One of prominent episodes of this training is recorded in Luke 10, when Jesus sent out the disciples to minister in His name. But He did not send them out alone - He sent them two-by-two. In fact, He made a habit of it. He sent people out in ministry (and even on seemingly menial tasks), and He consistently sent them out in groups ... as an intentional part of how he was training them for discipleship. Don't miss this! It wasn't just practical - He was always training them in discipleship. Sending them out in pairs or groups was part of their discipleship.
We see very few examples in Scripture where someone is sent out in ministry by himself. No doubt, it happened (see Philip, for example). But the overwhelming pattern is in groups. Not even the great missionary Paul traveled alone very often. Furthermore, he usually sent his disciples out in groups, too. Many of his letters were intentionally inclusive of those who were ministering with him, and he wrote to people who were in ministry as groups (cf. 1 Thess 1:1; Phm 1-3).
This overwhelming pattern leads us to our fourth truth about discipleship:
Discipleship must be community-based.
Discipleship is designed to be done in community, in pairs, in groups, with one another. Our 21st C Western individualism tends to read Scripture with a filter that interprets everything for "me" rather than "us," especially something so personal as discipleship. When we read discipleship as individualistic, we are misinterpreting Scripture. Community-based discipleship is clearly the model of the New Testament.
It is a step for some Christians to accept that Jesus intends for our entire lives to be about discipleship (rather than a weekly meeting I have for the first year after coming to faith where I complete a workbook). It's yet another step for us modern Westerners to accept that Jesus intends for our entire lives to be about community-based discipleship.
This means more than Sunday school classes, small groups, and accountability groups. Those are good things to have in our lives, but there are a lot of these groups where very little discipleship actually occurs. If we take discipleship to mean moving from unbelief to belief in every area of our lives in light of the Gospel, it's safe to say many groups do very little to cultivate this move as a lifestyle.
I'm not suggesting you leave your groups. I'm suggesting you make sure that you are in a group that is pressing toward discipleship. Join a new group or help transform the one you're in. Do not conclude that you can do the life of discipleship just fine on your own. That is patently against the model Jesus carefully crafted for us.
Focused discipleship groups keep people accountable to each other in authentic relationships with appropriate vulnerability, pressing one another to move from unbelief to belief in every area, intentionally multiplying itself by making disciples who make disciples, and serving together to make the Kingdom tangible for others. This kind of group can take many forms, can meet in any location, can have any combination of followers, and can take a variety of names. Labels are not important - disciplemaking is.
I cannot encourage you strongly enough to seek out a small community that earnestly seeks to cultivate complete followers of Jesus.
This is the fourth of 17 truths about discipleship we are exploring together. This week's truth comes from various writings of Caesar Kalinowski.
Great post, Colby. I attempted to post some thoughts a couple days ago, but I don't think they took. (Never got the image verification) Here's a second pass at conveying my reactions to your thought-provoking, heart-stirring post:
ReplyDelete1. For people to get this concept and incarnate it, they need to explore on a much deeper level what constitutes and best facilitates community. There is a moral, ethical component to it (arguably the predominant component), but also a practical component. Discipleship is just as much concerned with the practical as with the ethical.
2. The best phrase I've found to define community is, thanks to Bonhoeffer, "life together". Not figuratively; not casually; not occasionally. Rather than an event or series of scheduled events, community is the fabric and medium of life. It's eating and drinking together; helping each other out on the spur of the moment when an urgent need arises; working together to accomplish common goals; supporting each other in intensely practical ways as well as offering spiritual and emotional encouragement. It is friendship and partnership. It is bearing each other's burdens. It's reciprocal.
3. All of this begs the question, what conditions must be in place for the above description of community to be lived out by real people? This is where we get out of the theoretical, generic and cliche. It's also where we rub most harshly against the grain of our hyper-individualistic culture. To lead the Church out of the age of individualism, we need local church leaders to study and flesh the sociology, economics and ethics of robust, sustainable community and to call the family of God into that kind of community--at the very least, to grapple and experiment with the concepts at the nuts-and-bolts level.