Archive for the ‘Discipleship’ Category
Making Disciples or Making Disciple-Makers?
As pastors, we properly view discipleship through the lens of personal sanctification; it’s about helping Jim become a better father, Jane a better wife, Bob a better employee—all for the glory of God. It’s about helping Betty overcome her sin issues, and encouraging Sam to get more disciplined regarding his devotional life—again, all for the glory of God. In other words, discipleship is about helping others bring every aspect of their lives under the controlling influence of the Holy Spirit. Well and good. But the question of “how?” needs to be asked. How do we go about helping people move toward sanctification?
Over the last year and a half I’ve spent quite a bit of time reflecting on my calling as a disciple maker. And one thing that has emerged with fresh awareness is the realization that the only way to help someone become a disciple of Christ is to help them become a disciple-maker. Or to state it another way, the only way to help people become sanctified is by helping them become agents of sanctification in the lives of others. We will never help Jim and Jane and Bob and Betty and Sam realize the fullness of the Spirit-filled life until we’ve helped them become channels through which the Spirit of God flows into the lives of others.
The expression “filled with the Spirit” (and its approximates) is used roughly sixteen times in the New Testament. And what’s fascinating about the expression is that twelve of those times it’s used in connection with Great Commission activity. We don’t read “And Paul, filled with the Spirit, overcame his anger problem.” Or, “Peter, filled with the Spirit, became a more sensitive husband.” Instead, we read things like, “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness” (Act 4:31). In other words, the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church is meant to flow into us and then through us. Like electric current, the Holy Spirit can’t flow into a person unless he’s flowing through a person into the lives of others.
This, I believe, explains why many of our people (indeed, even we ourselves) struggle so much with living the Spirit-filled life. We’re trying to tap into the Spirit’s sanctifying power without simultaneously engaging in Great Commission activity. We want to have our lives cleaned up (it’s no fun being a sin addict), but we don’t want to have to re-arrange our lives toward the priority of the Great Commission. But I can’t stiff-arm the empowering ministry of the Holy Spirit and still hope to tap into the sanctifying ministry of the Holy Spirit. We meet him in the midst of his work. If I would know Christ, I must be about making him known.
So if you want your people to realize everything God has for them, then you need to give them a vision of discipleship that extends beyond a sanctified version of the American dream. We must help our people engage earnestly in the Great Commission as their primary calling in life. The Holy Spirit will only flow into them as much as they are willing to let it flow out of them into the lives of others. Those of us in a pastoral role haven’t completed the hard work of making disciples until the people we’re discipling are both equipped and motivated to engage in the disciple-making process themselves. In other words, a disciple isn’t a true disciple until they’ve become a disciple-maker.
Do Small Churches Provide Better Pastoral Care than Large Churches?
Carl Trueman thinks so. Trueman, whom I always enjoy reading, has an interesting article in the latest edition of Themelios (the free on-line journal of the Gospel Coalition) that touches upon the ideal size of a local church. My friend and fellow SAET board member Owen Strachen noted the article on his blog and I interacted with it a bit on his site. But in as much as I had more to say than should be said on someone else’s blog, I’ve combined my comments, revised them, added another layer, and have transferred them here.
In advocating the small church model, Trumeman writes,
Second, church involvement brings with it a natural accountability at a very practical level. Here I guess I show my strong preference for smaller churches. I cannot prove from Scripture that a church should never consist of more than three hundred or so people, but I would argue that a church which is so big that the pastor who preaches cannot know every member by name, and something about their daily lives, needs, and struggles, is a church where the pastor cannot easily fulfill the obligations of a biblical shepherd of God’s flock. Put bluntly, I want to be in a church where my absence on Sunday will soon be noticed and where the pastor or elders can draw alongside me and ask the pertinent questions.
I want to be in a church where the eldership takes note if my behavior towards my wife or children is sub-par on a Sunday (hinting at much worse in private). I want to be in a church where I pray for the leadership and where they pray for me—not just in a generic sense of being part of the membership, but informed prayer based on real relationships. In other words, I want to be in a church where my pastor is, well, my pastor and not just that guy who is preaching over there in the distance on a Sunday morning. Put yourself in a small, faithful church, and the pastor is more than likely to hold you accountable to the basics of Christian belief and practice.
I’ve pastored in both a small, rural church (250) and now in a large, urban church (12,000). Both have advantages and disadvantages. I feel a bit of what Trueman is talking about, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the extent to which true community and pastoral shepherding is possible in a large church context. Of course, not everyone in our congregation knows our senior pastor. But we have a robust ministry staff, and once you include the elders and volunteer shepherds (e.g., small group leaders, small group coaches), the shepherding gap isn’t as problematic as one might think.
In many respects, this whole discussion hinges on one’s understanding of discipleship and its relationship to pastoral ministry. Trueman’s critique of the large church (i.e., any church over 300 adults) strongly suggests that the pastor (or elders) of a local congregation must serve as the primary, direct pastoral care-giver for each member of the congregation. But I’m not certain this is either self-evident or biblical. Clearly the eldership of a local congregation must assume final responsibility for the health of the church it oversees. (The manner of this oversight would vary in relation to a church’s polity—particularly as one moves toward an Episcopal structure, etc.). But must the discipleship of each congregant be directly overseen by the eldership? I’m inclined to think the New Testament model of discipleship suggests otherwise. The burden of pastoral care isn’t only for pastors; every member is called to mutual ministry.
Second Timothy 2:2 is a helpful proof-text here. We are to be disciples who make disciple who make disciples, etc. The expectation and example of both Paul and Christ is that every true disciple will be engaged in the process of making disciples. In other words, the mandate of a true disciple is not simply to get one’s own house in order, but to help one’s neighbor get his house in order as well. And indeed, this is not a small part of discipleship. A primary means by which a Christian grows in grace is by being a channel of grace in the lives of others. At the end of the day, we can’t separate personal piety from Great Commission ministry. If I’m to grow as a disciple, I must be about making disciples. In fact, the “filling of the Spirit” in the New Testament is almost always tied to Great Commission ministry. If the people in our churches are not realizing the full sanctifying power of the Spirit, it may be because we’ve not asked them to embrace the Great Commission’s mandate of making disciples. “Bearing each others burdens” is a necessary part of what each member of a local congregation needs to be about—not only for the sake of the other members, but for their own sake as well.
Thus the New Testament vision of pastoral leadership is one in which the pastor equips others who equip others who equip others, etc., on down the line. In short, the job of a pastor is to reproduce himself. If our congregants are to engage in the discipleship making process, we as pastors must carve out room for them to do so. But if the eldership of a church insists on being the only real force for pastoral care and discipleship in its church, then at some point the biblical mandate given to all Christians to make disciples is stifled.
This isn’t, of course, to say a church must keep growing and growing numerically with no end in sight. Maybe a spin-off is the best option in some circumstances (though logistically tricky when a church is sub 500 people). I’m certainly not anti-small church. (In fact I miss it sometimes.) And there is no reason why a small church can’t live out the vision of discipleship I’ve mentioned above. But I do think we need to be careful about intentionally settling for smaller, as though smaller is always better. There are, I’ve found, less benign reasons for choosing small over big.
When I think back to my own time in a small church context, I recall using logic identical to Trueman’s to explain our smallness. We wanted to be small, we said. It’s the best way to do ministry, we said. But in hindsight, I think something else was at work. As long as we considered big church to be an ineffective way to do church, we never needed to feel overly burdened about why we weren’t reaching more people for Christ. I’m in no way imputing such motives to Trueman (or others who pastor small churches). No doubt he and others who share his view have a more mature perspective. (I say this sincerely.) But I do think this is something every pastor should give a moment of reflection to. Those committed to the small church model must be very careful not to adopt the small church model as a subtle way of justifying a lack of vision and intentionality in reaching the most people possible for Christ. The large church, for all of its hang-ups (both potential and actual) became large (at least in part) because it possessed a grand vision to reach as many people for Christ as possible. Of course, this doesn’t mean every church needs to be large. God blesses in differing measures, and some soils are not as easily tilled as others. But the small church pastor who contents himself in his smallness and has no thought of reaching people beyond those already in his congregation…well, something about that doesn’t square well with our Lord’s directive.
From what I have seen, as far as the capacity to shepherd is concerned, in the end it doesn’t really matter if a church is big or small. What matters is whether the leadership of a local church intentionally calls upon, equips, and enables its congregants to shepherd one other.
Thoughts, anyone?
(This article was originally posted on the SAET blog, but I moved it here with the thought that Straight Up readers may find it helpful as well.)
The Parable of the Talents and the Great Commission: Connecting the Dots
Have you ever thought about the connection between the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) and the Great Commission? We all know the parable: A man is about to go away on a long journey. He calls his servants to himself and charges them with the task of investing his property. After an undisclosed amount of time he returns and demands an accounting—the hour of reckoning has come. Two of the servants make good on the assignment and enter into the joy of their master. One, however did not and does not. And for this last “servant” the results were disastrous.
The point of the parable is rather obvious. The man going away on the long journey represents Christ. The servants represent his disciples. But what does the task of investing the property represent? Too often we think about the discharge of the talents in abstract, general terms—becoming a better person, using our gifts and abilities at church (I sing in the choir), etc. Indeed. But we must be more precise. The discharge of the talents is congruous with the Great Commission.
Note the connection: Christ is about to go away on a long journey. He calls his disciples to himself and charges them with a singular assignment: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.” After an undisclosed amount of time he will return and call us to himself. The hour of reckoning will come. He will not ask us if we have been decent, moral people. He will not ask us if we have been faithful in attending church. He will not ask us if we said our prayers every night before going to bed. No. He will expect that we have been fully engaged in the one assignment that he left for us to do—making disciples.
Make no mistake about it. A true disciple of Christ is engaged in the mission of Christ. Making disciples is not something we do on the side—a spiritual hobby to be pursued in our spare time. Like the wise servants of the parable, making disciples must be the one great task of our lives. Let us not fool ourselves into thinking we can pursue some higher agenda for our lives other than Christ’s agenda and still enter into his joy. In the end, the parable reveals only two kinds of servants—those who hear “Well done,” and those who hear “Go to Hell.” God have mercy on us for allowing ourselves to be distracted by every little thing. Christ has promised to be with us in this task. May we who long for his presence rush to where he is and meet him in the midst of his work.
For those of us who would know and love Christ, the Great Commission must be the singular focus of our lives—the one great task that, above all, we are striving to make a good return on. And by God’s grace, we will.
