Category: Discipleship

Discipleship in the Local Church – Part 2

In my first post we explored the importance of centering discipleship in the gospel and structuring discipleship with flexibility. Then, we examined three primary environments for discipleship. In this post, we will take a close look at how to draw a line from what centers discipleship (a gospel-centered approach to Scripture) to what structures discipleship (various forms that can form a pathway).

The phrase “discipleship pathways” has become very popular with churches. It is typically used to express a desire to become intentional in making disciples of Jesus. This resolve is commendable but unless the pathway is robustly informed by Scripture, and centered in the gospel, our forms for disciple making will quickly become rigid, hyperspiritual, and legalistic, forming people away from Christ, e.g. being a disciple means observing these 9 habits, sharing the gospel in this particular way, being emotionally healthy. Therefore, it is critical to not only develop a discipleship pathway but ground it in the gospel of grace.

Centering our Structures

How do we center discipleship in the various church environments?

  • Classroom: This environment informs the disciple. It is “teaching” them to observe all that Christ commanded, and Christ taught that the Law, the Psalms. and the Prophets have their fulfillment in him (Lk 24:44).
    • Bible Studies: The sermons, classes, and seminars need to be grounded not only Scripture but also in the person and work of Jesus. For example, it isn’t adequate to have a Bible Study on the Book of Daniel. We need to ground our hope in Son of Man, not in figuring out the “signs of the times.” Otherwise, people will attach their spiritual significance to cracking the end-time code rather than the return of the Son of Man.
    • Sermons: Many sermons contain exegetical insights, historical nuance, theological reflection, and still fall short of expounding the gospel. If the gospel is not in the text, it is always in the context. Thus, we should always examine a text in light of the greater gospel context. What is the passage saying about God and his saving grace? We are not making students but disciples of Jesus.
    • We can discern the gospel of grace in the text/context by looking for (For more on this see GCD, 146-150):
      • Person and work of Christ: the cross, resurrection, ascension, intercession
      • Gospel Metaphors: justification, adoption, new creation, atonement, & union with Christ, suffering servant, the Rock, pearl of great price, treasure in a field.
      • Actions of Christ: advocates, forgives, cleanses, transforms, obeys.
      • Types of Christ: 2nd Adam, David, Abraham. The true Temple, Lamb, etc.

 

  • Community:. This environment integrates disciples with one another. It is teaching “them to observe” all that Christ commanded. We cannot obey Christ apart from the Body of Christ. His teaching requires meaningful relationship with others. We cannot love, forgive, encourage, serve, and so without a community. Thus, the community is the context in which we are formed together, where we get to witness the love, grace, power, forgiveness, and service of Christ at work among us. But how do we make community structures gospel-centered? Too many small groups settle for social groups, Bible knowledge groups, gossip groups.
    • Small Groups: Many churches provide sermon discussion guides that simply walk people through the sermon or biblical text without ever getting the gospel. As a result, the community can feel lifeless and academic. We have to intentionally structure the questions to get to the heart idols, concerns, and tensions. Only when these are surfaced can we apply the gospel to one another. This is when change happens! See resources like Gospel-Centered Life
    • One-on-One: One-on-one mentoring can often devolve into passing on best practices instead of a formative encounter with the person and work of Christ. In order for discipleship groups or mentoring to transform, the mentor or leader needs to intentionally connect life aspirations and struggles to the gospel of grace by: 1) Listening to their Story 2) Empathizing with their Story 3) Retelling the Story around Jesus.

 

  • Culture: This environment invites us to intentionally spread the gospel. It is making disciples “of all nations” not “from all nations.” We aren’t sent to extract people from the world into a Christian enclave, but to take the gospel into a cultural context. However, some Christians attempt to do this combatively, trying to conquer secular people’s politics and ethics, leaving them stranded with words of condemnation but no salvation. Alternatively, Christians can respond to culture passively, simply absorbing the views of the world around them and smuggling them into the church. Instead of taking a combative or passive stance against culture, we must intentionally engage the people, beliefs, and values around us with the gospel of grace. I recommend an ARC approach:
    • Affirm: Validate cultural concerns and affirm secular values that align with Christianity. Build bridges not burn them.
    • Redeem: Redeem secular impulses and values with the gospel. Show the difference Christ makes on an issue.
    • Confront: Explain why a particular issue is not good for humanity and demonstrate how the biblical alternative is for their flourishing.

Discipleship in the Local Church – Part 1

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.

Careful Love

We’re all careful about what we love. If we love a movie, we’ll read the reviews, track the showings, and buy tickets in advance. If we love an author, we’ll follow their writing, pre-order their books, and dive into their biography. If we love our spouse, we’ll think about them and tell them what we appreciate about them.

But if our true love is the sound of our own voice, then tracking what God loves will be unappealing, distasteful. Service to others, prayer for the kids, prayer in general, Sunday gatherings, community groups, discipleship, and evangelism will all become negotiable. Why? Those words have to contend with the voice of the Inner Me.

If the weather is bad, if there’s traffic, if we just don’t feel like it, we won’t expend the energy necessary to join the church in worship and be shaped by God’s word. Instead, we’re shaped by our own inner words, our rationalizations.

If its been a long day, and the kids have been trying, then we won’t make the extra effort to join our community group and encourage others. We won’t lay our head down, reviewing God’s grace from the day, and thank him before we sleep. Instead of listening to his words to find rest, we’ll invite digital words in to soothe us from a narrative that excises God. We’ll be carelessly shaped by other voices.

Joshua urges the people of God, “Be careful to love the Lord your God” (23:11). Be careful, pay attention, slow down, reflect on what you love. If we don’t, we will be blinded by our own idolatry, snag our eye on a thorn, pop an eardrum. We’ll be maimed and disfigured.

But if we love God, we’ll read his words, listen to his voice, and invite them in to shape us more than anything else. His voice will speak the loudest. As a result, we’ll stand tall, even in hard times. Our eyesight will be clear. We’ll even have words for others. So let’s be careful with our love, and trust the words that never fail, “not one word has failed of all the good things that the LORD your God promised concerning you. All have come to pass for you; not one of them has failed” (23:14).

Liking Has Limits

When we connect with someone we often click or say that we like them. This connection is typically because of a shared interest or value, and because we “connect” we prefer the company of that kind of person. We do the same with food and clothes. We like particular foods more than others, so include them in our weekly diet. We are drawn to particular fashion, so we buy certain clothes that express who we are. We tend to like people who resonate with our self-expression, but biblical community is based on love, not likes.

Community is based on love not likes.

Love pushes us beyond the boundaries of like. Love melts social boundaries. It compels me to spend time with people who are different, to see the world from their viewpoint. Love puts a face on those we don’t agree with and says I care about you. Love does not equal liking, though it may include it.

Love is commitment, service, sacrifice, putting others first, whether we like a person or not. Love is hard, deep, true. And it’s easy to mistake the people we like for the height of love in our lives. But Jesus said love is expressed in our attitude toward our enemies, toward those who have different ideologies, ethnicities, incomes, and personalities. Jesus could have easily said, “Love your neighbor ask you like your friend.”

Because love can be demanding, we often daydream of seasons in our lives when “everyone got me.” College friendships become the standard by which we judge other relationships. Or we compare our community in one church against another, concluding that our present church is deficient and “not meeting our needs.” But this is mistaking loving for liking.

When nostalgia creeps in, what we often want is to wind back the clock to a time before we had to love people who were hard to love, who rubbed us wrong, who required very little effort to love, which is to say we love an idea of them, a fragment of them but not the whole them, not the true them, not all of them. In other words, liking has limits, restrictions, and boundaries. Liking is not love, though it certainly can be part of it. Liking accepts based on preference; love welcomes even difference.

It is possible to like someone so much that you don’t actually love them.

In fact, it is possible to like someone so much that you don’t actually love them. If we mainly like someone, we may not be willing to be honest with them, to tell them the truth about the ugly parts of their character. Why? Because it risks the relational comfort we feel when we are around them. But love risks the loss of being liked for the gain of being true. Love is truthful, not just tolerant. My wife likes me and she loves me. How do I know? She loved me enough to tell me once, “You are great at serving our family, except when it is inconvenient.” Gut punch. When we mainly like someone, we are unwilling to say hard things to them.

St. Paul took it a step further to say, “Love rejoices in the truth.” Sometimes we chicken out from saying what’s true about someone’s character, faulty beliefs, or poor decisions. And we will say to ourselves, I love them too much. It would crush them. I don’t want to hurt them. But often the truth is, we don’t want to be hurt. We don’t want to risk being un-liked. We love ourselves but only like others. Others have become a means to the end of my self-love.

When my wife dediced to tell the truth about my love of convenience and how it was impacting her, she had to push through just liking. She had to confront the very real possibility that her honesty would jeopardize my liking her, a least for a moment. She braced herself for temporary rejection in order to love me sincerely, to tell me the truth.

Love that Never Fails

If we like someone, we will find it much easier to love them, but it will also be harder to increase our ability to love. People who rub us wrong, have opposing personalities, or are entirely different require love. They increase our reliance on an outside source of love. They drive us to find a strength of love that can’t be found elsewhere.

That love, of course, is found in God himself: Lover (Father), Beloved (Son), and Love (Spirit). Apart from immersing ourselves in intimate communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we will opt for liking and grow weary and cynical about those he’s called us to love.

Liking has limits, but love is limitless. If flows from the intra-trinitarian fountain of divine love, where different persons of the Godhead love and serve one another continually, spilling out to love the other (you and me) in limitless love. As I depend on that source of love, I keep discovering  people I love become people I like, and those friendships tend to be stronger, deeper, and more sacrificial than people I have merely liked.