Missional Discipleship Practices, 1: Live Small

Discipleship, ultimately, is about Jesus. But it starts with me.

Those two great truths of discipleship about who I can trust and what I can control mean that the path to discipleship has to begin with me. And that means taking a hard look at how I understand myself and choices I’m making about how I live.

First, because I don’t live in a vacuum, I need to be aware of what the culture of which I’m part tells me about who I am and how I should live.

What contemporary American culture tells me is that I am what I do, where I live, and what I own; that my happiness, my sense of self-worth and, ultimately, my security, are in material wealth. So it follows: the more I have, the more I am. And because I should always want to be more, I should always strive to have more. It makes the economic world go ‘round.

It also tells me that I should live for me (my own desires should define my life) and, if I have one, my family. Others live for themselves and their families. Each person, each family—autonomous. I don’t need to be concerned with how my life choices might impact anyone else.

Collectively, this helps explain why I live trusting myself first and foremost and why I believe that through my own efforts and material success, I can control most of what happens to me.

Yet Jesus says something rather different.

• My identity and security are not in what I own so that the more I have, the better I am. I can lose all of that tomorrow. My identity and security are in my relationship with Jesus. 
• Choices I make about my life don’t impact only my life or the life of my family. Depending upon the choice, it can impact my neighbor, my employees, my community, people across the state, across the country, across the ocean. My responsibility as a human being doesn’t begin and end with me.

Consequently, the first discipleship practice: live small. We’ve all heard about “living large.” It’s the profile of a successful life: a lot of stuff, a lot of space, a lot of energy. But as disciples of Jesus Christ, we’re called to live small.

Living small is not just about the size of my consumption footprint. It’s about recognizing that my life is not about me. It’s the kind of life Jesus modeled during his earthly ministry: life lived mindful of our obligation to others.

I can think of it as striving for low maintenance living. That doesn't mean asceticism. It means mindfulness: knowing how much is enough, sensitivity to how my life impacts others, awareness of my responsibility to help others. The less energy I require to maintain my life, the more energy I have for living. For Jesus, for my family, for others, for me.

 Some Scripture: Luke 9:46-48; 12:13-21

                            Matthew 20:20-28

Two Great Truths of Discipleship

Discipleship...I believe there are two great truths:

• the only one you can trust completely is Jesus Christ

• the only thing over which you have complete control is how much of your life you choose to trust to Jesus Christ

The bottom line of what discipleship is about is accepting and learning to live these two truths.

As great truths go, these two are straight-forward enough, but unpacking them will take some time.  Unpacking them we must do, though, because they are foundational to all we think we know about living for the Kingdom.

It's easy to make a list of those people and institutions we don't always completely trust: the government, the boss, the media.  At the same time, there are those we want to believe we can completely trust--our spouse, our significant other, our friends--and we count ourselves blessed if we can.  The reality is, however, that all these people are still human, and because they are human they are broken, and because they are broken they can fail.  Which means they can fail us.  This isn't cynicism.  It's the consequence of a fallen, sinful creation.

Jesus, on the other hand, will never fail us, will always be there for us, will always care for us.

We are control freaks.  It isn't a question of if, only of how much.  We like to believe that if we just work hard enough, hoard enough, hold on enough, that we can control just about everything that comes our way.  But that's one of the great lies of the human condition.  In the proverbial flash of an eye, everything we think we have, all the control we think we possess, can be taken away, and there's nothing we can do about it.  Anything we think we can control, we can't.

Except this: we can control how much of our lives we choose to trust to Jesus.

Everything we do in the name of discipleship rises or falls on our willingness to trust Jesus with our lives. 

How do you understand the relationship between trust in Jesus and discipleship?

The Importance of Discipleship to Community Groups

Community groups, incarnational communities, fellowship groups, mission groups--a rose by any other name, as it were, but whatever we choose to call them, they're central to the implementation of a missional/incarnational church.  But they can also pose a real challenge, especially for a traditional congregation transitioning to a missional/incarnational congregation.

Partly it's that DNA thing again.  New churches, starting from scratch, and especially if they're reaching out to the unchurched, can make community groups part of who and what they are from the proverbial get-go.  Living your walk with the Lord in a community group is just part of what it means to do and be church.

But, for traditional churches especially, it's also about baggage.  People in traditional congregations hear "community groups," they think "small groups."  Small group ministries of various stripes have been church staples for decades.  For many people, their experience of small groups was positive; for just as many, however, the experience was something else...a weekly commitment to forced intimacy that made them profoundly uncomfortable.  The idea of yet another small group experience...no thanks..been there, done that.

And there is the matter of time.  Being in a community group is just one more thing to have to make time for in a schedule already begging for mercy.

We're very mindful of all this as we gear up to launch our first community groups.  And because we are, we've come to the conclusion that the success of our community groups hinges on us first emphasizing the importance of discipleship.  We're certainly not alone in this.  Mike Breen, among others, has argued that apart from a discipleship process, community groups and missional/incarnational church are doomed to failure.  The key, we believe, is in educating our congregation that Christian discipleship, rightly understood, is naturally lived out in a community group.  Such groups, in fact, are the best expression of living life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  This is not pedagogical slight-of-hand, either.  The Scriptural, theological, and ecclesiastical basis for such an approach is sound.

Further, it's not about forced intimacy.  It's about living your life with others. Appropriate levels of intimacy may naturally develop as a result, but there is no performance expectation as far as intimacy is concerned.  Besides, we're all already living our lives with groups of people anyway.  It's a matter of doing so with some intentionality because that's where our discipleship to Jesus and the work of the Kingdom leads us.

So, we're really working on ways to explain, explore, and emphasize discipleship as a necessary foundation for launching our community groups.  In the coming weeks and months, I'll document what we discover.    

In the meantime, we're interested in hearing about your experience.  How have you defined discipleship vis-a-vis community groups?  What role does discipleship training play in involving people in community groups?

Of Wineskins and Garments

I've written in the past about the fact that one of the challenges of leading a traditional church through the transformative process of becoming a missional/incarnational church is the need to nurture both simultaneously. A decision to go missional and, from the get-go, leave traditional behind is, to my mind, a denial of responsibility. Becoming missional is, almost by definition, a process, a movement of people from one way of living--not just one way of being church--to another. As such, it takes time: traditional and missional will exist side-by-side, and the timetable for coexistence is up to the Holy Spirit, not to me.

But...I've been spending time in Luke 5 lately and there is that business of the parable of the new wineskins. Jesus clearly is talking about new ways of being God's people and while he never mentions the word "church" how can we read his words and not think about the organizations and institutions of the faith? And if we do, it seems equally clear that Jesus is telling us that the old and the new cannot exist simultaneously without compromise at best, damage at worst.

Jesus, first in terms of garments, then wineskins, sets out that there is the old and the new. Further, he acknowledges that the old is torn which, read in terms of the church, can refer to the old ways wearing out or to actual splits in congregations and denominations. In either case, the new cannot be patched on to the old because that both disfigures the new and results in an old that is no longer of a piece. Shifting metaphors, Jesus makes it plain that old ways of being cannot hold new ways of being without ruining the old.

What Jesus' parable suggests to me is not that we must abandon traditional ways of being church but that we must not make the mistake of thinking that somehow we can piece together a viable expression of the Body of Christ using some traditional here, some missional/incarnational there. Or, to put it another way, we can't mend tears in old ways of being church with bits and pieces of new ways. And Jesus also reminds me that those who've always known the old will likely always prefer the old.

Damage is something I want to avoid, certainly to minimize. Maybe, therefore, for a time compromise is inevitable. But hasn't compromise always been inevitable? Indeed, any expression of the will of God that utilizes broken human beings can hardly be otherwise. But if we must compromise, let us do so faithfully, expecting that garments and wineskins old and new are to be in service not to comfort or vision but to the Kingdom.