One of the ways you know you’re making progress is that you stop having the same discussion over and over again.
If you’re discussing the same issues on your team or at home year after year, you’re probably stuck.
When it comes to much of the discussion around discipleship, I believe we’re getting it wrong in the church.
We’re stuck.
What if the popular understanding of discipleship is producing some of the ill health and even stagnation and decline we see all around us in the church?
And what if you could do something about it by rethinking what you mean by discipleship?
Different day, same conversation.
From my earliest days in ministry, I’ve had a conversation about discipleship that repeats itself again and again.
It goes like something like this:
Me: People need to reach out more and focus more of their time, energy and resources on evangelism.
Other person(s): That’s a great idea, but what we really need to focus on is discipleship. There’s such an immaturity in Christians today that we need to focus on growing the ones we have first. And besides, evangelical churches are known for producing shallow, immature Christians.
Pretty compelling logic.
Unless, of course, it’s wrong.
Flabby Christians.
I agree that often Christians in the West are immature. I agree our walk doesn’t always match our talk.
But I also think the average North American Christian is about 3,000 Bible verses overweight.
The way many leaders approach maturity is to assume that knowledge produces maturity. Since when?
It’s wonderful that people understand what they believe, but knowledge in and of itself is not a hallmark of Christian maturity. As Paul says, knowledge puffs up. Love, by contrast, builds up. And some of the most biblically literate people in Jesus’ day got by-passed as disciples.
The goal is not to know, but to do something with what you know. I wrote more on why our definition of Christian maturity needs to change here.
Here are seven things I believe are true about biblical discipleship that church leaders today should reclaim:
