Discipleship is a catch-all term. It can mean 1-1 mentoring, theological instruction in the local church, an intentional spiritual formation plan, personal sanctification, apprenticeship to Jesus, and more. When Jesus modeled how to make disciples with the twelve, his disciples experienced all of these things. The challenge is to carry this forward in the context of local churches.
Good pastors aim to take responsibility for Jesus’ commission to make disciples by “teaching them to observe all that Christ commanded.” Elders and deacons want their ministry to result in “presenting every person mature in Christ Jesus.” So what should discipleship in the local church look like?
Centered and Flexible
In the New Testament, ecclesiology is centered and flexible. Biblical ecclesiology is centered on the person and work of Jesus Christ, which supported by the appointment of godly, qualified elders and deacons, stitching God’s people together with the threads of love and truth. However, the New Testament does not identify how we are to structure the church: house churches, small groups, missional communities, a specific liturgy or size of church.
The Bible contains descriptions of churches that gather in large and small spaces. There are halls for instruction and mounts of open air proclamation. But these descriptions never become prescriptions. Theology and leadership are centered in a gospel-centered grasp of the Bible but the forms of church remain flexible.
Therefore, it is wrongheaded to become dogmatic about what structures the church yet flexible on what centers the church. But in a consumer culture preoccupied with pragmatics it is tempting to place the accent in the wrong place. Conferences, churches, and authors (!) insist that we should adopt their model to have guaranteed outcomes: everyone needs a discipleship pathway, apprenticeship to Jesus looks like this; you must have missional communities.
How then should we go about discipleship in the local church?
3 Environments for Discipleship
If being a disciple of Jesus shapes not just our beliefs but our behaviors in all of life, then we need to approach it holistically. Discipleship happens at work, in the home, in small groups, on Sundays, at happy hour, on vacation. Therefore, instead of articulating a narrow discipleship around, say, spiritual disciplines, we need a broad conception of discipleship that helps us be intentional in all of life.
There are three primary environments in which we are formed: the classroom, the community, and our culture. For discipleship to have integrity, we need to be able to draw a line from what centers the church to what structures the church. We need a robust understanding of the gospel, and Scripture, to permeate the various environments in which disciples are made. More on this later. For now, here are the three environments.
- The Classroom: This is a category that accounts for instructing disciples, “teaching all Christ commanded.” This environment takes serious the handing down of the faith, the particulars of Bible study, doctrine, and practical theology. This is where the disciple is informed. That’s not to say they aren’t also transformed, but the accent is on teaching.
- The Community: This is a category that accounts for the relational dimension of making disciples. We learn through meaningful relationships with one another. Jesus’ disciples always come with other disciples attached. This is where the disciple is integrated. It is where theology comes to life, where doctrine is broken-in, where Scripture gains ground in life. It is following Jesus into other peoples’ lives.
- The Culture: This category accounts for the missional dimension of discipleship. It is the sent environment of being and making disciples, e.g. the workplace, vacation, neighborhood, apartments, villages, suburb, town. This is where the disciple is intentional. It is where we carry out our responsibility and privilege of sharing the gospel with others.
If local churches only focus on one or two of these environments, discipleship will become malformed. For instance, a church that focusses on classroom and culture will lack the robust environment of community where disciples can grieve, grow, and rejoice together. Discipleship will become highly intellectual and missional: brains and bluster, without real meat on the bones.
If a church focuses on community and culture, they may be relationally rich but spiritually poor. Disciples will lack the depth necessary to address the problem of evil and suffering, to grasp the immensity and holiness of God, and deal with pressing cultural issues, e.g. transgenderism, AI.
Thus, we need to articulate discipleship holistically and structure our churches intentionally, accounting for all three environments in which disciples are formed. Doing this will result in disciples that are theologically informed, relationally integrated, and culturally intentional.
