3 mistakes I made in discipleship

“Discipleship” – that’s a word that you will and ought to hear in Church often. We challenge our church members to be in discipleship relationships that will grow them and we challenge them to disciple others as well. The word is used in the Lord’s command at the time of His ascension when Jesus said “go and make disciples…” Disciple making is in the very fabric and DNA of what it means to be a Christian. I was introduced to this truth very early on in my Christian life. In the days of my youth fellowship discipleship was a heavily used word and I thank God for those that took the time to disciple me. But I wanted to share with you three mistakes that I made when I attempted to disciple others. These are things I learned from and changed.

A.      Mistaking discipleship for counselling

Listening, counselling, giving advice and the likes are all a large part of disciple making. But they are never the bed rock of discipleship. I found that often the times I spent discipling someone became long drawn out counselling sessions. I was turning into an agony aunt (or uncle rather), a shoulder to cry on or whine on. Most of my conversation began to revolve around the difficulties of life and the bulk of my side of the conversation were mini speeches on how to cope with life and its struggles. But discipleship is not merely counselling. A disciple maker is not an agony aunt/uncle. When we see Jesus and the way He spent His time with His disciples we see Him teaching them the truths about the kingdom of God, about the Father and about eternity and the spiritual realm that was not a powerful reality to them until Jesus entered their lives. We see Him mentoring them in their ministries so that they were better and more confident servants of God. When he commanded us to make disciples He says “teaching them to obey all that I have commanded”. This means we are teaching them The Word because His commands are found there. Part of teaching the word is teaching others how to identify and overcome the hurdles and obstacles that get in the way of this obedience. So I learned, the hard way that discipleship is not merely counselling. When we reduce it to that we become overburdened and frustrated. Frustrated both at the disciple and us the disciple maker. We yearn to talk about bigger eternal things but find all our conversations bogged down by the temporal and at times seemingly inconsequential things.

B.      Mistaking discipleship for an event or a program

I don’t mean to discard the range of good discipleship material that one can find in Christian bookstores today – I am blessed by many of these wonderful resources. But one danger I found in myself and I find in the Church today is that we tend to make discipleship a scheduled event and an organised curriculum or program. I found myself getting annoyed at people I was supposed to be discipling when they “missed discipleship” that week. If they missed it for a few weeks in a row I interpreted that as them being uninterested and I gave up and moved on to some other poor victim. Discipleship for me (whether I was the disciple or the disciple maker) had become more of a scheduled meeting. My calendar entry would be “saturday morning 8am – discipleship”. But that was an interpretation of discipleship that was far removed from the Jesus way. It is a form of discipleship that has been bred in a modern context wherein we strive so hard to be independent. It has been cultivated within a culture where an individual’s privacy is valued almost above all else.

But the Jesus way was very different. In John chapter 1 when two of John the Baptist’s disciples approach Jesus he willingly invites them into His life. When Jesus called each disciple to follow Him He allowed them access into His life. It was not a Saturday morning meeting or a Wednesday evening bible study. It was life on life. The Jesus way of making disciples was to allow them to learn from not just His words but from his life as well. The early church picked up on this and learned this well. It is no wonder that we find it recorded in Acts that when people turned to believe in Jesus they were invited into this community that met together daily in one another's home and they began to do life together. Today the church tries to model that through homegroups/ life groups/ cell groups and yet we have turned these also into meetings in our calendar rather than a relational experience where we do life together with others. In our busy world today discipleship, church and our very faith is a scheduled event within all the other events of our life.

C.      Mistaking discipleship for cloning (subconsciously)

When it comes to discipleship and us discipling someone else we always look for someone who is not as mature as us in matters of faith and life. Conversely, when we seek to be discipled we seek out someone of greater maturity in matters of faith and life. When I am the discipler and I have mistook discipleship for counselling a very natural, subconscious sequence of events begins to unfold. I begin to superimpose my solutions and interpretations on the person I am discipling. I no longer help them put together a process to make sensible and God honouring decisions. Rather I substitute this with the quick fix “let me tell you what to do” discipleship sessions. I no longer help them to discover for themselves what Bible is saying because it becomes much easier to spoon feed them what I have already found in the word. But all of this makes the person I am discipling severely dependent on me rather than God. Christian, biblical discipleship is all about pointing people to Jesus. We all know how Paul tells the Corinthian church to “Follow me even as I follow Christ”. We see here that there is an element of discipleship that requires me, the discipler to be scrutinised and to be imitated, as Paul would say. But what Paul was calling for was not a cloning of himself. Paul did not expect everyone to live the life he lived the way he lived it. He was a church planter who moved from town to town teaching about Jesus. Yet we see that he himself placed two of his dearest disciples as pastors over two different churches. He leaves Titus on Crete and Timothy in Ephesus. He didn’t expect them to live the life he was living. So what does he mean when he says imitate me? I submit that the Jesus was of discipling making, which was also Paul’s way is to call people to imitate the principles, the motivations, the zeal.

As a pastor I desire to see more biblically sound pastors in my time and even after. But that does not mean that everyone I disciple has to become a pastor. They need not have to same passion to shepherd people and spend hours thinking of Church strategy, home groups, and church growth issues. My discipling of them ought, however to result in them being passionate about truth, passionate about the kingdom of God and the bride of Christ, passionate about justice, passionate about purity, passionate about the word and about prayer. That is the imitation that Paul is calling for. This imitation can be lived out within the context of anyone’s location or vocation. When we see the way Jesus called people we realize that denying and dying to ourselves in order to follow him does not mean the death of our talents, abilities and personalities. Paul was a zealous Jew and when he met Christ he became a zealous follower of Jesus. He was an academic and scholarly Jew and after he met Jesus he was (as showcased in his epistles) an academic and scholarly Christian. Peter was the first to speak up on most occasions before the cross. And after Jesus rose and then reinstated Peter, the Jesus way of discipling Peter didn’t involve a killing off of that passion and desire. In Acts once again Peter is the first to stand and speak to the crowds on the day of Pentecost. Peter is also the first one to speak at the Jewish leaders in the Sanhedrin when the church was charged to stop preaching Christ.

Discipleship is the call on our lives but we need to get it right, we need to understand it correctly otherwise it can be a cumbersome and largely unfrutiful experience for us as disciple makers and can become a tedious, judgmental and hurtful experience for those we disciple. When it comes to discipleship there is no better model than the Jesus way and there is not better teacher than Jesus.