In this video, Kevin Swanson explains that it is important to bring back relationships that foster accountability and growth within the church. We can learn a lot from the way that Jesus interacted with His disciples. We ought to pursue a relational form of living within the church. All too often, today, hospitality and relationships within the church have suffered.

1 Thessalonians 5:11 (NKJV) - "Therefore comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing."

Well, we're trying to bring back relational living in the 21st century, And I see it beginning with the family, as the hearts of the fathers turn to the sons and sons to the fathers. As we begin to see relationships renewed in the family life and a reintegration of family relationships, you will also see these families constructing churches that will emphasize relationships as well. We have lost the idea of human beings living in accountable, relational connections with other people. The state has replaced our social relationships, and now it's for us to replace that statist way of living and thinking with a biblical way of living and thinking, which involves crossing the generations. We need cross-generational churches.

We need relational pastoring. We need discipleship. We need shepherding. We need to replace university education with the kind of education that was used in the church for the first thousand years of church history before the secular universities were created. And that was a discipleship form of learning where the instructors, the teachers, were really disciplers.

They were like Christ who found 12 disciples to be with him for three years. This was not a university program. This was not a seminary. This was a discipleship program where 12 disciples were with a teacher. They lived with him, they listened to him, they worked with him, they applied what he said.

His focus was not on their knowledge as much as it was on their faith and their character. This is a good education program. This is causing us to reconfigure the way we educate our children, the way that we do our family life, the way we disciple our children until they're 18, the way we disciple young men into the ministry and into their mentorships and their life's calling. So we're talking about a relational form of living, a relational form of doing churches. We want to bring hospitality back into the church.

Rather than all of these programs, these age-segregated programs, we want to see people crossing over and getting to know people who do not think and act just like them. See, there's a difference between the slotted form of programmed life where you interact with people who are 25 years old, they've been through a divorce, and now here you are in the same divorce recovery workshop for six weeks or six months until you no longer fit the criteria, the very narrow criteria of what is required for you to participate in that small program. Well, biblical life, relational life is different. You are to relate to people who do not think and act just like you, who are radically different ages, radically different racial backgrounds, maybe even religious backgrounds, but here you are in the same church with people that are very different from you, but you can relate to them because you