GyAK: week 3

The issue we worked on last Wednesday was Character, specifically, Maturity. Now I'm sure there are a couple of you snickering right now, thinking about me and maturity in the same room.

Here are the objectives we were working toward:

• Importance of character assessment
• Defining mature Christian character
• Character weaknesses and ways to correct flaws

We looked at 1 Tim 3:1-12 for our text and read an article by Gene Getz.

Getting the discussion started is never an issue with this material. We jumped right in, talking about what real and 'potentially misleading' indicators there are for spiritual maturity. How do we generally measure if someone is mature or growing in our church? Attendance to program events?

The idea of having entrance into someone's life where you can really see what their character is like took a large part of our discussion. That seems to presuppose a level of community and close relationship. We also talked about how the responsibility doesn't lie completely with the existing leaders to gain entrance in to a potential leader's life, but that leader has a responsibility to open his life to people around him.

An attempt to quantify what Paul was talking about (as long as our 'attempt' doesn't become more important than the Scriptures) so that people can have an idea about where they stand on the road to spiritual maturity was seen as a good thing. This gives people something more objective with which to measure themselves, rather than subjective guesses about where they stand.

We ended up reporting a bit on our 'steps to obey' what we had learned that week as well as a bit on our steps from previous weeks. This week, I'm praying through the 1 Tim 3:1-12 passage, asking my Father to help me to mature spiritually. I'm certainly thankful that He's involved.