Grace allows you to be authentic with other Christians in an authentic community. As Eugene Peterson puts it, “Discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own.”
When the Bible speaks of church, it is always plural. Just think about Paul’s metaphor for the church being the body of Christ. You can’t exist apart from other Christians.
The other dominant metaphor is family, and that’s the first century, Middle Eastern definition, where Grandma gets old and you don’t throw her in a home.
Fast-forward 2,000 years to the American church.
I like to ask people, “If you got in a raging fight with your wife on Sunday morning and you’re rushing off to church, who do you run to?” Most people tell me they have no one, so they listen to the sermon and smile. From a discipleship perspective, that’s not OK.
We need to realize most churches are still operating around a weekend service based on the church-growth movement. It’s likely to be true even for churches who insist they aren’t. At the end of the day, right below the surface, most pastors focus on how to track and retain their people, instead of discipling and sending them out.
There remains a definition of pastoral success based on how many people attend a service. Few pastors will actually say this, but the church is still largely geared up to generate numbers more than loving one another.
For people younger than 40, the Barna study found a pretty intense hunger for relationships, action and authenticity. They wish church wasn’t just a sermon. They long for something real and interactive. They crave real relationships. I think it’s interesting that with the massive increase of social media, in the generation most connected to information, you see such an increase in loneliness, depression and isolation. Underneath the instant rush of technology and social media exists a desire for something real and significant.
Millennials don’t like monologues. They dislike what they see as a Christian’s inability to dialogue. If we don’t get this right, we will lose the millennials. As an educator, the worst thing I can do is walk in a room and lecture for three hours straight. In terms of education, monologue was dismantled centuries ago. The best way to learn is to get people engaged in dialogue and discussion. That’s why it’s so weird to go into a church and hear a monologue and leave. We need to have space for response and interaction.
In a survey of millennials who have a Christian background, many reported feeling that church isn’t a safe place to wrestle with tough questions or admit doubts about God. More than a third say that they didn’t feel safe asking their most pressing life questions in church. Churches that aren’t safe places for people to express doubt will have a hard time discipling people. A performance-based church environment will prevent disciples from genuinely wrestling with deep issues—but a grace-based environment liberates disciples to invite others to address their deepest and darkest struggles head-on.
Millennials are very passionate about vocation. Despite years of church-based experiences and countless hours of Bible-centered teaching, millions of next-generation Christians have no idea how faith connects to their life’s work. In the absence of good, holistic discipling, the significance of their vocation has remained a mystery, an untested assumption. A holistic gospel gives them eyes to see the kingdom at work in the work they do. An empowering church disciples them to do so.
Jesus invited people into discipleship as he was going on a mission. I learned from several discipleship books the importance of meeting with an elder at a coffee shop, one on one, three on three or in some small-group kind of mentoring. There wasn’t a lot of emphasis on the importance of being on mission together.
Jesus would walk past a tax office and invite someone to follow him on the way to healing a leper. Many churches do Serve Sundays and cancel the weekend service in order to serve their community. People in the community go, “Well, I could get into something like this.”
Jesus came as a servant. The pure gospel and the true Jesus are a lot more appealing to people than we can imagine.
I have come to see that the idea of diversity powerfully moves through the gospel. The New Testament radically elevates women, especially in the first-century context. Then you have the good Samaritan and the woman at the well and Paul confronting Peter’s hypocrisy in not walking in the truth of the gospel. I find it interesting that Paul makes it a gospel issue. Why? Because Peter was rebuilding ethnic walls that Christ sought to destroy.
Jesus is a global king, destroying ethnic, gender and age boundaries, not just as part of his mission, but also as a vital component. If we want to become more like Jesus, then diversity is not just icing on the cake.
It’s become true for me. I experience the diverse presence of Christ more when I’m around different types of people. God’s presence and glory is manifested in such intriguing and inviting ways through different ethnic and cultural expressions.
So how do we reclaim our neglected mandate of discipleship in our cultural context? I’m not saying any one model is best at all, but if I were a pastor, I would consider starting a church like the one Francis Chan began in San Francisco (WeAreChurch.com).
We Are Church has zero budget and zero pressure to fill seats to pay bills. No one is preparing a sermon; everyone is reading through the Bible together in a year. Each week someone devotes a couple of hours to lead life-on-life discussions. They don’t wrestle with making decisions based upon attracting more people or hiring a youth pastor.
The church is not large—five years after its start, 150 people attend at eight different home churches. At the same time, a strikingly high percentage of people are all in. I mean, all in. They live life together through loving and messy relationships.
Together, each one becomes more like Jesus. That’s discipleship.
