What does our discipleship crisis look like? Our lives look the same as our neighbours and they shouldn’t. We don’t all have to be radical, but we do need a small number of radicals among us to help us see that our lives could be different.
I do think ordinary faithfulness is the goal for most, even then our lives should still be recognisably different to our peers. When I first moved away from home to University, I was struck by the radical nature of the faith I met. I hadn’t encountered this before.
Other students were aware that their faith was their life: I remember spontaneous all night prayer sessions, evangelising on campus, long conversations about the Bible (that were probably more heat than light, honestly). A lot of that was youthful enthusiasm and it is good and right for it to be tempered as life moves into a more typical rhythm.
Yet, the adults I knew were radical too. Most of the families in the church didn’t have a TV. They gave their lives to Jesus and raised their children into the faith in ways that caught me as a fresh-eyed older teenager.
I’m not sure that not having a TV is the thing we all need to do, I feel no impulse to get rid of mine—though Rhys Laverty’s recent description of giving up the TV for the sake of their kids and the transformative effect it’s had on their children is inspiring—but I don’t encounter many people who don’t have one at all. People are shocked we don’t pay for a streaming service (which is about cost rather than ideology, we watch plenty) and we watch plenty of TV. It feels like the bar has shifted.
I’m not sure this example is a universal one. I suspect those families were being deeply counter-cultural in the early 00s. I was impacted by this example because it was shocking. Yet as culture has pulled in entirely the opposite direction, you’d think we’d see more pulling against the tide. If we turned to what should be an easy one, not giving smartphones to children, you’d hope Christians were there but we’re not.
Even if you disagree with my opinion on that, I can’t think of a common against the culture stand that we do see amongst Christians in terms of what we do with our lives. We sometimes talk a good talk but when it comes down to it, we don’t live differently.
As an aside, cultural engagement is more complex than just what we’re against, of course. Brad East has helpfully laid out that our culturally engagement should variously look like resistance, repentance, reception, and reform, depending on the question at hand. Three of these stances require us to have a contrast between us and those around us.
I suspect the difference would be more obvious if we started to open up our bank accounts. Many give their money, quietly, and generously for the cause of Christ. This is good. It’s deeply, and quietly, radical. There’s no need to make a fuss about it but give your first fruits to the Lord.
I hope it would also be more obvious if we looked at who comes and eats at our dinner table, but I’m not so sure that’s all that widespread. Who has your door key? What adults in your church know your kids? Who sometimes comes and joins in with bathtime? Who comes to eat, not at a ‘dinner party’ or just the adults but with the family and gets welcomed into family worship over dinner?
Do you even have family worship over dinner? I don’t think the time of day is a requirement here, but if you’re raising little ones you do need some pattern of raising them up in the way they should go (Proverbs 22). A friend who works at another church was recently telling me about some parents they’d encountered who thought that they should ‘leave it up to their kids to decide’ their faith and that discipling them was the church’s job. This post isn’t about that, but please don’t do this.
I don’t think there’s a particular pattern that you have to follow with your children, but you should have some sort of rhythm that helps them learn the faith and meet Jesus.
The best way of combatting many of our discipleship failings is to start again with the next generation. Teach them the creed and what it means, sure, but also show them how you take the way of Jesus into account as you live your lives and make decisions about whatever life throws at you.
I think we could be so much more than we are. The church is the dizzying glory of God, displayed for the world. In our worship we get a glimpse of the city of God. This means the pattern for life in the city of man is found in our practices, teachings, and community. The way your own household should be ordered and the way the wider community should be ordered can be found in the church.
The church has an economics—in the classic sense of oikos, a way of ordering the household, as well as the more modern sense—the church has a politics, the church has a vision for the world that is grander and wilder than anything a politician will offer you. One day the glory of the Lord will cover the earth like the waters cover the sea. First, we must mature.
Let’s get about that. Which means absolutely everything must be transformed in the light of Christ.
It is also true that ‘radical’ living exhausts Christians running around wondering if they’re radical enough. Most of the Christian life is about the quiet ordinariness of your domestic life. Your Christian duty is to love your spouse if you’re married, to raise your children in the faith if you’re a parent, to be a good friend and neighbour, to look after the poor, and to see the kingdom of God invade your locality.
Most of this ‘whole life’ discipleship is ordinary. It’s not exciting. It’s a walk forwards into a new way of living, but it’s also very mundane.
And it’s the life of the world.
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