Discipling the Urban Poor: Observations from the Field.

Ajith Fernando article.

Abstract

In the late 1960s the Founder Director of Youth for Christ (YFC), Sri Lanka, Sam Sherrard, was going through the list of all who had made commitments to Christ through our ministry and was troubled by how little contact the ministry had with these young people. This led him to a search for a better methodology of follow-through care for our ministry. Around this time he read, two books, both of which first appeared in 1963: New Testament Follow-Up by Waylon B. Moore[i] and The Master Plan of Evangelism by Robert Coleman.[ii] The result was a revolution in Sherrard’s understanding of ministry: he saw the need for follow-through care of those who made commitments and the value of leaders discipling a few people. He abandoned his plans for rapid expansion of the ministry and determined that he would pour himself into the lives of a few people. He assured his supervisors who were a bit worried about the shift that once a good leadership base is developed, the ministry would not only expand but would also find a stable financial support base through volunteers who have been discipled.

Over forty years later, we can say that what he predicted has happened. The ministry now operates through 150 ministry points (like youth clubs) all over the country. Most of the eighty staff and 560 volunteers it works through met Christ and were discipled in Youth for Christ. Discipling remains a key aspect of our ethos.

Around 1978 there was another major shift in the ministry’s strategy. YFC had been working primarily with English-speaking, middle-class, nominal Christian youth partly because of the lack of good youth ministries in most churches. Now youth fellowships had begun to spring up in many churches. For many years we had been thinking of the huge challenge of reaching the totally unreached youth in our nation. A majority of these youth were Sinhala or Tamil-speaking and came from economically poor backgrounds. We decided to concentrate on these youth, a move which involved a major cultural shift for us. For the past thirty-three years or so my primary ministry has been with the urban poor. This includes our ministry in the local Methodist Church in which my wife and I helped restart about thirty-three years ago, after it had died down. Most of the members of this church are first generation Christians from economically poor backgrounds.

This paper will reflect on our attempts to apply principles of discipleship in our ministry with the urban poor.