Lifestyle And Discipleship
From the pen of Michael Spencer, otherwise known as the Internet Monk.
Lifestyle & Discipleship
Jesus didn’t invent the concept of being a disciple. The rabbis of Jesus’ time undertook students and followers in a “follow, listen, imitate” relationship as a typical form of rabbinic training. John the Baptist had disciples. The graduate seminar was replaced with meals together, weeks on mission, and hundreds of hours of conversation. Disciples in Judaism were not learning three hours a week. It was a life-consuming, life-transforming vocation.
Christian discipleship grows from that historical soil, but it is distinctively shaped by Jesus. Discipleship with Jesus was crucially focused around coming to understand Jesus himself. The midterm exam was not “tell me what you have learned about the Kingdom”, but “who do you say I am?”. This reflects the primary course material in Jesus’ brand of discipleship: Have you come to grips with what it means that God has come to you?
Promptly upon getting the answer to that question, the Gospels tell us that Jesus refocused his personal journey toward the cross and began to teach his disciples with new intensity the complete course of discipleship. Where their first semester homework was to get with a friend and go heal the sick, now there were signing up for classes such as “Being Servants”, “Carrying Your Cross”, “Washing Feet” and “Starting Over When You’ve Betrayed Me”.
The entire discipleship experience with Jesus was ironic. Once they had captured his rabbinical teaching method and bought into his kingdom message, he became the Messiah who would disappoint those wanting a political kingdom, who would be rejected, spit upon, tortured, and killed. To be a disciple was to take all of this upon oneself willingly in a full understanding that cross, kingdom, and New Creation were joined together in and by Jesus.
The contemporary model of the pastor is, on one hand, the entrepreneur, the “vision caster”, and the likable, unifying motivator. For others it is the ideal of the “Edwardsian” pastor, spending hours alone in his study to emerge on Sundays preaching sermons with irresistable theology. What about what Bill Hull called the “Disciple Making Pastor” ? The Epistles and the Book of Acts show leaders taking intense interest in the process of the behavioural/devotional formation of their converts. Paul’s own methods reveal an intense concern for discipleship using the methods of Jesus, investing hours, months, and years in developing relationships that allowed him to say “follow me as I follow Christ” and to use himself as a living illustration of applied Christianity.
Contemporary church life seems designed to create a kind of Christian who looks to the church itself for information, motivation and direction. If the church can produce its own brand of disciples, then it has done its job. But are church programs imitating the discipleship we see in the Gospels, or are they redefining discipleship into church-sponsored activities? While we know Jesus was a disciple-maker, our contemporary versions of Christianity often struggle with, or omit entirely, any meaningful process of discipleship that can’t be labelled as teaching/preaching or supporting a church program. As a result, the continuing emphasis on Christian doctrine takes place in the midst of a movement that is clearly shaped far more by the surrounding consumer culture and its own church-centred interests than by any recognisable process of discipleship.
Discispleship and the Christian Lifestyle
Western Christian culture often sees no problem with defining our conceptions of normal Christianity within our assumptions about lifestyle. Many Christians are confused to learn, for instance, that Joel Osteen’s presentation of Chrisitianity is not the teaching of Jesus or the New Testament. For many, Osteen represents a welcome fusion of their own ideas about the Western lifestyle and a personal belief in a God who exists to help you find “happiness” and success. Many modern Christians are puzzled to learn that Osteen and Jesus have radically different teachings about money, possessions, and the relation of the individual to money as a resource. One can not honestly hear what Jesus said on money and not be challenged to abandon the Osteen prosperity message. Some have never heard a presentation of discipleship that showed a possible collision between the kingdom of Jesus and their version of a prosperous life. Osteen’s message doesn’t grow out of anything said or done by Jesus, but out of the re-conception of the gospel as a material validation of a spiritual reality. With no connection to Jesus at all, Osteen’s words unite our deeply held conviction that we deserve the best God has to offer, and where better to experience that lifestyle than in the West where the best can be had for a price?
One does not have to look among the fans of the outright prosperity gospel to see this tension. In thousands of churches, Bible studies, and small groups, there is a massive disjunction between what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and what it means to have whatever possession, experience, or fashionable indulgence that seems appealing. The weakness of Protestantism on the subject of personal discipleship in an affluent culture has laid the groundwork where the logic of the prosperity gospel rarely bumps into anything that seems to be at cross-purposes with being a disciple of Jesus.
The actual processes and content of discipleship have been lost in the fog between easy-believism and a too-academic version of what Jesus commands his apostles to make: Jesus-imitating disciples. In an increasingly post-Christian world, this kind of discipleship will simply not suffice. A newly aggressive secularism, armed with the rhetoric of the new atheism and the confidence that religion itself can be portrayed as the root of all evil, now demands a response from a fully embodied, experiential, and engaged Christianity. Without demoting our response to the intellectual and rhetorical challenge, we are now called out of the classrooms, conferences, and church auditoriums to demonstrate the life that adorns the doctrine.
For contemporary Christians, the call to discipleship in the post-Christian world has called them to look at the church in new and realistically critical ways. Why is the gospel of so many Protestants orthodox but not transforming? Why do our churches resemble the culture’s version of organisational success rather than the culture-crossing, community-creating, church-planting movement that Jesus empowered with his very own Spirit? Why are so many evangelical leaders engaged in the promotion of doctrinal reformation and worldview articulation but not in the creation of the processes of transforming, missional discipleship?
You can find debates on the resurrection here and there, and Christians are excited about their skill in presenting the evidence for a risen Christ; yet this culture asks us to present not only the evidences for the resurrection of Jesus but the evidence of a resurrected Christian life, community, and ethics.
We must remember that discipleship includes the dynamic processes of Christian experience: knowing, growing, building, serving, forgiving, loving and risking. It is the transforming knowledge of God in the Spirit that experiences the transforming power of the Word. We are properly warned not to obscure the gospel by a wrong emphasis on discipleship. I suggest also that we not hollow out the gospel by disconnecting it from discipleship. It is this discipleship, a discipleship that illuminates the fullness of the gospel, that we desperately need in our churches.
Michael Spencer, aka “The Internet Monk”, is a writer and communicator living in southeastern Kentucky.
The full article was printed in the magazine Modern Reformation.