Over at Deeply Committed...

My friend Kevin Watson recently wrote a post about Generation Rising: A Future with Hope for the United Methodist Church over at his website, Deeply Committed.

You can find his post at this link.

Kevin contributed a chapter to the book on the significance of the class meeting for Methodist discipleship. His chapter is entitled, "Small Groups: Bearing One Another's Burdens." In it Kevin makes a strong case that the class meeting - so important in early Methodism - offers a model of discipleship formation that could be vital to ministry in the United Methodist Church today. Because small group ministry is about "watching over one another in love" (to use John Wesley's phrase), it is really about nothing less than our sanctification.

Kevin M. Watson

I wanted to highlight Kevin's blog post because he makes an important point in the post about the project represented in Generation Rising. The book offers a vision for the whole church and is aimed at Methodists young and old. But the twelve contributors who wrote its chapters are all members of the Generation X cohort (that is, people born between 1961 and 1981). This is a group of people who are moving increasingly into leadership in the church, and hearing their voices about the church's future is important. That's a significant part of what the book is trying to do.

By the way, Kevin himself has written an excellent book about the Wesleyan General Rules that is well-worth checking out. It's called A Blueprint for Discipleship, and you can find it here.