Joy of Personal Discovery

As a new believer involved in the CCC ministry at Penn State, I was strongly influenced by Howard Hendrick's leadership messages. One principle that was inculcated early was about the "joy of personal discovery". Hendricks illustrated this by what a student told him in class one day, "Look what I found in this passage, Prof." Hendricks listened as if he had never seen that before. The student went on, "That's not all. Look what else I found!" The joy of discovering on their own a teaching or principle or personal relevance of a passage is to be nurtured in others. At a recent gathering of our Catalytic Vertical Team, Sam Osterloh, Catalytic National Director, led us into our time where he wanted faith to be infused into the discussions. Sam is a great teacher. But, rather than lead a devotion where he shared faith principles or his own insight, or, more to the point, the perspective that he wanted us to have, he broke us up into small groups to talk about various faith stories in the Bible. Each person was to think of two stories. The objectives of the time were: 1. What are the similarities of these stories? Differences can be noted as well. 2. How did the person/people know what they were supposed to do? 3. What personal and organizational connections do we need to make? Here is what I liked about that. Each person had to take time to personally wrestle with God's Word. The Holy Spirit used that time to take the Word and massage it into our hearts. Many of us enjoy teaching and some of you are gifted at it. But sometimes what our student leaders need more from us is the environment where they make personal discovery rather than hear our insight. It has been said that "Telling is not necessarily hearing" and "teaching is not always learning". Are we developing an environment in our ministries where God's Word is being studied and applied to hearts? If you would like to try this with, say, a leadership team of a ministry, here are the stories that the group I was in discussed:

• Caleb--spying out the land and eventually taking a mountain once in the land.
• Esther 4--took faith to be a part of God's plan and to go before the king for her people.
• Gideon--had his plan and God took people away before he was ready to trust Him.
• Hannah--wanted a child and believed God.
• Abraham--went looking for a land and a city without knowing where he was going.
• Abraham--another story about sacrificing his son, Isaac.
• Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch--taken from a fruitful ministry for an apostolic work in the desert.
• Nehemiah--acted personally on all the things that God had laid on his heart.

Another good study for a leadership team is Ben Rivera's Life Focus studies. These have lots of Scripture and are great for allowing the student to percolate God's Word through their hearts so they can hear from Him. The first one on Biblical Purpose is pure genius. Very simply, it has one column with 12 passages on purpose and the other column is for recording insight. At the end, the student answers the question, "Based upon your reflections, write out your Biblical purpose." As we seek to develop ministries that are staff coached, locally led and student owned, allowing students the joy of personal discovery helps build ownership.