In the ongoing missional church conversation, much is said about the necessity of discipleship. In fact, one of the leading voices in the conversation--Mike Breen--goes so far as to say that in the absence of having a system in place that produces and reproduces disciples, the missional movement, like so many church movements before it, will fail.
Maybe.
Predictions of failure aside, though, there is no doubt that creating disciples is a (perhaps the) critical issue. It's an easy enough conclusion to draw from Jesus himself--go forth and make disciples, he said, and I will build the church. Discipleship is job one.
This isn't a challenge peculiar to missional/incarnational churches, however. It's a challenge faced by all churches of all times in all places. And it's a challenge rooted, first, in Christendom's substitution of church for Kingdom and, second, in the fact that we've thoroughly domesticated the Gospel in order to control it. Domesticated it in the sense that the church has taken what is, in truth, a call to a very radical, counter-cultural way of living and emasculated it (forgive the sexist overtones) into a sappy, syrupy behavioral to-do list of suggested behaviors (often masquerading as "spiritual disciplines") from which we pick and choose those we can integrate into our daily lives with minimal discomfort and upset.
No wonder, then, that our understanding of disciples and discipleship is...well, let's just say it's something that any close reading of the Gospels and Acts makes clear is a good deal less than Jesus intended. Which goes a long way towards explaining why the church, on so many fronts, is in the mess it's in today (WorldVision's Richard Stearns nails this).
So: the challenge for all churches, missional or otherwise, is to discern and teach biblical, Jesus-driven discipleship. Given the plethora of off-the-shelf, out-of-the-box discipleship programs available, it shouldn't be so. Except that that's precisely the problem: we approach discipleship as a program. Discipleship isn't a program. It's a way of life. It isn't a series of books or classes, a 12-step program or a seminar. It isn't a set of behaviors that can be integrated into our already-living daily lives. Our worldview cannot shape our discipleship. Our discipleship must shape our worldview.
This is not to say behaviors aren't important. Paul makes that clear enough. Nor is it to say that any efforts invested in learning more about discipleship are wasted. It's simply to say that we can't get there from here. Centuries of domesticated Gospel and discipleship-as-program have gotten us where? Discipleship is what Jesus has always told us it is: we die to ourselves (and to the world, with all that means) to live for Him. Reading Scripture and studying and practicing spiritual disciplines can be aids to the journey but they cannot be the journey itself.
The day we quit talking about programming and polity and ministries and mission--quit, in fact, talking about church because, after all, Jesus himself promised us that he'd take care of that--and, day-in-, day-out begin living for Christ and the Kingdom, is the day we truly begin to become disciples. That, in itself, won't immediately solve the challenge of producing disciples who produce disciples, but it is, I believe, the absolutely necessary pre-condition for such producing and reproducing to begin.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Thursday, June 6, 2013
If You Want People to Follow You, They Have to Know You Care
More than one book has been penned (well, key-stroked) about Leadership Principles According to Jesus. I've never been entirely comfortable with the everything-you-need-to-know-you-can-find-in-Scripture school of Christianity. Most of what you need to know, certainly. All the really important stuff you need to know, absolutely. But everything? Biblical truth transcends time and place, but I'm not sure even Jesus would claim that the Gospel narratives of his earthly ministry provide a leadership textbook for the 21st century.
But...even if Jesus doesn't tell us everything, that doesn't mean we shouldn't practice everything Jesus tells us. I'm thinking of one Leadership Principle in particular: If you want people to follow you, they have to know you care about them.
Jesus calls his disciples, they drop literally everything to follow him. Sure this is Jesus we're talking about. Being the Messiah does give your call street cred that your average run-of-the-mill ministry opportunity doesn't have. And Jesus undoubtedly had a charisma (fully human yet fully divine) that pretty much immediately banished any second thoughts his disciples had about answering the call. But, for all that, Jesus was relentless in communicating through words and actions not only that he cared for those who followed him, not only did he love them, but he was willing to die for them--even when they had no idea what he was talking about when he spoke of what awaited him on that hill outside Jerusalem.
"A new commandment I give you...love one another as I have loved you." That would've made no sense apart from Jesus' manifold efforts at compassion and caring for his followers...caring that went way beyond saying, "I care about you" or "I love you," though Jesus undoubtedly said that often enough. Jesus cared enough about his followers to invest time in them, to teach them (over and over in the face of their thick-headedness), to warn them, to heal them, to tell them the truth that following him would mean rejection and suffering and daily shouldering their own cross. And for all who said, "this is too hard," and turned back, we know of the relative handful who stayed and followed and, ultimately, understood...a handful that grew into a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And that relative handful: they followed because Jesus was the Messiah, was charismatic, because he was the Way to life. But they followed, too--in fact, until they did figure him out, probably followed mostly because--Jesus cared about them in profound and extraordinary ways, and they knew it.
I don't know anybody (OK, hardly anybody) who answers the call to ministry for the paycheck. Most churches don't have the resources to pay people enough to do the work. It's too hard, too costly. People do the work because they are called and they can't not do it. And they follow a leader because they buy into the vision and believe in the mission but, most of all, I think, because they know the leader cares about them. In my experience, at least, people will not follow someone they think doesn't care about them no matter how compelling the vision or urgent the mission. They don't expect the leader to die for them, but they do expect the leader, through words and actions to say to them in healthy, appropriate ways, I care about you.
But...even if Jesus doesn't tell us everything, that doesn't mean we shouldn't practice everything Jesus tells us. I'm thinking of one Leadership Principle in particular: If you want people to follow you, they have to know you care about them.
Jesus calls his disciples, they drop literally everything to follow him. Sure this is Jesus we're talking about. Being the Messiah does give your call street cred that your average run-of-the-mill ministry opportunity doesn't have. And Jesus undoubtedly had a charisma (fully human yet fully divine) that pretty much immediately banished any second thoughts his disciples had about answering the call. But, for all that, Jesus was relentless in communicating through words and actions not only that he cared for those who followed him, not only did he love them, but he was willing to die for them--even when they had no idea what he was talking about when he spoke of what awaited him on that hill outside Jerusalem.
"A new commandment I give you...love one another as I have loved you." That would've made no sense apart from Jesus' manifold efforts at compassion and caring for his followers...caring that went way beyond saying, "I care about you" or "I love you," though Jesus undoubtedly said that often enough. Jesus cared enough about his followers to invest time in them, to teach them (over and over in the face of their thick-headedness), to warn them, to heal them, to tell them the truth that following him would mean rejection and suffering and daily shouldering their own cross. And for all who said, "this is too hard," and turned back, we know of the relative handful who stayed and followed and, ultimately, understood...a handful that grew into a few hundred, a few thousand, a few million, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And that relative handful: they followed because Jesus was the Messiah, was charismatic, because he was the Way to life. But they followed, too--in fact, until they did figure him out, probably followed mostly because--Jesus cared about them in profound and extraordinary ways, and they knew it.
I don't know anybody (OK, hardly anybody) who answers the call to ministry for the paycheck. Most churches don't have the resources to pay people enough to do the work. It's too hard, too costly. People do the work because they are called and they can't not do it. And they follow a leader because they buy into the vision and believe in the mission but, most of all, I think, because they know the leader cares about them. In my experience, at least, people will not follow someone they think doesn't care about them no matter how compelling the vision or urgent the mission. They don't expect the leader to die for them, but they do expect the leader, through words and actions to say to them in healthy, appropriate ways, I care about you.
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