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Christian/Discipleship Education

By Laverne A. Farmer, Elder, Christian Education

My former pastor and dear friend, Roger Lovette, many years ago wrote the book, For the Dispossessed.  In it he writes “Have we ever thought that God may not want all the credit for all the shenanigans we pin on him every Thanksgiving?”

He goes on to say “Somewhere down the line we have messed this thing up.  The way any person begins discipleship is with a sense of need.  As long as we are self-satisfied, our hands full of our own deeds, and we are so everlastingly comfortable with everything around us—we have no need of God.  We need nothing.

“But there are other days when we need everything. What do you do if there is hate in your heart so deep and so strong and you’ve carried it so long that it has just about choked you to death? What do you do? What do you do when you’ve lost all your old bad faith and the institutional church doesn’t mean anything at all to you—and God is only a word? What do you do?  What do you do if you’re overwhelmed by too much change and too much knowledge and too many facts and too much adjustment and too many books? What do you do?

“I would call you back to the first Beatitude: ‘How blest are those who know that they are poor; for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.’  When your hands are not full and your heart has been drained of so very much you counted on and you are left with the great emptiness—this is the beginning place.

“Christ has always promised to meet us if we call. He never called the virtuous but sinners.  He spoke to the poor in spirit.  His was the word for the empty.  His message was for the open and for those that would receive.

“Long ago, Christ told the story about a man who went out and invited his friends and neighbors to come to a feast.  They all gave excuses and nobody would come. And so the man gave a second invitation: ‘Go out into the highways and hedges and tell the beggars and the broken, the weak and the infirm about the dinner and bring them home with you.’  And from that day to this, in church’s best times, she has enacted that story. 

“Christ still calls the beggars, the broken, the weak, the infirm—the dispossessed—those who recognize their own poverty.  Is this not the beginning of discipleship, always? Those with a deepsense of need are invited. The gates are open and the table is set for the poor in spirit.  It is a call to the dispossessed.

“’How blest are those who know that they are poor—for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.’”