It is a spiritual leader's special privilege to work with young people on their way to making a decision to embrace Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. It is a “defining moment” in their lives. Every young person should be offered that opportunity of a moment. But no moment is so instantaneous that it has no process. And no process is so gradual that it lacks a moment. The truth of the matter is, confessing faith in Christ has a “defining process” to it. I often sort through my own experience to get this truth to sink in.
Before I embraced Jesus…there were people who had been hugging on Him long b
efore (is it too shallow to speak of Christian commitment and trust as, "hugging on Jesus?"). Long before I came along, Billy and Evelyn, Pop and Gram Baskin, Aunt Thelma, Mr. Barnett the fifth-grade boys Sunday School teacher, Dave Ferry (who actually assigned “homework” in a high school small group), John and Eleanor Nickel retired missionaries to Nigeria, Wes Roberts, youth director, and a host of unnamed others whose faces I see and remember they said something that helped me along the way to my "defining moment." These
were saints-in-process who helped me along in my process to faith, trust, and commitment.
The Apostles’ Creed which we recite so many Sundays like a favorite hymn, was a song being sung by the saints long before my voice joined the chorus. And before that, a fellowship of believers had been singing the confession “Jesus is Lord, Christ is Risen!” two millennia before I awakened to self-consciousness, faith, and a momentous personal decision.
That’s why we keep baptism and discipleship in the closest contact. That was where Jesus put it in his great commission of Matthew 28. And that discipleship is a process with many features: the memorizing of Scripture, recalling the order of the books of the Bible, and recitation of the Creed. It can include weeks and months of study with spiritual leaders and models. But the larger setting is this: a relational-mentoring-spiritual-intellectual process in which the entire “communion of saints” is effective through the work of the Holy Spirit. God uses the ordinary “defining community” to invite its children and youth—indeed everyone—to a moment of response to the gracious gift of God in Jesus Christ. Defining moment? Yes! But before that, a defining community, a defining process.
--Larry