What is Discipleship?

This past year a small group at Christ Church met regularly to think, and pray, and plan for “discipleship.” This is exciting! This has caused me to rethink how I view discipleship.

It can mean, “Go and convert people to Jesus, after which you need to hurry and baptize them and eventually teach them into maturity.” This is the normal way of thinking.

Or, it means “Go and convert people to be followers of Jesus, and God’s design for doing this is by baptizing them (initiating them into the community of faith) and teaching them (which is the main work of the church). The burden for the first is on “us,” our faithfulness and our diligence. But, for the second, it is God and his instrument (the church being the church, promoting renewed minds) that promotes disciples making disciples.

Discipleship for the first is a program that assumes that some are baby-Christians who need the likes of you and me to bring them to maturity. But we are all baby-Christians, and discipleship is not a program but the church being the church for one another. It’s the church that helps every Christian come to greater dependency on the fact that Christ’s work is finished once and for all. We are secure in God because the message about God in Christ – his life, death and resurrection –  is delivered/preached with a promise (God gives us what he promises!) that is ours when we receive him by faith.

We Anglicans sometimes get justification and sanctification catawampus. Either we say that they are the same thing – like sanctification is about making progress towards our ultimate justification (you’re right with God at some future date when you are actually morally right with him, and in the meantime, you are in and out of grace). Or, we devise elaborate programs for sanctification that they call “discipleship” once we are justified (now that you are right with God that didn’t require any striving but only grace, now the striving and self-help begins in order to bring our ugly selves into line with our righteous standing with God).

Could it be that when Jesus said, “It is finished” he meant this for justification and sanctification? And the experience of our life-long progressive sanctification is now a matter of practically and experientially training ourselves to think differently about the fact of our justification? That sanctification is “the art of getting used to the unconditional justification” wrought by the grace of God (Gerhard Forde) that only and continually shows us our deep need for God and the greatness of his grace towards the undeserving? “I have already and forever blessed you in Christ with every single spiritual blessing in the heavenly places… so, Lord, open the eyes of my heart to see!” (Ephesians 1, Chuck’s loose paraphrase).

“Discipleship,” then, is the church being the church (baptizing and teaching) so that, in following Jesus, we will learn to think differently about the finished work of Christ. Think christianly – transformed in the renewal of your minds – setting your minds on things above – taking every thought captive – thinking about these things. Instead of surrendering to a “What can I do” mindset, discipleship is retraining our thinking to: “So, God, how can I relish and live from the truth of what Christ has done, and how this totally redefines my reality forevermore?”

Chuck Collins
Associate Rector