Learning godliness from Scripture and a sister

As a first year MTS (Ministry Training Strategy) apprentice at my church, St Paul’s Anglican in Sydney’s north-west, I get to help make disciple-making disciples as my full-time job. One of my main ministries and highlights of the week is meeting up with different women in my congregation to read the Bible together and pray for each other, with each other. I also meet up with my trainer, Bon, who pastorally cares for me and teaches me from God’s word as I seek to do the same for others.

I think all Christians should take the opportunity to meet up with someone older and or younger in the faith in order to share life with each other and be encouraged by God’s word together.  It is my hope and prayer that you may be encouraged by a bit of my story, to prayerfully consider someone you could meet up with and then ask them to do so.  Wouldn’t this be a great way to get the year going?

So, each time Bon and I meet, after a brief chat about our day and often longer discussion as to how our playgroup went the day before, we get to down to ‘business’—reading God’s word together. In one sense, this seems ordinary. We go through each verse of a particular passage, asking each other questions and discussing what stands out, what we think it means in the passage and what it means in application to our own lives. And yet, there is also something extraordinary about it. God promises us that when we read his word, he speaks to us, and as we pray for each other, with each other, he listens. I have found our meet-ups enormously encouraging and personally helpful in being able to debrief, receive feedback and ask questions of someone older and wiser in the faith, whether about ministry and theology, or even the day-to-day of cooking or family life.

I have heard people say that trainers train their trainees to be just like them. Perhaps this is inevitable. Indeed, Paul calls the Corinthians to “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). I can even see this in the way that I have picked up Bon’s mannerisms, like her nods, and clarifying questions: “Does that make sense? Is that okay?”

More importantly, though, Bon models to me godliness in doing life as a wife and a mother serving the Lord Jesus Christ. I see the way she respects her husband, the way she disciplines her little boy, and the way she deals with exhaustion. I see her often-untidy home and am always still invited warmly into it. I even see how she deals with conflict and says things that are hard to hear. I see the way knowing and loving God’s word dictates how she treats her family, those at church, and also those in our evangelistic playgroup who don’t know Jesus. I see how she entrusts everything to God in prayer. I desire to imitate her as she imitates Christ.

Meeting up with someone older in the faith and further along in life, experience and ministry is a wonderful blessing. Godliness needs to be learned, so it needs to be taught. I need to be willing to learn, and, in God’s kindness, Bon has been willing to teach me. God-willing, all my meet-ups during my apprenticeship and beyond, with both younger and older sisters in the faith, will be marked by a gospel-saturated joy, mutually encouraging each other in the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Who in your life, older or younger in the faith, could you encourage by meeting one-to-one with to read the Bible?