration. But we think of it, okay, we had a conversion experience, right? It’s someone who goes to church on Christmas and Easter, or someone who believes this. And I think we tend to think people, I should say, tend to think of Christianity or Christians as someone who holds to these series of different, sometimes nearly isolated events in their life. And my most basic assumption is that that’s 100% wrong, and life is a journey. Life is a gate and a path, right? Matthew 7: and we are all born into the broad, narrow road that goes to destruction. God calls us often to go through a gate, which is conversion. And on the other side of the gate is the narrow, difficult path. It’s a path that’s full of persecutions. The word ‘difficult,’ the word translated ‘difficult’ is actually the Greek word for ‘persecution.’ So it’s related to the word for persecutions. And at the end of that path is life. 

And so the idea is, a Christian is, in Jesus’ words…what did Jesus say to people when they came up to him? They said, “Here, believe these 46 things.” He said, “Follow me.” Jesus wasn’t interested in people who would believe this or have that experience. Jesus was interested in people who would follow him. That’s why you’ll almost never hear me use the word ‘Christian.’ I know I probably use it more in the last half hour than I’ve used it in a long time. I don’t like the word. Well, that’s too strong. I don’t use the word. I think it occurs three times in the New Testament, once on the voice, at least once on the lips of an opponent. 

Christianity is the way, right? It’s a journey. The Greek word translated ‘way’ is ‘hodos.’ It’s the word for path. It’s a word for road. There was a, you know, a road going to Jericho. It was a hodos, it was a wave. Christians are people who are traveling along a journey. They’re following Jesus. So that’s the basic theological premise of this entire class and this entire book. Okay? And the book I’m working on right now is the lectures are a little more propositional. The lectures are more geared toward helping people know what they believe and why those beliefs are important. But in this day and age, people are a little more interested in story, aren’t they? They’re more interested in narrative. They want to know your story and they want to be a part of the story. And so what I’m doing is that I’m retelling the entire curriculum as 12 trips in the Pacific Northwest, 12 hikes. The series it’s going to be in is called the Backpackers Guide, because what’s backpacking about? Well, what’s the minimum you take, your stuff in your backpack, and you take off right? You go on a trip; you go on a journey.

So this is beginning the journey. This is: how do you start your hike of life? How do you start your spiritual journey well? So I talk a lot about the path, the way, going on a trip, going on a hike. Life is a journey. Can anyone here just forgive? I’ll give you an example. We lived through a difficult situation a while back and I got a friend back in Spokane named Jerry Sittser. Does that ring a bell with anyone? He’s a Professor at Whitworth College, and he wrote a book published by Zondervan called A Grace Disguised. It’s the single best book on pain there is. It is an amazing book on pain. Jerry and his family were driving out of Spokane, and a drunk hit him head on, killed his wife, his mother and one of his daughters. The other daughter and older son were okay. The younger son, John, was 2, spent 6 months in a body cast. John was my son’s best friend in high school. That’s how I really got to know Jerry. And he wrote the book later to talk about what’s grief all about and how do you handle it. And really recommend not only that you buy it, but you keep it around in your church and give it to people, because it’s not a book that has the answers, it’s a book that invites you to a journey, to invite you to walk with Jerry on his journey. 

We had him over for dinner. We said, “Jerry, how do you forgive? How on earth can we start to forgive?” And he laughed. He goes, “Ah, you can’t.” I go “Ooh.” (I was in the mad stage still. Oh I like that. I can be mad.) He goes, “No. What you do, Bill, is that you pray for a forgiving heart. Somewhere along the path, somewhere along the time, you find that you actually mean it, that you really do want to be able to forgive. And then your prayers start to change, and you start offering forgiveness. And then one day you suddenly realize, I actually kind of mean this now, don’t I? And as time goes by, you start meaning it more and more and deeper and deeper.” 

What Jerry was describing is the heart of this book. And I think that’s true of all of life. Life is a journey. And whether a new believer is trying to come to terms with confession or past sin or continued failures once they become a follower of Christ, or they’re trying to figure out this prayer thing or this reading the Bible thing or this evangelism thing, or all these different topics, it’s all a process. There isn’t just an answer that works, is there? What Jerry taught me was forgiveness is what’s at the heart of this whole class is that when somebody becomes a Christian, you don’t want to give them the right answers. You want to walk with them. It’s a journey. The guy who wrote The Message, Eugene Peterson, he wrote a book called Obedience in a Long Direction. I think I didn’t get that quite right. It’s this book on spiritual formation, as we know. And it’s this: the Christian life is about being obedient and it’s in a long direction. You just keep going. 

What a new believer, I’m absolutely convinced, needs to understand is that they’ve begun the journey. The journey is not a sprint. The journey is a marathon. The journey is not a short half mile hike to the waterfalls of where our cabin is on the Ponderay River. That’s where most of the stories are told from our cabin. It’s a long John Muir trail, kind of all the way from the top of the U.S. to the bottom. It’s a journey. I believe, if a new believer can come to grips with that fact that this is just the beginning of the journey, and what that beginning looks like and pointing them in the right direction, I think that 95% can dissipate greatly. And that’s why I’ve put so much of my life into this book and of the workbook and into all this stuff. I just really believe we got to give new believers that are missed, the chance. We got to give them a fighting chance. You know, having them raise a hand and then thinking they can go out and live any way they want for the rest of their life, that just doesn’t cut it. 

You’re going to find out my views on justification and sanctification pretty quickly. We may disagree on that. And when I cover anything that’s at all controversial, I’ll be sure to tell you. But I think life is a journey. And when we are justified, we’re changed. And that change starts to take effect. And in fact, it must take effect. When I talk about this, I often go back to the Matthew 7 passage and ask people, “Where is life?” Is it on the other side of the gate, or is it the end of the path? The life is at the end of the path. The other way to say it is in your preaching and in your theology. I’m sure we would all agree that gate is essential, right? You have to go through conversion. But is the path optional or is it necessary? That is the theological question for new believers. Have they done all that it takes to get into Heaven? Or is there something else? And what you’re going to find out is that I’m a pretty bad Calvinist.

I’m probably a four pointer headed toward three. So, I mean…I don’t believe you can lose your salvation, so don’t get me wrong in that. But I believe the path is absolutely essential. And if we do not help people know what it means to walk the Christian life; Jesus says that those who persevere to the end will be saved. So theologically, the challenge of this class for you is how do you balance the gate and the path? How are you going to challenge justification and sanctification? There’s going to be a lot of things that are going to come up as we go through this class. But life is a journey and we’re going to talk about how to help people begin well. 

Now, here’s one of the interesting things that happened when I started the sermon series. I couldn’t see it at first, but I started getting a trickle of people three or four weeks into the sermon series. And he said, “We’ve got to tell you that when you announce what these next 12 weeks are going to be, we rolled our and said eyes, great, more basic stuff. We don’t want basic. We want deep stuff. We want meat to chew on.” 

And what they found out is that after about four weeks, there were such gaps in their knowledge and such gaps in their experience, that even though the sermons and the workbooks were all designed for brand new believers, about half of it they’d never heard of before. “I’d never heard of it before. Hadn’t heard of the fruits of the Spirit.” 

“How can you be in a church for ten years and not hear about the fruits of the Spirit?” 

“Well, I hadn’t heard about it.”

I said, “So you don’t understand that part of the task of the Holy Spirit is to start changing you to the likeness of Christ. And the results of that change that we cooperate with are called fruits. We call them fruits of Spirit, Galatians 5.”

“Well, I’ve heard of Galatians 5, but I never knew what that was.” 

It was amazing to me people who had been in church for many years, they looked at a new believer’s curriculum and they rolled their eyes, but about half of what they learned they’d never heard before. I should say up front, my encouragement is that all of you preach these 12 sermons in your church. There are my sermon notes. There are overheads. There are notes for your people. There are videos. There is all kinds of stuff. Pirate it to your heart’s content. Don’t give me any credit. You don’t have to. Preach the series. Preach the series. And what you will find is that your elders will come to you, some of them, and they’ll say, “I had no idea. I had no idea that the Holy Spirit helps us in our prayers. I had no idea the doctrine of the omniscience of God or the omnipresence of God is that God is present in all His fullness in all places. He is just as present in Orion’s belt, in the Constellation, as he is in my heart. That’s why he can give me all of his attention; even though he’s got another three and a half billion people, he can give all of his attention to.” 

You go through these great truths that are in these sermons, and the people will say, “I didn’t know this stuff. I didn’t understand it.” Don’t think that because this is a class for new believers that people in the church automatically know all of it. My experience is they really don’t unless they’re very unusual people. (That was all under point one.) 

But I wanted to give you some of the history of what’s behind. So let me talk about the pieces that we have here. We have the workbook, and you may want to move things around in your notebook to get an order that makes sense. But I kind of, as I finished cleaning up each one, sent a PDF to Cathy and she ran it off. So she just put them in the notebook in the order in which I sent them to her. But you probably want to rearrange them and put nice little tabs in them or something like that. What you have is a workbook. That’s what you can print out and you give to the new believer. There’s something almost every day for the new believer to do. It’s non-threatening. It’s not a lot of work. But what I’m trying to do is to get people to understand that Christianity (use that word), that being a follower of Christ is something that happens every day. And so there’s a Bible verse to read or there’s a journal to jot your thoughts down or something like that. But there’s something to try to get people in the habit of…they’re spiritual disciplines, is what they are (I just don’t ever call them that), of praying and Bible reading and memory work and stuff like that. There’s six days in each chapter. The fourth day are the notes to my talk. And so what we would do at our church is that the new believer would start on their own, like Wednesday and maybe do something up Thursday, do something on Friday. Then the way we did is that people would come to church on Sunday.

They had a separate room and they had the video of me doing the sermon. It was nice because it was shot in the church. So whether they look at me in video, whether they actually came into the service, everything was still the same. And every new believer needs a mentor. You can’t walk the journey alone, right? You just can’t. I mean, every once in a while when you go on a hike you want to be by yourself, right? You want to enjoy peace and quiet. But usually we want to be with someone. And if we don’t know how to hike, we have to have someone, don’t we? We have to have someone who knows how to read the map. What’s the trail map in my metaphor? The Bible, right. You need someone who knows the trail. And so the idea is that every new believer gets a mentor that will walk with them, become part of their life, encourage them. Then on Sunday, or whatever day you want to do it, you sit down, you go through the lectures. And it’s nice is that you can stop me whenever you want, and you can be watching the person’s face and say, “Was Bill as clear as mud?” Or “Did you get that?” “No, I don’t understand it.” Okay. So you stop it and you can talk about it and you can, as a new believer, ask questions. You stop and you talk about it. 

In actuality, it was set up for 12 weeks. They usually went on much longer than that. But the fourth day has all the lecture notes, and the days five and six are follow up. Day five is always a memory verse; spiritual discipline, right? You’ve got to memorize, just simple little verses, something to get the Word of God into people’s head.

And sixth day is some kind of a reflection kind of day. 

So you have the workbook, and can you see how the workbook and the sermons (or the lectures) fit, how they go together? So the sermons are on day four. The third thing we’re going to have when I finish the book is the actual story form of the book that I’m working on, but that’s not available yet. And then we have the lectures that we’re doing here this week at Faith. And what I want to do is we’re going to go through all 12 weeks, and I’m going to hit the high points. We’re going to be flipping our way through the workbooks. I’m going to be pointing out things. Then what I’m going to do is I’m going to summarize the lectures. And then what I want to do, and this is why I’m so glad that so many of you’re here, I want to talk together about, okay, once we’ve covered this topic, what are the questions that are going to come up? 

This is the number one fear that mentors have. They’ll say, “I can’t walk with someone through a 12 week curriculum.” I go “Why?” “Well, they’ll ask me questions that I don’t know the answers to.” So you kind of gently say, “Well, wouldn’t that be a good thing? Wouldn’t it be great to know where there’s holes in your knowledge?” But people are scared. So what this class is primarily about is training mentors. So what I want to do is to walk through with you… Here are the questions that I think are going to come up in the course of talk one on conversion, and then I want to talk about the answers. And then that’s where we can say, and I’m going to ask you over and over again, “What are the theological questions, what other kinds of practical questions are going to come up?” I want to talk about this stuff, and so we can get ready for it.

For example, the talk today on conversion uses John 3:16, “For God so loved the world.” There’s a lot of people that simply cannot fathom the concept of a God who loves because their father sexually molested them. Right? These are things that we know. And it used to be that we could talk about a loving Heavenly Father, and it wasn’t as big a deal. But that’s because all the sin in the church was still buried. You know the steps, right? 49% of evangelical pastors intentionally go to porn once a week, and that’s the ones that are being honest. And you look at it, and you go “Man it must hurt.” That’s not a shameful statement. It’s that things aren’t as nice as we would like them to be. 

I heard the expression… I was watching 60 Minutes the other day. That was on Memorial Day. And it was all about that’s coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. They had one special on brothers that were serving together, and they asked one of the brothers, you know, “How does your mom feel about this?” And he goes, “Oh, we can’t be honest. We church up. We church it up to her a lot.” Church it up. You’ve ever heard that expression? I’d never heard of it before. It’s a great expression. We all know what it means, doesn’t it? Means we’re dishonest. We can decode it. We make it look good. We ignore the fact that there’s pain and suffering underneath it. We church it up anyway. We know the numbers on girls who are molested, and the numbers in the evangelical church, the percentages are the same as they are in society. It’s way past a third now.

I’ve not seen any latest stats. There is pain in this world. That’s the point I was trying to make, right? There’s pain. And so when you go through someone’s conversion experience and say, “Look, God, your Father, loves you.” They’re going to look at you and go, “You have no idea what you’re talking about.” Right? Those are the kinds of things that I want to work with you, and you help me as I’m writing all this to… “What are those hot spots? What are those things that are going to come up. What are the questions that a new believer’s going to ask that can stump a mentor?” Let’s get our mentors ready. 

I have a great relationship with my pastor. He does things that I wish he wouldn’t, like calling me from a pulpit. He did it last Sunday. He said “I read this about that, this verse means such, such. Hey, Bill, is that right?” And he’s looking around for me. I said “Please don’t do that.” His favorite thing is that when he doesn’t like the NIV translation, he’ll say, “Bill, what does the NIV mean here?” Now what are you supposed to do, 500 people in the room? I can’t stand up and explain the NIV to him. But we have a really good relationship. He’s one of my best friends. And so I say that as a precursor because I wouldn’t say this to someone I didn’t have a relationship with. His altar call is something to the effect (I should have written it down). I’ve heard it so many times. He preached the sermon on giving, said “I feel the Holy Spirit wants me to make the offer. Is there anyone who wants to trust in Jesus, anyone over here at the windows?” And then he walks his way across the building, he’ll go up all over the room, and there’s something happening in our church, and nobody quite knows what it is, but there’s something that’s new and there’s something that’s different. They would say it’s the Holy Spirit. 

Anyway, I went to him after the service. I went “Dave, that was really cool.” I said, “It sound like a lot of people raised their hands.” 

And he said, “Yeah, it was amazing.” 

And I said (because we’re in a relationship), I said, “So what are you going to do?” 

He looks at me and goes “I’m not sure. That’s a good question.” 

And I say, “Yeah, it really is a good question, isn’t it?” 

So what are we going to do? Well, we’re starting to use this curriculum in the church and get these people into getting their spiritual journey started in the right direction. I’ve taken a long time to talk about this, but I want you to get excited about it. And I want you to see why this is so important. And I want you to be a… Hopefully you’re asking yourself, “What do I do? What do I do when someone comes down to the altar, or someone raises their hand, or your youth pastor tells you that, you know, 47 people came forward at camp this week.” What do you do? And does your theology say, “Oh, nothing,” (which is one theological position), or does your theology say, “I better get them started in the right direction because perseverance is really a big deal, and we’ve got to help people understand what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.” 

Because the warning passages in Hebrews “…and we are reconciled to Christ;” Colossians 1, “If we continue in our faith…” those things are scary verses. Matthew: “There’ll be people standing at the Judgment Seat saying, ‘Lord, didn’t we do all these great things in your name? We cast out demons and we did miracles…’” (and I think prophesy, whatever it was…three things). And Jesus is going to say to them, “I don’t know you. Who are you?” Basically, “Go to hell.” That’s what he says, right? I wouldn’t say that from the pulpit, but that’s what he says, “Depart from me, you workers of iniquity.” Isn’t that ‘go to hell?’ Alright. What do you do? What do you do when your youth pastor says, “46 conversions at camp?” What do you do? That’s what this class is about, is together we’re going to help develop a system to train the mentors so they can use this curriculum and walk with new believers, and get them started going the right direction in life. Okay. That’s what this is all about. 

Now, I was going to require this, and then I said, “No, these guys are flying in from Albany.” At one level, what this class is all about is helping you get so familiar with this book that you will live out of it. Alright? This is Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. Wayne is a dear friend of mine, taught at Trinity Seminary in Deerfield for 20 years. He teaches in Phoenix now. He was instrumental in getting the ESV (English Standard Version) started. He was the one that called me to ask me to be on it. And I served for ten years on that committee, my dad and I. I was the New Testament chair. Dad did most of the work and as dad says, “But I’ll do all the work, you take all the grief.” And I didn’t know how right he was. And Wayne was on the committee. I love Wayne to pieces. He’s a fireball. He is controversial. He’s taken a pretty strong stand on the women in ministry issue.

And there’s some of that in here. But he understands that that’s not orthodox. It’s not a thing of primary importance. And he can get along just fine with people who disagree with him on that topic. He is a five point Calvinist, but this is simply the most biblical, systematic theology I’ve ever read in my life. And he says in the preface that “The words of God have power that human words don’t have.” And so he says, “That’s why I quote the Bible so much; a lot of systematics just make references to the verses.” Wayne quotes them. And that’s why it's 1200 pages, because you can see for yourself why he’s saying what he’s saying. This is the book I’m going to keep going to this week as I kind of hear the theological issues that I think are going to come up…well, let’s see how Wayne handles them. I mean, I’ll give you some of my answers. But this probably is one of the five most important books of my life. There’s a lot that I’ve gotten out of here. So I don’t agree with it all, I’m not a five point Calvinist. I have some different positions, and I’m going to show you where I think he’s wrong in a couple of things. But he could be right and I could be wrong, but I shall alert you to them. 

Now, this book is scary to some people because it’s so thick. Anyone can understand this book. John Piper’s church in Minneapolis. John and Wayne are very good friends. They’ve adopted this book; every Sunday School teacher, as I understand it, every Sunday School teacher at Bethlehem reads it, even the ones who teach grade school. You can read this. Now, there is a book about half the size, and I asked Zondervan to send it to me and it didn’t come in.

They’ll probably waiting for me when I get home next week. But there is a version of this, I forget what it’s called, but it’s about half the size. And it may be for your church and your people that size is a real issue, and you don’t want to give this to your elders and say “1200 pages” you know, “by Monday.” Wayne also in conjunction with, I think it was his son who did it, or son-in-law, wrote another book called The 20 Things That Believers Believe (or something along that line). And so it’s much, much smaller. It’s the kind of stuff you can hand out to people all the time. But I’m going to use the big one because this is the one you should be using. It’s 45 bucks, list price. So CBD’s probably got it for $35, $33. But you will live out of this book when you have questions in your sermons, you know, what does that mean? You’ll look it up. It’s going to have it. It’ll have your whole sermon here because it’s going to have all the primary verses you need. I mean, this is just a really, really, really, really good book. So I’ll be using it a lot in class. 

Okay. So those are all the different pieces of the story. Any questions or comments…? Kind of clear where we’re headed on this is? 

Student: The mentoring part, is it one-on-one or is it in a group? 

Dr. Mounce: My recommendation is try to get people one-on-one. But the church did it in groups. They had about two people that would work with five or six new believers, just because we couldn’t get…there weren’t enough people. And I hadn’t been preaching on this long enough to really get it, see? But if you preach through it, then everyone in your church qualifies to be a mentor, right? I mean, this isn’t rocket science stuff.

This is basic stuff, it’s stuff that every believer should understand. And so if they’ve heard you preach through it and you’ve talked about it, after every sermon there’s reflection questions. I’d encourage you to preach on it, and then Sunday School or small groups or whatever you use to have them go through the reflection questions. If someone does that, they’re going to be ready to walk with someone else. And who’s always the most excited evangelists out there? So new believers, right? It’s the one who have been called on a death into the life. It’s those who were everything was dead and now they’re alive. You don’t have to tell them what evangelism is. They just start doing it, I mean, in most cases, but yet you have to have groups. 

Let’s take a break. I’ve still got a few other introductory comments to make. And then what we’re going to do is that we’re going to get into the first chapter, which is the most difficult chapter of the entire 12. And so there’s no way we’re going to finish it tonight, because in honor of the people who come from the East Coast, we always cut Monday night a little short because what’s 10:00 or 9:00 to us is the next day for you. But this is the most important chapter. It’s the one that’s going to have the most questions. So we’ll work on that this evening and some into tomorrow. The second most difficult chapter is the second chapter. After that, they’re all pretty easy. Okay, so we’ll go slowly the first couple, and then we’ll pick up steam. Okay. So let’s get back here in about 20 minutes or so. Okay.

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