Why Discipleship Doesn't Work
A Mini-Course on Reimagining Discipleship in the Church
As much as folks disagree on things in the church about theology and practice, we all seem to agree that the main problem is that discipleship isn’t happening in the church. It even seems like the more we talk about it the worse the problem gets. As a side issue, that is the same phenomenon I see in discussions about educational theory.
But let me suggest that the problem, as we name it, is not as clear-cut as might seem. The call to disciple and to discipleship might not be what we imagine.
I realize that this is a bold declaration, but I disagree with the common consensus that our problem is discipleship. I think that misconstrues the biblical material and misunderstands the nature of spiritual formation.
There are a lot of misunderstandings floating around about what a disciple is, how to understand this language and paradigm in the New Testament, and even how we are to conceive of the actual practice of disciple-making. While I don’t have the space to give a full-account of this, and I’ll offer resources below, I want to push back pretty hard on our presuppositions.
Many of us just take this framework for granted and don’t realize how modern it is, how narrowly we have come to understand these things, and how little support there is in the Bible for how we talk about all of this. We also often, I think, miss the broad movement of the New Testament that points to something much deeper and much more profound that we usually accept.
This post is a part of a series that I am doing that can be found on the main page of my substack that is called “Office Hours.” My hope is to provide a series of short mini-courses on a wide variety of things that pertain to spiritual formation, including a mini-course that is already available called “Bringing Spiritual Formation to the Church.”
If you would rather have this course on audio instead of video, you can click here for that option.
In this first, and free, video introduction to this course, I tell a bit of my own history with this question, and address what will become the main question of this course.
What follows in this mini-course is an exploration of the themes of disciple and discipleship along with the question that began to plague me as I considered the biblical material: why does the New Testament authors stop using the word disciple after the book of Acts?
Contents of Course:
Episode 1: What is a disciple, and why are we typically wrong about that?
Episode 2: How do we read the Gospels along the developmental trajectory of Scripture?
Episode 3: The context for following Jesus
Episode 4: Called to Union and to Imitation
Episode 5: Weighing Where We Are
Bonus Episode 1: How do we hear Dallas Willard in light of this?
Bonus Episode 2: How do we hear John Mark Comer in light of this?
Final Bonus Episode: Original (and much nerdier) Episode 2:
In this first discussion, I address the terms disciple, discipleship, and rabbi, pointing out serious problems with how people tend to use these terms.