There probably isn’t anything Jesus was as overt about as he was about discipleship. That’s why it’s so strange churches put such little focus on it. Here’s three things that get in the way:
The Shame of Sin. We ask the question, “how can I disciple someone else when I’m such a mess?” But this isn’t as big of a problem as we think. As Tim Keller says “only a Christian knows how much they hate God.” The discipler should be candid about their sin, and in time, the way the they approach sin will become essential to the act of discipleship itself.
Lack of Self Knowledge. Discipleship opportunities are lost all of the time due to the assumptions that come with a lack of self knowledge. Positively, a person might have an amazing devotional life, but not realize they have something to share, because it comes naturally to them. Negatively, a person might have cultural or political assumptions, and say things that exclude people they might otherwise help. If a Christ-follower does the hard work of learning who they are, they’ll have few blockers in passing that on to others.
Structure. In Jesus’s culture you walked everywhere. If you wanted something, you built it. If you needed food you grew it. It was easy to follow people around and learn what they do. Relationships and skill acquisition today is fundamentally different. We have rubrics for everything. So what if we approached discipleship with some basic questions of structure: What does the disciple need to learn? Where will that take place? How will we know when we’ve succeeded?
What will it take to get over our fear of discipleship? We need to accept our sinfulness as the place where God shines through, do the hard work of learning our inner selves, and structure into our lives as individuals and as a church.
photo credit: Adam Foster | Codefor via photo pin cc
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