It’s been almost thirty years since Henry Blackaby published his collection of discipleship principles that came to be known as “Experiencing God.” Before then, Henry had been a pastor of fairly obscure churches in the outposts of Canada. Folks who publish such things realized that he had put into a discernible and actionable form the tenets of just how God uses his people to accomplish his will.
The Experiencing God workbook and subsequent trade book have sold millions of copies. And you will be hard pressed to find anyone who has traveled in Baptist circles in the past generation whose life and ministry has not been impacted by this work. I know that when Lisa and I accepted the call to leave Albany for Monroe over twenty years ago, EG was the guidebook on our journey of faith. And traveling the path to St. Pete, we paid lots of attention to the EG road marks and used them as confirmation of God’s call.
At 5:30 PM on the four Wednesday evenings in February, I will be teaching “The Essentials of Experiencing God.” It is impossible to condense all his great teaching in to four hours spread over four weeks, but I do believe we can sketch the outline and draw the big picture clearly enough for all to see. Depending on the turnout, I plan to do this again in the weeks to follow. And I am hoping that afterward we can rekindle a group ready to take on the full meal deal of the thirteen-week, day-by-day study. I am praying that this way of thinking about and responding to God will sweep over us. And I want you to be part of the groundswell.
Make no mistake; while his work is absolutely biblically exhaustive, the goal of Experiencing God is just that; that followers of God experience him for the sake of being used by him to help realize his will in the world. It’s transformation over information. It’s faith over format. Over time we will walk with Moses, Elisha, David, the disciples, and more, and discover that the same God wants to walk with us with the same measure of intimacy and purpose. It that sounds far fetched, come and see for yourself what can happen when a person, group, or congregation believes it can be so.