Don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. – The Bible, James 1:22

I didn’t start out to be a pastor or a writer. I started out to be the engineer in charge of building the first colony on the moon.

Obviously, that didn’t happen.  I became an engineer alright, but the space program went a different direction, and so did I.

In 1978 I had a nice job with a great future in research and development at Ford Motor Company. I also had a growing sense that God was calling me to leave those bright prospects to attend seminary. Six years earlier, at a Young Life summer camp in Colorado, I had promised God that I was his to command. So I packed up my young wife and six week old baby and went off to seminary.

Fast forward thirty-some years. That six week old baby is now working for the Lord in Turkey. He arranges for me, his veteran pastor dad, to lead training conferences for Turkish pastors. And that was the beginning of Doing Christianity.

The notes from those conferences have turned into a book, tentatively titled Pastoring: The Nuts and Bolts. (My publisher will tell me the final title. Watch this space.) I’m on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Podcasts and videos are in the works. I’m writing other books and this blog. Put it all together and you have what I call Doing Christianity. Because Christianity is not just believing a creed or saying the sinner’s prayer. It’s a way of living. Christianity is something you do.

Jesus said the two most important commandments are to love God as much as we can and love our neighbor as much as ourselves. Then he added a third, just for his followers: love each other as much as Jesus loves us.

God is not commanding us to have a feeling. Love is an action verb. These are all things we do. And the Bible says we keep doing them until we are like Jesus and the world is like heaven.

That’s God’s purpose for us and his creation. It’s why we’re alive.

But let’s back up a bit. Because the passion of my life is to see that God gets out of me everything he created me for – and you, too. So when God created creation, what did he have in mind?

For me, the answer is simple. The Bible describes God in many places, but there’s only one place where it tells us the essence of God’s nature. That’s 1 John 4:8, and it says God is love.

Now, love can’t exist in isolation. Love the verb is an action, done toward someone else. Love the noun is a relationship, shared toward someone else.

God always shared love within the Trinity. God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, the three Persons of the one God, shared love from eternity to eternity. But God wanted to share his love further. So God created us.

God’s purpose was to share his love. Our purpose is to respond.

The greatest setting of human love is the family, and God uses family as a picture of his relationship with us. In fact, God calls himself our Father. So how do we respond to the Father-love of God?

Like any father, God wants his children to love him, welcome him home, listen to him and respect him. Like any father, God wants his children to grow up to be like him. And because God is the ultimate and infinite Father, God wants his children to bring others to become his children also – ideally, every other person in the world!

Unfortunately, many Christians don’t know what it means to experience God’s presence, to hear his voice with clarity and confidence, or to wait on God like a gracious host. Many Christians don’t know how to imitate Jesus in his Spirit-filled character, Spirit-led wisdom, Spirit-empowered actions and Spirit-impassioned invitation. Many Christians feel woefully inadequate at demonstrating the joy and authority of a child of God and inviting others into the family. But Christianity is not just something you believe, it’s something you live. Doing these things is doing Christianity.

In over 36 years of being a pastor, I’ve never found anyone who wants to be a bad Christian, or an ignorant Christian, or an immature Christian. Yet churches are full of good people who never reach the full potential of why God created them.

It’s not God’s fault. The Bible says, “By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life” (2 Peter 1:3). But it also says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6).

And that’s the problem: lack of knowledge.

Most churches focus on certain aspects of Christian faith. They do a good job teaching those things. They may not do so well with others. The result is that many Christians don’t have a well-rounded understanding of all the good things God has given us.

That’s where Doing Christianity comes in.

God has blessed me with wide-ranging Christian experience and an eclectic theological education. I’ve been part of historic churches where I learned about practicing God’s presence and working to better myself and the world. I’ve been part of evangelical churches where I learned to love and study and use the Bible, and the importance of spreading the gospel to everyone. I’ve been part of Pentecostal and charismatic churches where I learned faith and prayer and the voice and power of the Holy Spirit. I’ve attended charismatic, mainline and evangelical seminaries. And my early training in engineering gave me tools to pull all this together and make it easy to understand. I haven’t learned everything about everything, but I’ve learned a lot about a lot.

Doing Christianity is my ministry of sharing that learning in clear, encouraging ways. It’s my part of helping people connect more widely and deeply with God, imitate Jesus, grow God’s family and make the world more like heaven.

There’s nothing as rewarding as living with a passion for God’s purpose.

Please leave a comment and let me know how it’s working out for you, and how I can help. Sign up for email and follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Most important, please pray for me and this ministry.

God bless you, and may God bless many people through you!

Read more on the Doing Christianity blog (click HERE). Read more about Pastor David Wentz HERE and HERE. Listen to his sermon archives on the Doing Christianity podcast (click HERE).