DISCIPLESHIP (The first of several reflections...)

I’ve been thinking about discipleship a lot lately. This topic has come up in a number of books and articles, conversations and seminars, as well as in my devotional readings. The general perspective of all these writings and discussions is that we have not been doing well “making disciples” in American churches--for some time--and instead, we’ve tended to rely on emotional feelings of spiritual well-being as the mark of our Christian life and faith.

This crisis in discipleship-making has been publicly acknowledged by the original seeker sensitive megachurch, Willow Creek, whose influence and philosophy of ministry has impacted almost every evangelical church in our country for the past 30 years. Willow’s assumption has always been that high levels of participation in the programs and activities of their church would help people mature spiritually and produce disciples of Christ. Instead, in their massive multi-year study, “Reveal,” Willow found that people’s involvement and participation in these sets of activities does not predict whether someone is becoming more of a disciple of Christ. Spiritual growth does not happen best through people becoming dependent on church programs and ministries, but through the age-old spiritual practices of prayer, Bible reading, and relationships.

This is very interesting and provocative to me. It causes me to wonder what other evangelical assumptions we might hold that are not necessarily absolute or true either. One of these is the strong individualistic focus we have put on conversion/salvation, along with our reductionist understanding of “the gospel” and reductionist methods we’ve settled on to inform others about what it takes to become a Christian. All around the world, people are beginning to realize how all of this is very much tied to Western culture and values, and to recent evangelical history. I first discovered this in the “Perspectives” class on missions: that a key philosophy and component of mission practice today is to get conversions of people groups, not individuals! I was shocked, because this seemed so at odds with the assumed, conventional understanding of conversion that I had always been taught and ascribed to.

How does this relate to discipleship? Simply that throughout the past 100 years of evangelical history, our priority has not been on making disciples (which includes repentence, conversion, and to “accept Christ”) but on getting people saved. However, discipleship is about more than salvation! We have been good at holding people accountable to this initial, first step in being a disciple, but not to the life-long process of becoming increasingly like the One we follow: Jesus Christ. We have been good at teaching theology and doctrine, the Bible and morality, but not so good in the practical living-out of the “good news” (i.e. making disciples). We have gotten people to believe certain things, but not so good in getting them involved in acts of compassion, mercy, and justice and in Jesus’ very obvious preference for the poor and outcast.

As Oswald Chambers put it: “Jesus said, ’Go and make disciples,’ not ‘Go out and save souls’ or ‘Make converts to your own opinions.’ The nature of spiritual life is gracious uncertainty. If we are only certain in our beliefs, we get dignified and severe and have the ban of finality about our views; but when we are rightly related to God, life is full of spontaneous, joyful uncertainty and expectancy.”

Perhaps the low view and negative feelings that many in our culture have toward the Church and Christianity is that they don’t see disciples of Jesus in real life but, instead, people converted to various opinions and certainties. This seems to be the perspective of many of our own 20’s/30’s here at Hilmar Covenant. I have been meeting with a number of these young people recently to get their honest opinions about our church, and one of the things that every one of them has said about our congregation is how disconnected and out of touch we are from the needs and realities of the world. They see us being too caught up with church issues, agendas, and opinions and they are not interested in being part of any of this. They want to see Christians out in the community, interacting with people, engaged in the needs and issues facing us today (sounds just like Wainer Guimaraes in Rio!). Maybe our rhetoric, methodologies, and emphases have just gotten a bit out of balance and distorted. Perhaps the ways that we’ve intellectualized and reduced the huge, exciting realities of “good news,” salvation, eternal life, and a relationship with Jesus down to simplistic formulas (“Four Spiritual Laws,” “Steps To Peace With God”) and statements (“The Sinner’s Prayer”) have caused people to miss the beautiful, supernatural richness of what it means to be “saved”--saved to follow Jesus in every aspect of one’s life. In other words, to be a disciple. Discipleship-making is much more wholistic in approach than what we have made it out to be.

In his book, “The Forgotten Ways,” Alan Hirsch confesses that the crisis his Melbourne Australia congregation faced was similar to Willow Creek: the fact that they had not been successful at the task of making disciples--and therefore they were not fruitful in mission. Could this be the reason why the American Church is also in crisis today? That indeed, we have not done well “making disciples” for a long time and, consequently, our mission--which is pursuing Christ’s priorities in the world, sharing “good news” with our communities and culture--has been weak and ineffective?

Earlier I made the observation that in Western/American Christianity, we tend to rely on emotional feelings of spiritual well-being as the mark of our Christian life and faith. This is connected to the “consumerist” model that has been prevalent in the life of our churches: that the church exists to “meet my needs,” to offer a variety of goods and services (called “ministries”) for me to pick and choose from, to provide me with a degree of comfort, stability, and well-being, and to protect me from the evils of the world.

Also, we are a culture that is saturated with stimulation, so feelings have come to mean everything to us. However, as we so often proclaim: our relationship with God is NOT about feelings! But do we really believe this? Do our actions prove this proclamation? Again, Oswald Chambers has much to say about this:

“The proof that we are rightly related to God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not. We must never make our moments of inspiration our standard; our duty is our standard. We are not built for mountains and dawns and artistic affinities; they are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff of life, and this is where we have to prove our mettle. A false Christianity takes us up on the mount--and we want to stay there! The mountains are meant for inspiration, but one is taken there only to go down afterwards in the demon-possessed valley, where we are meant to live and lift up those who are down. If we cannot live in the demon-possessed valley, our Christianity is only an abstraction. Drudgery is the touchstone of character. The great hindrance in spiritual life is that we look for big things to do. But ‘Jesus took a towel...and began to wash his disciples’ feet.’ Do not expect God always to give you His thrilling moments, but learn to live in the domain of the drudgery by the power of God. The height of the mountain is measured by the drab drudgery of the valley, but it is in the valley that we have to live for the glory of God. We cannot stay on the Mount of Transfiguration, but we must obey the light we received there and must act it out. Jesus says, ‘If you would be my disciple, deny yourself, take up that cross daily and follow Me.’ It has nothing to do with eternal salvation; it has everything to do with our temporal value to God--and most of us do not care anything about our temporal worth to God. All we are concerned about is being saved from hell and put right for heaven. There is something infinitely grander than that, and Jesus Christ gives us a marvelous chance of giving up our right to ourselves to Him in order that we might become the devoted bondslaves of the one who saves us so supernaturally.”

How has our discipleship, and our discipleship-making, been compromised because we’ve depended on emotional feelings, “mountain top” experiences, constantly new stimulations, programs, and human techniques rather than on the historic, solid, more mundane disciplines of prayer, Scripture, and relationships? What would it look like if we, together as a congregation, went back to these quite simple--yet powerful--resources for spiritual growth? If we did away with gimmicks, busy programs, distracting activities and meetings and opened our lives to one another regularly through prayer and Bible reading together, and outward service together? Sound dull? Too boring? Uncreative? Like drudgery? My hunch is that we would be amazed at what the Holy Spirit would do in our midst if we committed to this kind of focus.

Finally, one last point about discipleship, and about acting out daily our commitment to not just believe in Jesus, but to follow Him. Some of the hesitancy I feel in evangelical circles when we talk about the necessity of doing faith springs from an unhealthy, unbiblical, untheological understanding and dichotomizing of “faith and works.” I think that, in our Protestant reactionary zeal to make justification by faith the absolute cornerstone and crux of our salvation theology, we have wrongly severed action (or works) from faith, when biblically and theologically they are intertwined and totally connected. You cannot talk about one without the other--yet that is what we so often do! As soon as someone begins to press the required responsibility of living out our faith in Christ (works), most of us immediately jump in and push aside this vital necessity of action with a stern warning: “Your works will never save you!” Which effectively diverts people’s attention from the requirement of action and restrains them from freely and boundlessly doing all the things that Jesus says we must do in Matthew 25 (feed, water, house, clothe, care for, visit) if we are to “go to eternal life.”

And as Covenant “people of the Book,” whose banner cry is “Where is it written?”, what do we do with James 2:24? “You see that a person is justified by what he does and not by faith alone.” Yikes! How did this get in there? The unnatural separation we have made in evangelical Christianity between faith and works has, I think, also contributed significantly to the crisis of discipleship in the Church. Belief-Action/Faith-Works/Confession-Expression...there is never one without the other! It’s as simple as that. And as much as we evangelicals demand personal acceptance of Jesus as Savior in order to be saved, we must also demand the obligation that is ours to reach out and act with love and justice to people and situations every day, out in that demon-possessed world that we also live in. I think the Church is beginning to recover this reality--which is very exciting! The number of congregations reaching out in practical ways to serve their communities--as we are doing together one Sunday each month--is growing all the time. It’s a start. We just need to be re-trained and “re-faithed” in these very practical ways until our DNA as followers of Jesus has been re-programmed and is once again the same as our Lord’s. Then we will indeed feed-water-house-clothe-care for-and visit without even thinking that these actions are separate or different from belief. Correct discipleship-making will clearly teach and model this truth as people grow deeper in their walk with Christ. This is what discipleship is all about. This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus.