To be a disciple is to be a learner or an apprentice. Discipleship isn’t a ‘thing’ that we sometimes do. Discipleship—or ‘followership’—is life.
I’ve claimed the UK church is in a discipleship crisis, taking in our lives, our communities, and our minds. What does the first one of those look like?
When you stick ‘-ship’ on the end of something you end up systematising a phenomenon and developing a ‘science’ (in the sense of a body of knowledge). We see this in ‘leadership’ for example. A similar thing has happened with ‘discipleship.’
Is it good and right that some people talk about how we learn to follow Jesus? Yes. That’s what I’m doing after all, I’m sketching the contours of ‘discipleship.’ But, it isn’t a ‘thing’ we do as though we added it onto the rest of our life. It is life.
To use a less familiar term to help us think about these things together, I tend to call discipleship ‘Christian formation.’ The point is to be formed towards Jesus. The means is the question at hand.
Most of us picture discipleship in a very particular way. In a more cerebral conservative evangelical world that might look like the acquisition of knowledge about the Bible. In my charismatic evangelical world(s) it’s less likely to, even in the more conservative corners. Typically, it tends to involve exploring your heart and emotions and finding idols to rebuke and crush.
Both are good and godly, both are not the whole story. In both settings the most likely context people imagine for discipleship is one-on-one, probably in a coffee shop.
These sorts of conversations are great, they’re key to friendship as well as to receiving wisdom and direction. Though we should remember that male friendship tends to be side-by-side rather than face-to-face. It’s good to read the Bible with a friend, it’s good to talk about your heart. They are not the sum of discipleship. They aren’t really discipleship at all, they’re conversations about discipleship most of the time (this is less true if you just read the Bible together). Following Jesus is what you do the rest of the time.
Our crisis of discipleship is not helped by us thinking that following Jesus is a Christian activity that we add to a life of activities. Formation is just becoming more like Jesus as you live your life. Which is both simpler and much more all-encompassing. The faith touches everything and you can do everything Christianly.
Sometimes this sort of suggestion is mocked by accepting that you can do certain high culture jobs, especially academic ones, in explicitly Christian ways, but how can you sweep the road Christianly? A road is swept, or it isn’t.
I think this is a failure of imagination, because Jesus is always interested in our characters, and so I think the guy who sweeps the road while repenting of his sins, forgiving those who hurt him, loving his enemies, and taming his tongue—among many other things—will actually sweep the road differently than the rest of his team who don’t know Jesus.
Even if we allow that the content of some manual jobs doesn’t change, this doesn’t mean that a host of other professions shouldn’t be approached differently.
We should be expecting our faith to touch and change every aspect of our lives. We should expect the Bible to provide wisdom for every decision we’re making, even if this is often more about developing wise lives and minds so that we can make godly decisions.
Which means that our Christian formation should touch all of life. Talking about the sins of the heart is good. Learning more of the Bible is good—and an area that charismatic evangelicals are challenged in—but our formative work should touch more of life than that.
Our churches haven’t equipped us for this either, though I think that’s understandable and reversible. I’m not taking a pop here; I haven’t done this in my own ministry either. I think that’s been a mistake: Christ is for all of life.
Formation is about all of life. Discipleship is about all of life. Why? Because Jesus is the cosmic Emperor who demands that you live his way.
We need to learn how to talk like this again. One reason we shy away from it is that the early charismatics often got involved in ‘heavy shepherding,’ where every decision in your life was subject to the elders. It was abusive madness. A friend told me about how the Pastor had to approve which sofa they bought.
As a reaction—though not only for this reason—we’ve stopped suggesting that Jesus touches this part of your life. Does Jesus care which sofa you buy? I sort of think so. Not that you can’t buy expensive or nice things, though sometimes Jesus is asking you to do something else with your money, but there are Christian questions to ask. Did you think about getting other people into your living room when you picked the sofa, for example? There are other questions too.
Which is to say, no the Pastor doesn’t get to approve it, and you probably have loads of choices where you can just pick the one you like, but there are Christian questions to answer too. Jesus does care about your sofa, however trite that sounds.
He cares about every corner of your life. I am equally wary of churches telling you what to do as I’ve been on the wrong end of that a time or two, but they should be telling us that something is sin and something is virtue. That will involve some telling what to do. I do think that churches should be training us in how to think so we can make good decisions about all the situations which are particular and depend on your circumstances, which is most decisions.
In some ways that sounds worse: being trained how to think. It sounds like indoctrination. Which it is because it’s about putting doctrine into people, but I think everyone gets the wrong idea when I come out for indoctrination. There are clear pitfalls here. We should avoid them, but not by pretending that the faith doesn’t touch everything and change the way we live.
It is likely that these decisions will get more pointed and challenging for Christians in the years to come. It may be that certain professions become difficult to be a Christian in. Assuming it does turn that way, would we be willing to leave our jobs over our faith? Or, will we be like the proverbial frog in the saucepan as the water temperature rises?
When we realise that discipleship is all of life we realise that these are important questions, not always with straightforward answers, but that churches need to teach us how to think with wisdom so that we can parse them and follow Jesus in all our lives.
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