Please note: we'll be taking a break from sending out Discipleship Weekly over the summer so this is the last article for a couple of months. We'll be back in the first week of October, so keep an eye on your inboxes then!

It started in a coffee shop with my daughter and grand-daughter. I was sharing how meeting with church family once or twice a week wasn’t enough. How far we seem to be from the ‘encourage one another daily’ lifestyle of Hebrews 3:13. Is it our ‘my home is my castle’ culture that mitigates against this closer community? Many Christians attend Sunday church meetings twice or three times a month, as outside commitments and interests crop up.

The idea of ‘God calls’ started to form in my mind: a weekly one-to-one phone/video call with someone in your church, with an intentional focus on God. Something short, that includes the Bible and praying for each other.

As thrilling as puddle jumping

As we left the café, my grand-daughter was thrilled to see that puddles had formed after the rain. Of course, she started jumping gleefully into every puddle we came across. Passers-by stopped to watch and were rapt by the sheer delight of this simple expression of wonder. Except one lady, who unnerved us by looking on with a serious face. Was she going to reprimand us for a lack of control and for inflicting pedestrians with the risk of being splashed? Instead, she said, ‘You should be charging people to watch that.’

The second part of God calls came to me. The church is the dwelling place of God. He wants to make a home in his people! Should we be any less excited at that than by my grand-daughter’s rapture in the puddle-splashing? God calls us to get alongside others. God the Father himself is in fellowship with the Son and the Holy Spirit. We are made in his image and connecting is part of who we are – we are born to enjoy fellowship.

As simple as a phone call

A lady in our church had been recently housebound following a fall. We started a weekly God call. We each shared what God had been saying to us through the Bible in the past week. Others followed. Most involved choosing a book of the Bible and reading a chapter or a few verses each time. One man said he would like to ask me questions, so I just included the word of God in my answers. Another lady needed help picking up a weekly prescription, so this gave us the opportunity the meet, read and pray. My eldest daughter rings me when she has a few minutes free and we go straight into sharing what we have heard from God in the past few days.

I keep the God calls short – just 10 minutes or so, in order that the weekly commitment does not become unsustainable.

As important as eating

Crucially the Bible is always included. The Lord’s prayer says, ‘Give us today our daily bread’ (Matthew 6:11). Given that Jesus also said, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’, I think that hearing God’s voice daily is as important as eating (Matthew 4:4). We may feel that we do not pray or read the Bible enough, but God is so gracious – I find that in the 10-minute God call, we hear the beautiful voice of God and we are enriched.

When asked recently to name my favourite Bible verse, I said, ‘The verse that came alive to me in the past week’. Matthew 13:52 reveals that, as disciples, the Bible is like our own a storeroom, full of new treasures as well as old for us to bring out and share. Praise God for Bible gems that we have heard and owned in years gone by and which still enrich us to this day. However, let’s not rely on past discoveries, but rather reach out to God for fresh gems from his unfathomable store of wonders.

God calls have become part of the rhythm of my week. Blessings and truths are shared and thus multiplied. New Bible treasures are enjoyed on top of the weekly/bi-weekly highlight of altogether church gatherings. Above all, it helps us fulfil the disciple’s top priority, laid out in Psalm 27:4:

‘One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek; that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.’

We are God’s temple. God wants us dwell in his beautiful presence together. By getting alongside someone we can help each other to make this a daily priority – a brief midweek call can become a simple but profound delight!