Discipleship Isn't a Program

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.