The Demand of Discipleship
a course correction
“Do we make this more complicated than it needs to be?”
The question rang in my ears and unsettled my leadership brain.
The answer is that of course we do and yet at the same time, we don’t fully reckon with the complexity of the issue either.
What issue?
Discipleship.
In short, the question asked, replete with uncertainties and rife with various angles, generated a myriad of reflexive flinches, a flinch of fear, a flinch of angst, a flinch of doubt, and few others for good measure. Jabbed right in my preconceived notions, knocked off balance, and suitably wobbled, I answered as best as I could, mumbling and stumbling through canned responses about leadership and private practices versus corporate practices and planning and strategy and probably several other embarrassing cliched concepts.
What I wish I had said in the moment is this:
“All the planning a church does should be in service of making disciple-makers and that if that isn’t the goal, the church isn’t fulfilling its purpose.”
Is that harsh?
I don’t know.
Maybe.
Go ask someone what a disciple is.
I’m serious. Make the time to do it. Maybe even put down your phone, close your laptop, and have a conversation with a Christian you know, your husband or wife or child or friend, maybe even a church leader. Ask the question. Like, right now.
This article will be here when you get back.
…
…
…
Have you done it yet?
…
…
…
How about now?
…
…
…
I’m serious.
I want to know the answer and you need to know the answer.
I’m going to bet that one of the first answers you received is something along the lines of “Someone who follows Jesus.”
Decent first step. Awfully churchy, but at its core, the answer isn’t entirely inaccurate.
What does it mean to follow Jesus? He’s not around. We can’t play “Follow the Leader” by mimicking him, at least not exactly. Every Christian isn’t called to wander around Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria with twelve companions casting out demons, teaching with authority, subverting the religious and political climate of the day by urging submission to authority yet obedience to God, and such.
To follow Jesus is to what, then? What is a modern Christian to do? How is a modern Christian to act? What does it look like to be a disciple?
I’d venture that if you continued the “What is a disciple?” conversation for any length of time, terms like evangelism, scripture reading, prayer, fellowship, sacrifice, service, love, would bob and flit and weave through the dialogue to present the moving targets of what and who and when and how and how much.
At the heart of the matter lies…well…a heart.
Transformed by grace and radically reorganized by Christ’s love, a regenerated heart seeks not just to be with Jesus in the moment and for eternity—which sounds lovely, by the way— but to be reformed by Jesus into the image of Jesus. I desperately want to not be me and to be more like Jesus because I, dear reader, am a dirtbag. Redeemed as I may be, I fight against myself and my own desires every. single. day. That may sound familiar to you if you slug it out against your flesh and blood everyday, too.
But when I pause for a moment to consider Jesus, the guy who is shaping me into his own image as I surrender to the painful process, discipleship gets hard. It’s not the act of being discipled which sledgehammers away at me; it’s the understanding that being discipled forces disciple-making.
There is no such thing as a non-disciple-making disciple. The whole point of discipleship is becoming more like Jesus by letting others help you become more like Jesus which compels helping still others become more like Jesus.
This seems to be where the process breaks down.
Carrying out strategies for growing in our understanding of the meta-narrative of the Bible, cultivating a dynamic prayer and devotional life, developing a robust personal theological mind, serving others in the church and community sacrificially…well, typically we say if you’re doing these things, you must be an excellent disciple. However, in a vacuum, these activities, while great and potentially life-giving, do not make you a disciple.
Go read the story of the rich young ruler in Matthew 19:16-30. This guy has lived his entire life working to uphold the Mosaic Law. He’s held his life up to the standard he knows, and holding them side-by-side to compare the two, sees that he’s done pretty well. Given an assignment, he has labored and made an effort to do it right. Examining his finished product, he says, “That looks about right. It fits all the criteria, but…” In that moment, he knows something is off but can’t quite put a finger on what it is which seems to be why he comes to Jesus. He senses that he missed the mark somehow but he wants someone else’s opinion. He looks outside of his own self-evaluation in hopes of hearing that he’s going to be OK after all in spite of the vague dread he feels.
And Jesus doesn’t say, “You’re killing it.” Instead, he talks about the commandments and keeping them. So, the young man vindicates himself by saying he’s kept them. He knows the letter of the Law and he knows that, to the best of his ability, he’s held to it. And then Jesus changes the rubric, swinging the wrecking ball to raze this young man’s perception of what’s expected of him. He does it lovingly and graciously, but also truthfully, which dissolves any confidence this guy may have had in his self-evaluation.
Similarly, reading Jesus’s words should demolish any and every false notion of what it means to be a disciple in order to reconstruct our views on the foundation of what he says. Jesus says it is far more than adherence to the Law, it’s giving up everything to follow Jesus. Surrender all that you have. Give up on what you think you know. Rethink what you think you need to do.
In Matthew 16, Jesus tells the twelve that if anyone would be his disciple the path begins with denying self, taking up the cross, and then—and only then—can you follow him. It is a call to die, a call to give up everything to follow Jesus. To James and John and the rest of the disciples, Jesus explains that to be great in the kingdom is to serve others, to give your life up for their benefit.1
The underlying message rumbles and cautions, both in import and power—being a Christian is never about you.
Are you saved for your own benefit? In part.
Are you saved for God’s purposes? Absolutely.
If God’s purpose is to cover the earth with his glory through the church, then the faith which saves you is primarily for God’s glory not for your own.
How does that work? If your faith turns inward and focuses on only how it impacts you, the spread of God’s glory stops with you. If your faith works out to the benefit of the community around you, that’s a good first step, but still misses the eternal mark. If your faith leads others to surrender to God’s plan for their lives, you have hit the target.
Your faith is neither solely about you nor simply the good of those around you. Your faith in Christ is the vehicle by which God intends to grow his church and subsequently further spread his glory. As such, discipleship demands reproduction.
To be a disciple is to pass along what you know. To give it to the next generation. If you’re not doing that, you’re not a disciple, you’re an adherent. Jesus doesn’t seek adherents, he seeks disciples. Go look at the book of Judges and see the disaster of a generation that knows everything and does not pass it along to the generation behind them.
8 Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of 110. 9 They buried him in the territory of his inheritance, in Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash. 10 That whole generation was also gathered to their ancestors. After them another generation rose up who did not know the Lord or the works he had done for Israel.
11 The Israelites did what was evil in the Lord’s sight. They worshiped the Baals 12 and abandoned the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed other gods from the surrounding peoples and bowed down to them. They angered the Lord, 13 for they abandoned him and worshiped Baal and the Ashtoreths.2
The rest of the book of Judges is a cringe-fest. The people God calls his own and rescued from slavery in Egypt are commanded to pass their knowledge and experience to their children and grandchildren but failed to do so. Over and over, the people of Israel failed to do the very thing God desired of them. It is little wonder that Jesus, following the resurrection and before his ascension, meets with the disciples and tells them what they are now to do in order to fulfill his mission:
18 Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.3
The first disciples of Jesus were sent to be disciple-makers. It’s all a part of the plan.
Not my plan, mind you, God’s plan. God’s plan for his church.
Which forces a question to the forefront—If being a disciple necessitates being a disciple maker, what does it take to be a disciple maker?
That’s not a complicated answer at one level and entirely too complicated at another. The simplest answer is two-fold: to be a disciple maker requires just two things relationships and time.4
What kind of relationship and what kind of time?
That’s where the complexity spikes. BUT…at the heart, being a disciple maker demands these two things.
Discipleship isn’t the job of the few, but of the saved. If you’re reading this and consider yourself a Christian, then discipleship is your job, not merely being discipled, but being a disciple maker.
So…with whom do you have a relationship that needs to be encouraged to surrender to Jesus either more fully or for the first time?
I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you have three possible answers. A name popped into your head fairly quickly or one didn’t (which wouldn’t be right because look around your church and you’ll see someone to disciple) or you said to yourself, “It’s complicated.”
So, do we make it more complicated than it needs to be?
Maybe, but we’re also likely not as committed to THE purpose of the church as we could or should be.
How do we become more committed?
That’s another post for another time.
~SDG~
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Mark 10:35-45
Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Jdg 2:8–13.
Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Mt 28:18–20.
I suppose you could say three, you yourself need to be a Christian otherwise I’m not sure what exactly you would be discipling someone else into.
Excellent article.