Who are Your Reliable People?

Last week, I wrote a blog post urging young adults to devote their best energies and efforts to seek first the Kingdom of God (Trading Cancel Culture for Kingdom Building). God has used young adults in mighty ways throughout history, and I believe today is no exception.

This week, I want to challenge those of us who are a little older to invest our time in this younger generation. Ambitious, egocentric Christians want to become the biggest tree in the forest. Faithful servants want to plant a forest.

My wife and I will be forever grateful to a wonderful campus ministry at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington named Campus Christian Fellowship. Our campus pastor, Brady Bobbink, didn’t let any student graduate without knowing 2 Timothy 2:2 by heart:

“And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.”

We talked often about “2 Timothy 2:2ing” the world. Brady concentrated our ministry on evangelism and discipleship with an intentional focus of finding reliable people, qualified to teach others, in whom we could invest our lives.

At eighteen years of age, I wasn’t sure I had that much to invest in others, but Brady used Kingdom theology to make the mission sound compelling: don’t worry about what you don’t yet have, just give whatever God has given you. 

I’ve never stopped looking for those reliable people (and never stopped thanking God for Brady’s faithfulness and influence).

My senior pastor, Dr. Ed Young, also helped direct my life when he pointed out that Jesus chose his disciples, and we should choose ours. I spend plenty of time as a pastor with people who are hurting and need help working through a particular issue or understanding how to apply a sermon or Scripture. But if I’m devoting extended time and thought to someone outside a normal friendship, it’s because I believe we’re in a 2 Timothy 2:2 situation.

We should be looking for people to invest in. If I’m already living a full schedule because there are reliable people and Kingdom minded work filling up my calendar, it is much easier to say “No” to someone who just wants to take up time and be noticed in a toxic sort of way. Of course, as God’s followers we are always open, twenty-four hours a day, to divine appointments to love. The Good Samaritan didn’t check whether the beaten-up traveler was reliable. We want to be generous to all, but focused on a few, as Jesus was. He healed and served and then often sent the recipients home as he focused on his reliable few.

My whole point in urging you to freely, without guilt, walk away from toxic people is to then ask how many reliable people you are investing in. More than I’m trying to get someone out of difficult relationships, my focus is to get people into healthy discipleship relationships. The reason I’ve learned to avoid toxic people and limit my exposure to them is not because I don’t want to be bothered. As a Christian I live to be “bothered” in the sense that I’m to love God in part by loving others. My time isn’t my own! Other people’s needs come before mine.  I limit my exposure to toxic people because I’m devoted to growing God’s church and that requires me to be on the lookout for reliable people who are qualified to teach others, and respond by being generous with my time investing in their spiritual welfare.

God has given me a certain platform when it comes to writing and marriage ministry. As much as I try to honor this by creating content that pleases God and is useful to others, I also reserve a significant time to encourage and spotlight other (often younger) writers that I believe have something important to say. Even if I could become the tallest tree in the forest (which I couldn’t—that’s just not me), I’ll still eventually die; that’s why a Kingdom-minded Christian is more zealous about planting a forest than she or he is about towering over the forest.

If you’re a public school teacher, in finance, business, the arts, married or a parent—what are you doing to help people do what you already do, perhaps even better and more effectively than you’re currently doing it?

Can I make this personal? One of my daughters has been in several churches as she moves around the country. One of the most painful things for her has been that male pastors (like me) often pull in younger men while younger professional women can be treated as if they don’t even exist (or are simply asked to volunteer in the nursery). If you are an older woman (even if you’re only in your thirties, you’re “older” than a woman in her twenties) it could mean so very much if you’d take another woman “under your wings” and invest in her.

I did internal cartwheels of joy when I learned that a young woman who was going through premarital counseling with me was also seeing an older woman in our church for one-on-one mentorship as she prepared for marriage. I knew my friend Laura was giving that young woman excellent advice and spiritual care, in a way, as a male pastor, I simply couldn’t.

You’re not a Paul if you don’t have a Timothy.

You’re not a Priscilla if you don’t have an Apollos.

Don’t judge your impact by how many people know about you; judge your impact by how many forests you’ve planted.

My boyhood pastor, Eugene Boggess, was a powerful man of God. The church he pastored in Washington State was, by Texas standards, tiny. And then he got kicked out of that church and took the pastorate of an even smaller church (I followed him). One of the most sobering conversations of my life was when he told me that God kept calling him to smaller and smaller churches. In a worldly sense it’s supposed to be the reverse: a pastor succeeds at a small church, gets a medium church, and then finally, a mega-church. His kept getting smaller.

Near the end of his life he told my dad that, looking at me and Jerry, and Bonnie and Kim (some other younger people in the youth group), “I guess I must have done something right.” A man who never would have been invited to speak at a pastor’s conference on growing your church rightly reviewed his life by his sons and daughters in the Lord.

My most powerful mentor in seminary, Dr. Klaus Bockmuehl, had an enormous impact on my growth in Christ, just when I needed it most. He was brilliant but died before he was sixty years old. (He seemed so old to me back then, but now I’m within a year of how old he was when he died.) Despite his brilliance and spiritual sensitivity to the things of the Lord, he couldn’t get a traditional English publisher to release his final book (Living by the Gospel), finally settling on a tiny publisher that in the past thirty years has published maybe a dozen books total.   But his ministry focus, stated months before his death, was that “God has called me to lift my students up on my shoulders so that they can go farther than I ever did.”

Dr. Bockmuehl spoke of my future writing ministry where there wasn’t one. How eager I am to see him face to face in eternity and thank him for investing in someone that, from an earthly perspective, was utterly and completely unworthy of his time.

A third mentor was Janet Thoma who, thankfully, is still with us. As an acquisitions editor at Thomas Nelson, she took a chance on me 25 years ago when no one in publishing knew who I was. She heavily edited my first book (Lisa cringed at one of her comments: “Gary, this is way too long, didactic and boring, but I’m going to turn you from a man who wrote a master’s thesis into an author who writes books people want to read”) and gave me invaluable encouragement and training.  

If God has given you any kind of platform and you use it only for yourself, you are missing out on the heart of Kingdom work. Find reliable people and invest in them generously, liberally, and sacrificially.

For more on this, read chapter 7 of When to Walk Away.

I couldn’t find a single copy of Dr. Klaus Bockmuehl’s Living by the Gospel: Christian Roots of Confidence and Purpose available online, but if you ever run across it in a used bookstore, you’ve found a gem. You can, however, still order Dr. Bockmuehl’s Listening to the God Who Speaks which I also highly recommend.