Pastoral Succession: Libin Abraham on Following a Legend

A spiritual conversation may not be you walking the whole Romans Road—even though that’s amazing if that happens. It could be the start of a conversation where you just ask somebody, “Hey, what’s your religious background?” That counts, because that’s starting a conversation that God can use to take you and that person further. Just initiate a conversation with somebody who may not yet be a follower of Jesus.

The reason why I think it worked [in the broader church] is because every time our elders met, we were asking, “Who did you share the gospel with? Who did you have a spiritual conversation with?” We didn’t want to hold our people to a level of accountability when we were not willing to do it ourselves. So it really came from leadership all the way down.

I think sometimes with good intentions churches separate discipleship and mission. We’ve really tried to say, no, discipleship and mission go hand in hand. To be a faithful disciple means you are on mission, and you cannot be on mission apart from being a disciple because Jesus’ basic invitation to his followers was, “Come follow me and I will make you fishers of people.” All that is one sentence. That’s the baseline expectation of what it means to follow Jesus. 

As we were inviting people to live engaged on mission in evangelism, God was turning up a prayer culture and an awareness of the Holy Spirit—which obviously [go] hand in hand—but I don’t think we made the connection until midway through. A praying person is usually the one who’s sharing the gospel. The level of prayer in your life is connected to the level of evangelism. So we began to see an awareness of the Spirit, more prayer nights and asking the Spirit to move, and people getting excited when they saw the Holy Spirit supernaturally bring people to Jesus. 

One story I love is on a Sunday morning there was a young man who came to church [who] had never been to church before in his whole life, never stepped into a church. He lived in Arlington, which was like 30 minutes away from here. And he was going to start a new job that Monday or the week after that around our city. He wanted to make sure he got in the rhythm of driving the distance and showing up to work at 8 a.m. So he said [to himself], Let me find a coffee shop where I can get up in the morning, drive 30 minutes, get settled in so I get in the routine. 

So he came on a Sunday morning as a practice run to drive to his workplace. We have a coffee shop at our church [and] that’s the one that pulled up on Google Maps. So he shows up at 8 o’clock. This guy is not a Christian, grew up in a different world religion, doesn’t know what this is, sits down at a coffee shop for an hour, works on his computer. Then he’s packing up ready to go, and our first service is about to start. 

He’s leaving the lobby and our greeter is like, “Hey, are you going out or are you coming in?”