History and Effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous

I just finished a good, but not real great, article in Wired Magazine about AA. It was so good that I decided to add a comment to it suggesting a couple of corrections. I suggest that you who are interested in healing and growth take a look at it.

Write me after you look it over and tell me what you think.

Jesus, Lazarus and Judas

Pastor Reuben of the Randers Free Church with Gary Sweeten


My sermon for Palm Sunday

Here is a terrific story. Jesus and his pals come back to the small town of Bethany located just outside Jerusalem to visit with His old friends Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. The story is found in the Gospel of John Chapter 12 and it has some real characters in it.

Here is how it begins: "Martha was serving and Lazarus was reclining at table with Jesus. Mary took a jar of precious, very expensive ointment and began to anoint the feet of Jesus with it." Not much seems to have changed in this family. Martha is still serving while Mary is forgetting to work so Jesus can eat with Lazarus.

Oh, wait a minute. something has changed. Lazarus is not dead any longer. He is sitting there at the table as big as life and twice as active. "But," you say, "he was dead as a door nail. What happened?"

Lazarus, Mary and Martha lived in a rather small town so everybody knew everybody's business. Not a soul in Bethany was ignorant about the death of Lazarus and that it was a tragic death for a man so young. Everybody talked about it for days. This must be why so many of the people of the village were gathered outside the house to see if they could get a glimpse of Jesus and Lazarus.

They also knew that Lazarus was so dead for so long that his soul had already ascended out of his body. Every Jew knew that one's soul stayed in a dead body for no longer than three days, yet Jesus had called Lazarus forth from the tomb of death after he had been dead for four days. IMPOSSIBLE!

As an observer from modern times, it seems to me that everyone present would be overjoyed with the situation. what could anyone find to criticize in this situation. Well, some people found a great deal to disloike and even hate.

More later. I must have some tea with Peder Poulsen, my current Danish host, and Galina Chentsova, head of our ministry in Russia .

How Did We Grow So Large?

Equipping Ministries International, an organization we started from the Teleios Ministry at College Hill Presbyterian Church in 1978, has spread to over seventy nations. How did they do that?

Sweeten Life Systems, a ministry we started after leaving EMI, has spread to another ten or so nations with our unique equipping ministry that focuses on Discipleship in Building a lifetime of great relationships. How did we do that?

By following the model laid down by Jesus. We teach, train, coach and mentor high quality Christian leaders who wan to learn about building solid relationships with God, themselves and each other. These men and women are sold out to Christ and to a Discipleship Model not just a "Stand up Comedy Routine".

We "Equip Equippers to Equip the Saints to DO Ministry".

Galina Chentsova is a great example of this model. She came to Cincinnati in 1994 and learned our materials and methods of teaching them. She returned home to Moscow and started training her own Russian friends and colleagues. Now, fifteen years later there are dozens of training centers and hundreds of graduates who are multiplying themselves daily.

It is a fairly long and deep process that produces great fruit for God.

Discipleship, Training and Equipping the Saints

A few days ago I posted some thoughts on one of the Sweeten Life Board's priorities for one of our next great adventures. We are coming to the end of the powerful, life changing research on ways to best support families with disabled kids and we are gearing up for a new thrust as soon as we develop the actions steps necessary to carry out our research insights.

The USA and the world has a greater number of Christians today than ever before in history. And, many of these men and women has been Believers for a long time. This means they have been in churches, Bible study groups and discussions about faith, ministry and influence for hundreds of hours. "Why are we having such a small influence on culture, evangelism and our neighbors?"

As a teacher, coach with several degrees in education I have some ideas about the answer to that big question. Perhaps we have focused our Christian educational energies on making students more knowledgeable. Unfortunately we have not focused much time on preparing those students how to multiply themselves. There is a world of difference between being a good ball player and being a good coach.

Pete Rose was a great baseball player but he was not a very good baseball coach. No one had to teach Pete to slide headlong and to run as fast as he could to first base. He was a "natural" who assumed his players would do likewise.

Why are our best preachers not always good coaches of parents on child rearing, members on evangelism, leaders of small group, committee facilitation, etc? They are good at preaching not detailed processes.

Why are we such poor evangelists? Why do people think they are evangelizing when they simply shout Bible verses and slogans to people they assume to be unsaved? Preaching is the only model they ever see so they suppose that is the only model there is.

I wrote this on a comment in an earlier post: "After being in numerous discussions among Believers about "How best to evangelize" I am even more concerned about how we too often come across as a "pompous know it all". Have you ever seen a game of "biblical ping pong"? Where we engage in several mutually exclusive monologues consisting of out of context Bible verses that we think support our ill thought out point of view." I am in them a lot.

It struck me recently how we have failed to teach our Christians how to dialogue not just speak in monologues, slogans and Bible verses hurled like spears at another persons' ideas. I wrote a book on this topic called, "Listening for Heaven's Sake" and it has sold over 100,000 copies but I am not sure anyone knows how to apply its teachings very well. Lectures are not the best way to communicate and they rarely if ever lead to conversions. The publisher, Equipping Ministries International, has taken that book farther and currently teaches how listening is a means of evangelizing.

We at Sweeten Life Systems are going to redouble our efforts to train Mature Christians how to live daily with grace, mercy and positive influence. We need a good, easily accessed way to train Believers how to do more than intellectually assent to theology and apply God's truth to life. We call this, TIPS for Theology Into Practical Ministry. Theory into practice is required if we are to overcome the genuine barriers to personal ministry.

Stay tuned! If you are interested send me an email. gary@sweetenlife.com

Healthy Churches

I have been interested in developing healthy churches for a very long time. I have seen some slight movement toward facilitating health in a few congregations but frankly I am not sure health is a very high priority for most Christian leaders.

Developing healthy churches is dependent upon facilitating healthy interpersonal relationships in the staff, elders, deacons and members. The kids in Sunday school will not likely become good communicators and good at caring for each other is the Sunday school teachers do not model those things. And, even if the teachers are excellent at interpersonal relationships, when the kids go home to chaos, conflict unbridled and miscommunication exponentially growing, how can the kids live healthy lives?

The church is a system of systems; a family of families. It is the sum total of all the family systems that are congregating. Here is my definition of the goals of church members:

A desire to learn how to work out all the problems and conflicts they have not been able to work out on their own at home. Husbands and wives bring to a marriage all the un worked issues carried over from childhood. Those issues are poured into the congregation with the high expectation that God, the Minister and the Elders will help the people get well, healthy or at least better.

This sets us up for grave disappointments. So, when we set the Ministers up on a high pedestal of expectation, they have a very long way to fall when they cannot deliver. But no human can deliver healing so it is unfair to set the Ministers up that way. Yes, but it happens every Sunday.

So, what shall we do? Teach the skills of healing, growth and change to every single member. Teach personal responsibility and how long it takes to bring change. Teach about mercy and grace for self and others. Teach every member how to listen and listen and listen. Teach every member how to take every thought captive. Teach them how to stop all that Stinking Thinking.

Every member needs to be trained to rest in Christ and stop all the performance nonsense.

It is not easy but we can make some steps toward healthier living. Why wait? Start now!

A New Way of Thinking

Is it possible for me to please God and do His will without renewing my mind? In retrospect, I thought I could be a pretty good Christian with my own mind. I had never heard that I needed a new mind and a new way of thinking when I was a young Believer. I was, in fact, a very arrogant person who was convinced that my thinking and approach to life was just fine, thank you very much.

Today, however, I see that my mind was filled with distortions, misunderstandings and bad theology. I know that bad theology leads to a dysfunctional lifestyle and poor emotional/spiritual health. No wonder the Lord wanted me to alter my thinking and repent! Those old habits got me into a lot of trouble with God, myself and other people.

God wants me to be healthy and live in abundance of joy, great relationships and spiritual peace. The ideas, assumptions and principles that were loaded into my hard drive called the brain before salvation blocked peace, inhibited joy and promoted conflicts with God, myself and others. YIKES!!! I needed help.

I needed a church and Christian leaders who could assist me to repent of my old ways of thinking and to develop new Belief Systems.

I finally found ways that helped me repent. Oh, I knew that I needed to change my drinking, sex and cursing, but those are easy to alter. After repenting of my wild side I began to read the Bible while studying to be a teacher and coach.

I learned about God's word along with teaching students grow and change. I decided to apply those teaching methods to the Bible.

I learned:

If it works, do more of it.
If it does not work, stop it.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I learned the Christian education was NOT working.
I learned about what needed to STOP.
It was broken so I needed to fix it.

It was my experience with coaching that taught me most about being a disciple maker. I needed to coach Christians how to change their thinking, feelings and behavior. I learned that talk is not enough. I learned that students/disciples only learn when they change and only change when they actually PRACTICE new ways of thinking and acting.

Now I train, coach and disciple men and women with processes that see them change. Next time I'll tell you more about what I learned.

See my web page at www.sweetenlife.com for more on this topic.