What comes to mind when you hear the word discipleship? I would imagine that some of us immediately recall some kind of discipleship class or group designed to help understand and mature our faith in Christ. Others will recall specific individuals in our lives who modeled and shared their faith in Jesus. Still others may envision a course of basic Christian tenets and practices. I expect that others will be inclined to remember their own history of being drawn into the life and activity of a local congregation.
When Jesus came to inaugurate his kingdom here on earth, he gathered a rag tag group of young men who became his disciples, and many other men and women gathered with them. After teaching them through instruction, occasionally confusing parables, and living life with them, Jesus gave them (and us) the following commission in Matthew 28:18-20, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Jesus lays out the instruction: make disciples, baptize them in the triune God’s name, and teach them to obey Christ. Furthermore, the gospels are a witness to Jesus’s methods. All our programs, training sessions, and classes are trying to replicate what Jesus was doing then in the first century. The diversity of modes and methods for discipleship attempt to contextualize Jesus’s methods in our time, and for our cultures. How do we carry out the commission of making disciples in the year 2022 and beyond? At what point of someone’s journey do we begin to disciple them? How do we disciple two generations (the Millennials and Generation Z) who represent the most unchurched generations in our collective lifetime? How do we need to reimagine discipleship for a host of folks who see Christian faith and the Christian church with suspicion at best or at worst - part of the problem in our culture?
We should acknowledge that ‘reimagining’ comes with the potential connotation that we are trying to come up with something novel and new. In truth, reimagining is itself not particularly novel. One could swap the word ‘reimagine’ out for ‘revival.’ There’s an aspect of reimagining that’s really more about returning to the original idea or example than dreaming up something completely new. How did Jesus make disciples? What have we missed from his example that we need to rediscover or reclaim? What practices of Jesus and the early church have we abandoned that we desperately need now?
This is such a core piece of the work we’re called to do that we want to spend several weeks exploring what it means to reimagine discipleship as we lead into the 2022 Discipleship Forum event starting Oct 24-25th. If you're interested in attending the forum, you can find more information and registration at the button below. But if you can’t, we hope this discipleship series will serve to inspire deeper reflection on what needs to change. How do we need to think about discipleship differently? How do people need to be equipped and deployed to make disciples? Through the next several weeks we’re going to explore what it might look like to reimagine and rediscover the kind of disciple making that Jesus commands.
Christ’s Peace,
Lance
CGGC eNews—Vol. 16, No. 36
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