Discipleship-Oriented Church
GraceDoes your church actively train people individually or in groups to do any or all of the following:
- pray
- read, understand and apply the Bible for themselves
- give joyfully
- forgive
- fast
- sacrifice
- seek God for grace
- worship that involves the whole person, affections as well as mind
I guess the answer is likely to be some but not all of those things. If the answer is no to most then you don't currently give a great deal of emphasis to discipleship. Why do you do the ones you do and not the others? The answer for me is that I tend to concentrate on the visible, measurable one, that I can tick off when a training course has been delivered on it. Which in turn tells me that I find it much easier to prioritise activities than relationships and skills training over discipling people in godly character.
Discipling in godly character while being no less deliberate is long term, relationship-intensive, involves friendship of depth, use of my home and hospitality. But most of all it involves a mindset that this is more foundational to work for than skills and knowledge. In my vicinity everyone is so busy that it is very hard to see how to so establish church expectations and structures to prioritise discipleship, and much easier to see how to do good front-led activities and services. Therefore the drift will always be away from a small, intentional relational discipleship model, towards a larger, less personal and intentional main teaching meeting style model.
The Apostle Paul's model was that he wanted to lead the people in "progress in the Lord and joy in the faith." The foundation of growing the church is growing people and this is how we are meant to work for growth. In turn receiving grace is the foundation for joy in the Lord, because it is only receiving grace that enables us to put our confidence exclusively in Jesus.
Therefore the task of discipling (in fact the foundational task of all leadership), the core of gospelling each other, is to seek God for his grace with people.
Reader Comments (7)
Marcus,
Glad to read this - I remember a chat you & I had some years ago in Swansea where we were chatting about being passionate about discipleship.
One of the things that saddens me with the UK trend for apprenticeships in churches is that in most places (my own church included!), the apprentices are "shipped in" from elsewhere. To me, that suggests that discipleship is either not happening, or is failing to impact the people in that local church. I worry that we import people in from other places as a cover-up for our own failings in discipling our own people.
The other thing I would include in your list is discipling others...if discipling is only seen as something I receive, rather than something I am also to be involved in, again we fail...
But, before I accuse others, I must first ask myself, am I discipling as well and as much as I could and should be doing?
Cheers for a helpful post Mr H...trust you are both well!
Hi Marcus and Ben
Love to have challenges like this. Thanks.
I hear Ben's point and I think in some cases what he says about apprenticeships is true. But it is not necessarily true.
In no way am I claiming to have this right, however, I think there are very real issues with using someone as an apprentice in a church where they have been born and grown up and where they are still surrounded by family members, not least parents and sibblings. A fresh start for them can be by far the best option. We have this year exported two apprentices, having encouraged them to serve consistently as teens and young adults and then helped them find suitable apprenticeships - and we've imported two.
Pragmatically, in these consumerist days some churches may well gain quite a lot from ('excuse my French') de facto 'bought in spirituality' apprenticeships. I've certainly benefitted from this myself. Some of the imported apprenticeship folk I've met -- despite or even because of their youth perhaps -- had so much to offer they seemed to have a role something like latter-day travelling prophets.
By the way, Marcus, if I may playfully go semi-off topic a little, the 'forgive' item on the list in your insightful piece reminds me that I must finally forgive you for not choosing to do my Cyberculture option on the Pomo MA all those years ago :)
Ben: a very useful addition to the list. I have to confess that the whole thing is highly aspirational in my own setting. Almost the key question is how to introduce these emphases when they haven't been there before. The factors resisting change are formidable, but most revolve around mindset - "we simply don't get why that would be a good idea enough to make the significant changes to church life that would facilitate it." Its very hard to show people concrete examples before they have had any concrete examples. So I am as much a learner in this as anyone
Neil: I have seen both work well. I think an advantage of getting in from outside is no prior assumptions of the church from the trainee, and no prior assumptions of the trainee by the church. The worst thing is when a church has an image of a recent graduate as "the kid we knew in small trousers". When they may well be among the best trained evangelists and small group leaders in the church if they have had good CU experience. We are about to export, have imported and have grown our own trainees, with good success in all instances. The export allows us to serve the wider church which is great.
Noel: I never realised you felt bereft of my presence all those years ago. Thank you for the forgiveness. I'm actually slightly surprised at myself not taking the cyberculture course seeing as I ended up writing a HIGHLY (ironic) postmodern and experimental dissertation on Baudrillard, William Gibson and cyberpunk. I like to think I wrote The Matrix 2 years before the movie came out, which of course was pure Baudrillard.
Nice to see you keeping yourself busy, Marcus. I would completely agree that good discipling in godly character is a long-term venture. I just wonder whether we have lost the art of 'long-term'. What in life, if anything, is now started out with a long-term commitment in mind. Whilst marriage should be, I would venture to guess that most people getting married may vocalise that long-term commitment with a good dose of 'well lets see'. A career is rarely for life, home is home until you can progress up the ladder, and commitment to a particular church lasts as long as it fits your agenda.
Before I get too depressed, let me turn this into a question. If good discipleship requires a long-term view, how can we encourage that in ourselves and others when 2-3 years is a long commitment, let alone 5? This requires skirting the relationship building foreplay and risking living open and accountable lives at a much earlier stage with people. Whilst being scary, this, I believe, is the best way to draw people quickly into relationships of depth that will feel long-term before you know it and hence bring about the opportunity for godly character to result.
Hi Matt
you are especially gifted at skirting the "relationship building foreplay" (strange phrase!). I guess you mean the period of superficiality (that in our environment can last for years) before we are daring enough to either let people know who we really are, or to want to get close enough to know who they really are.
If we allow people to stay in the skirting phase for a long period of time we may never get over superficiality. Deciding to ignore it and just blast into other people's lives, or live your own so openly that it is a constant challenge to others is pretty scary for most people. Especially when a resistance to community of depth has been built up over a long time. Once people are resistant then they build their lives in other directions meaning that to then build community they have to shift all kinds of paradigms and activities.
You know I couldn't agree more (you blasted your way through our defences adroitly enough, didn't you?!). But how do we do it widely? How do we create a community and a general mindset where it is the expected norm, not the scary exception?
Neil -
Thanks for your comment - I hear your caution on using apprentices from your own church family too. My other fear with it is that for the most part only the bigger churches with the structures, money etc seem to benefit, I wish that more churches would do a 2 year apprenticeship, with one year at the bigger church & one being sent elsewhere to help. (Or something along similar lines - 3 days with a bigger church, 2 with a smaller one). My concern is that the trend has been to have apprentices (which I think has been a good thing for many), but it has been widely followed in the UK, without necessarily being well thought through and/or challenged.