Paul Calvert finds out more about an Israeli Discipleship School

Alon Greenberg

Alon Greenberg runs Lech Lecha, a discipleship training school in Israel. Paul Calvert sat down with him to find out more, Alon began by sharing what Lech Lecha means.

Alon: Lech Lecha is the Hebrew word for what God said to Abraham in Genesis 12: 1 when He asked him to leave his country and follow Him wherever He asked him to go; basically translated "go forth" meaning "you go" and that's what we feel like with our organisation, God calling us to follow Him in obedience to Him and to go wherever He wants us to go.

Paul: So what is Lech Lecha and how was it started?

Alon: Lech Lecha is basically a discipleship training school here in Israel. We started about 6 and a half years ago, but the vision started about 16 years ago when my friend got a letter from his friend in England. An Israeli going to England to a Bible School; his friend said we need something like this Bible School in Israel, so at that moment the vision was born and it took about 10 years until it actually got started.

Paul: So what things do you do to disciple the young people here?

Alon: For the last 5 and a half years we have built different programmes. The main programme we are doing once a year at the moment. It's a 3 month discipleship training school, where we take them around the country, (we don't have our own centre). We stay in different Christian youth hostels or camp outdoors, stay in different congregations and while we are doing this we have our study programme.

We go through the whole Bible with the young people from Genesis to Revelation and we talk about discipleship and not only talk about it and teach it, our focus is to live it out while we are travelling. For 3 months with the guys, we want to apply it while we are studying it. We also evangelise wherever we are and help in the congregations, help people in need and just live a life as a disciple.

A tee-shirt with Lech Lecha written in Hebrew

Paul: Israel is a multi-cultural country with both Arab and Jews are you a mixed group?

Alon: Actually the vision started from the Jewish Messianic congregation in Israel, meaning Jews who believe in Jesus; but as we went on with our programme we really felt that God opened up the vision to reach out to the Arab Christian community and now for the past 4 years we have always had Arab believers taking part in the programme. We have Arab Pastors helping us out on the study programme and a few years ago God brought a wonderful Arab Christian lady into my life and together we feel this vision should go to the whole body of Christ in Israel meaning Jews and Arabs alike.

Paul: Do you have any personal testimony from the group where God has changed their lives?

Alon: Yes there are so many testimonies! You know people come into our group, some of them grew up in Christian or Messianic homes so they don't have such dramatic stories; but there are others who just came to faith a couple of months before joining the programme or even in one case, 3 days before we started the programme!

One young Arab guy came to faith, he is called Ibrahim. He had a criminal background; drugs and gang life. He got saved 3 days before we started our course and the guy that brought him to us said "you're going to have to accept Ibrahim". We just didn't know, we didn't think it would be the right thing, but we said, let him join the programme for a couple of days. Then we saw how much God changed his life and it was amazing! This person came from a background of violence and God turned him into a person who's a man of prayer. After Lech Lecha he went to Bethlehem Bible college and in the meantime he got married to a wonderful believing wife and together they want to serve the Lord.

This is just one of the stories and there are so many more. Another guy, he's an Israeli Jew, emigrated from the former Soviet Union. He too was also involved in gang life, drugs and criminal acts. He came to faith about half a year before we started our programme. He got off the drugs and he came because he was so hungry for the word of God. Now he is an Evangelist. Why I wanted to say his story with Ibrihim's story is that both of them met like a couple of month ago and then they realised they were in two gangs fighting each other before they were believers, they were fighting each other and were involved in a fight which ended up in death for someone and then God picked one from one gang and he got saved and he picked another from the other gang and he got saved and when they realised what God had done they were falling in each others arms! They were crying and praying for each other and forgiving each other and they said wow we want the world to know what God can do.

Paul: Wow, it's amazing to see what God is doing in people's lives. What's your vision for the future of Lech Lecha?

Alon: Well, we want to develop more programmes, which are shorter programmes for a week or 2 weeks for people before their army service. In Israel the Messianic Jewish people have to go into the Army and it's a very tough time, so we want to develop those additional programmes so they can live the Christian life in difficult circumstances while in the army. We are hoping and praying also for a centre for where our programme can be based.