Discipleship: Just do It!

I have met so many pastors/leaders/home team leaders, over the years that who have all the right questions about discipleship. Questions in and of themselves are not bad unless they are paralyzing to the work. In fact the first step to working towards a better way of discipleship is to question the current form or lack thereof. However, It is vitally important to get out of the question asking stage and back to the work of discipleship. If not, it becomes easy to slip into years of asking questions with little to no resolution. I have settled in my head that I do not want to spend the majority of my ministry asking how to do discipleship or how to do this or that. Pastors/leaders have come to the point that we know what discipleship looks like for us. So ask your questions and get some answers and then just do it.

I grew up in a church that basically had no understanding of discipleship. This church had no Sunday school or home teams or any articulated ideas about how discipleship worked. Because of that, it would be easy to think that that church had very few mature Christians. However, the opposite was true. Hundreds of people in that church grew in the faith and still love Jesus today. To be fair that church “organization” barely exists today, but those people are faithfully serving at other churches. I also know many other people from similar bad church situations and yet God worked through those bad methods to grow faithful followers. The main reason I have stopped asking discipleship questions all the time about organic or didactic, small groups or Sunday school is because of verses like Heb 12:2 “Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of OUR faith”. This verse says that as sure as Jesus is the founder of our faith is He also the finisher of our faith. This is unbelievably good news that we have to be reminded of consistently. Jesus finished work is our great anchor to know that people will grow in the faith. That reality frees us from believing that we have to find the “perfect” model for spiritual formation and explains why dysfunctional church structures often have mature believers in its midst. It is reasonable to try to find the best way to disciple people but it is unreasonable to think that if we don’t have Sunday school, small groups or Gospel-centered, organic discipleship or whatever you see as the “right” way, that discipleship wont happen. Discipleship models and conversations are like eschatological conversations, they sound great by their adherents but they all have flaws. The good news for home team leaders or pastors is that what God starts He finishes. Try to quit freaking out about models and just pick the one that makes the most sense biblically and then trust the Holy Spirit to work.

I have settled on what discipleship is for me. First, I believe in home groups and accountability groups that are Gospel Centered. Paul prays for the church in Ephesus that God would Eph 1:17-19 “give them a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him, having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know what is the home to which He has called you, what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints” and that is my prayer for all of my/our home teams and small groups. I want us all to grow in our knowledge of Jesus. I want all of our discipleship structures to be for the purpose of Gospel understanding because that is where power for sanctification flows and how God gets most glorified.

Secondly I have settled on how I disciple someone one on one. I like structured/organic discipleship. If I only try organic relational discipleship I have found that not much ever happens. So I have to put in a little structure for me to regularly meet and disciple someone. Here is what that looks like.
1.Conversations about life
2.Discus assigned readings for that week (The Jesus Storybook Bible, Death by Love, Wayne Grudem Systematic Theology)
3.Discuss bible readings.
4.Pray
Apart from a once a week meeting like this I like to hang out at least one time with that person. For me, this process works out well as I trust that God does the work of discipleship and not my model.
Where is your hope in discipleship? The Sovereignty of God through the transforming power of the Gospel, or is it in your model? Grow in the understanding of the Good News and then help others do that as well.