0
shotgun discipleship.
if you can’t reproduce disciples,
you can’t reproduce leaders.if you can’t reproduce leaders,
you can’t reproduce churches.if you can’t reproduce churches,
you can’t reproduce movements.~ neil cole
i got this quote from steve addison’s blog and it sparked some thought for me. this is a great measuring stick, and it makes me wonder how well we do in the church of actually reproducing disciples. there are some churches out there that are doing a bang-up job, but overall i’m not so sure that in our current church climate we’re really making that much of a difference in the realm of discipleship.
i’ll never forget what one of the first sr. pastors i worked with said, “we do such a great job of getting people in the door; we do such a good job of introducing them to Jesus, but we do such a terrible job at discipleship. the people we introduce to Jesus would be better off if once they got out of the baptistry they were met with a shotgun and we sent them straight home.”
too often for us we relegate discipleship to a set of classes–typically the “base” or “discovery” classes as produced by saddleback. although there’s some great information and discipleship training that can occur in them, too often that’s where we stop. we expect these classes to give them everything that they’ll ever need to get started and we view them as quick fixes. we expect people to be discipled on their own (which is funny because a disciple is a follower of someone–and don’t give me, they’re discipled by Jesus cause although this is true there must always be flesh and blood discipleship that occurs because as followers of Jesus we live in community).
“community” has become such a buzz-word in the church, however i wonder how much we really understand it. for us community is nothing more than a sense of belonging and a comfortability factor, maybe some deep relationships with a couple of people, but we’re still (in a sense) expected to compartmentalize our lives between church, work, family, etc. i think discipleship is an important and integral part of true community. often we run programs such as classes, etc, to help people connect and to disciple them– but we leave out the idea of mentoring. mentoring is a process that is longer than a few hours one day a week, or a few hours a month, mentoring is life-long study and followership under someone. i’ve heard it said in the realm of discipleship that we should always be looking up and always looking down. we should always be looking up to someone to help guide us along in this journey of life; and we should always be looking down to help lift people up and bring them along with us. too often we find people that are only looking up and never look down… and we wonder why all we seemingly hear in the church is “i’m not being fed here.” if we started looking down and around for people to mentor, creating a climate and a culture of mentorship and followership (a dual structure) maybe those rumbles would start to evaporate and fade away. discipleship is a community issue, not a personal issue because you can’t have disciples apart from a community.
will this cure us of being the most illiterate period in the church in america? probably not, but it’s a good start and will certainly make more of a difference in the life of the church than the expedited mode of discipleship we currently employ… and maybe, just maybe we’ll be a movement again.
Leave a Reply
