Making Disciples

I read this post about why churches do not make disciples. It Alan Knox asked for ideas to improve the situation. I then wrote what you see here.

Firstly, I think we need to see what it is, in Jesus' context and in Jesus' teaching that makes a disciple. The word is fraught with religious associations today. Dallas Willard prefers apprentice, I typically use student.

Jesus himself defines a disciple as somebody who will be like his teacher and as somebody who continues in his teaching. Dallas Willard combines them to say, "a disciple is somebody who is with somebody else, learning to be like them." That is biblical.

So, if we define disciple, then we have to become disciples as well as aim to make some. That means learning from Jesus, because Jesus said to, "learn of me for I am meek." So we learn from Jesus about God the Father, about the kingdom of God, about the defeat of the kingdom of Satan, about what true goodness is, about the Holy Spirit, about Jesus himself, etc. This process is called repentance, or changing your mind. Paul talks about it too, he says that mind changing is the key to transformation under the gospel in Romans 12:1-2. This cannot be done without specific attention to the good news that Jesus preached, that was preached about him, and the specific teachings of Jesus in the gospels and their meaning for today. It will involve being wrong, messing up, failing to live up, receiving grace and comfort from Jesus, as well as surprising results as people say, "oh, Jesus said that...better do it." That's what people who have the Holy Spirit do.

This cannot happen by accident, but it must be intentional. We must intend to follow Jesus. We must intend to teach others how to follow Jesus. Without human intention there is no discipleship. I think the myth of the “accidental disciple” came from a faulty version of Calvinism poorly appropriated and misapplied and perhaps from a bit of the “waiting on God” version of sanctification which is a breed of fatalism and Pentecostalism. The idea is that God will deal with our sins and our understanding in due time. But Jesus never gives a hint of that, he tells us to follow him and he calls the shots and forgives us when we fail and transforms us as his truth gets worked into our minds, our wills, and finally our daily habits.

So we've gotta be disciples and then we've gotta make them, probably largely within the church today, but on the outside too, that's the mandate, but the problem is that the church is no longer a body of disciples, which makes it a great mission field. Incidentally, Paul thought the same way, he was still making disciples of the Corinthian church and nothing was particularly holy about those saints, except that they called Jesus Lord.

I would then explain that convert, in the New Testament (Romans 15:6) is a word describing somebody who went through a personal change through their experience of repentance and acceptance into God's kingdom. Converts are not merely people who do some religious thing, but they are people who decide to follow Jesus...no matter how badly they stink at it of course.

I think that part of the mystique that comes with the phrase “making disciples” is the use of the great commission by missionary organizations to focus on the all nations portion of the commission, which causes people to think that making disciples is not the normative criteria for what makes the church. Wherever somebody happens to be at the time is a nation, so if they travel across cultures or not, they are still on mission for God, they are still called to make and be disciples.

One other thing that must be dealt with is the idea that disciples are perfect or perhaps a different breed of extra special Christians, when in reality everybody who calls Jesus Lord is supposed to also call him teacher. Disciples are students and they mess up, they get embarrassed, they sin, and that's why Jesus died, to save his disciples. So, once the idea that to be a disciple is to be perfect is removed, then I think more people will say, “oh, Jesus calls me to learn of him and he'll deal with perfection, but I'm just supposed to learn of him and call others to do the same.”

These thoughts are disorganized, but these problems must be addressed on the human end for discipleship to happen, or it rarely will.

Dallas Willard on the Bible and Why We Have It

 

On its [the bible] human side, I assume that it was produced and preserved by competent human beings who were at least as intelligent and devout as we are today. I assume that they were quite capable of accurately interpreting their own experience and of objectively presenting what they heard and experienced in the language of their historical community, which we today can understand with due diligence.

On the divine side, I assume that God has been willing and competent to arrange for the Bible, including its record of Jesus, to emerge and be preserved in ways that will secure his purposes for it among human being worldwide. Those who actually believe in God will be untroubled by this. I assume that he did not and would not leave his message to humankind in a form that can only be understood by a handful of late-twentieth-century professional scholars, who cannot even agree among themselves on the theories that they assume to determine what the message is.

The Bible is, after all, God's gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive, but straightforward reading-that is, one not governed by faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy-is what it requires to direct us into life in God's kingdom. Any other approach to the Bible, I believe conflicts with the picture of God that, all agree, emerges from Jesus and his tradition. To what extent this belief of mine is or is not harmfully

circular I leave the philosophically minded to ponder. Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. (San Francisco, California: Harper Collins, 1997) xvi-xvii.

The Canon and the Mission of the God in the World

After a few years of studying the history of the New Testament canon, the spread of the church through the world, the teachings of the Fathers, and of course the New Testament itself, this paragraph from Robert Jenson wonderfully focused all my thoughts about mission, gospel, and apostolicity. One of my favorite paragraphs ever written on the subject. We have the canon because the church needed a litmus test for the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the tradition by which we judge tradition. Reading it is the experience by which we judge experience. And the gospel on its pages is the gospel we are to preach.

Although the history is complex and its complexities are disputed, the canonical event can for theological purposes be very simply described: becoming aware that the apostles were gone, the community collected and certified documentary relics of the apostolic message. The church did this because she is to bring the same message she brought while the apostles guided her. Not all books in the canon were written or used by apostles. As the church gathered and commended apostolic writings, the criterion of apostolicity was simultaneously material and historical: a document was apostolic from which could be heard the teachings of the apostles. There is nothing viciously circular here; if the church had forgotten the teaching of the apostles, she could not anyway have assembled a canon. ^- Robert Jenson. Systematic Theology Volume 1: The Triune God. (Oxford University Press 1999), 27.