Lecture 25: Through Movement for Clergy and Laity

The sermon is a critical part of the discipleship process. The “through” movement is the process of the “from-to” movement. Each of these steps must be contextualized to your situation. We are aiming for maturity in Christ. As a leader, you love the whole but you only disciple the few. Don’t neglect public proclamation but don’t see that as the end of your ministry. Daily pray, read scripture, weekly services, small groups acts of service, fasting, giving. Discipleship is helping people integrate the word of God into their lives.

I. The Role of the Sermon

The sermon is a critical part of discipleship and I don’t want to separate the two. If you study the sermon, for example that of John Wesley, you will see that there are a fairly large number of sermons that he never preached. They were for the body of Christ to read so they could understand theology. This is a both/and process; the sermon with upfront teaching; you have to get the content of the Gospel.

II. The Through Movement

What is going to be this important through movement? I want to move through six processes or environments. If you think in terms of environments; some of you may be frustrated in the sense of understanding these things where you want step 1, 2 and 3, etc. But the danger of this, just with any boxed system that you pull off the shelf, it is not contextualized. You have got to contextualize what you are doing to make it appropriate for your setting. I think if I can at least give you the general environments, then it will force you to depend upon the Holy Spirit to contextualize these things. Without this through process, we are not going to be able to arrive at a place where genuine discipleship is taking place and where spiritual leadership is finding its flower. As a spiritual leader, you want to know the fulfillment of Christ in your life. You also want to have the joy of seeing others blossoming and unfolding in that love. There is no greater joy than seeing other people come alive and accept the calling of God that was on their lives and seeing them take up this whole business of following Jesus. So, let’s look and talk about those environments. I don’t want to come across as being arrogant, but I am not sharing theory here. These are working environments where the Lord enables to take place in congregations with some that I have led myself. These working environments are unfolding and thriving in different places.

III. High Bar Standards

I don’t know how you can accomplish much of anything in business or any kind of work or any endeavor you do if you go low bar. That is, if you have small expectations. The first is a historical environment that I find important that goes all the way back to the beginning with Christ. This is a high commitment covenantal structure. We are aiming for maturity in Christ. Any kind of discipleship process that meets it goal in the maturity of Christ and participation in the mission of God will require a high commitment. Sometimes in regards to offering, people will tip God on Sunday; no we are not tipping God on Sunday. We ask for a high commitment for those entering in and by necessity avoid any kind of minimal commitment. Normally, the people who fight the hardest against this in trying to get these concepts across will be the pastors themselves. Pastors will often say that their people will not do that as they are too busy. You can’t get them to make that kind of commitment. I usually just step back and look them straight in the face and tell them that idea is nonsense. The real issue is that they don’t want to do that. They don’t want to commit themselves to have that kind of high bar discipleship. Jesus asked for nothing less than the totality of our lives! And so, we want to move in that way. Think about what A.B. Bruce said. He wrote the 1871 classic text called the Training of the Twelve. He said that those on whom so much depends, it plainly behooves to process very extraordinary qualifications. The mirrors much be finely polished that are designed to reflect the image of Christ. Yet, as we know the humble fisherman of Galilee had much to learn before they could satisfy these high requirements. So, much that at the time of their apprenticeship for their apostolic work seems all too short.

But then he went on and said, from the words of Jesus and from his actions, we can say that he attaches supreme importance to that part of his work. In other words, it was the training of the twelve. This is not a casual or low bar thing. A concept that is important to understand; in his great love, Christ loved all people. He ministered to the crowds; he healed people and shared his life with people. He loved people so much that he spent time with huge numbers, but in truth, he only discipled a few. The concept that we need to understand, you love the whole as God loves the whole, but you only disciple the few. One of my few Japanese students told me that her basic understanding within Japanese culture is of one fruit, which is to see one conversion in a lifetime is something to rejoice over. But the point, we are called to intentionally pour our lives into a few people. That is all you can do anyway when it comes down to the more one on one. We don’t neglect the crowds, we preach to the crowds. But we seek to integrate this behind the scenes with the disciples. He loved the whole but he only trained the few. I find that we really don’t immolate this example well. For hundreds of years, we have been captivated by the allure of public ministry, namely the talking head, one person transferring knowledge to a large body of people. Keep in mind that a good proclamation of the Gospel will indeed to that. But, it is when you just stop there at that point; we simply do not care much for the patient behind the scenes slow process of growing disciples the way that Jesus grew them.

I believe that there is a calling here; it is not to neglect public proclamation and not to see that as the end of your ministry in itself. We need to ask the church to take on the full example of the head of the church. He is the great pastor; he is the shepherd and we want to follow his leadership. We want to be like Jesus when he shared the joys of the kingdom with the crowds, like that on the Sermon on the Mound. I also want to be like Jesus when he shares the application of the sermon with the twelve after they finish up with that sermon. I want to be with Jesus when he meets with Mary and Martha in their home and in his resurrection life and on the road after his resurrection enlightening them. He is working with a few here and a few there. So the early band of apostles and disciples were trained by Jesus both through public proclamation and by one on one and small group presentations. You see this same thing showing up in some of the great movements of Christianity in history. One of those is the Wesleyan movement; Wesley preached and taught the Gospel wherever he could find an open door. He was rejected and barred from preaching within most Anglian churches in Britain at the time. He preached in city squares, in fields and in cold pits before he had his own places to preach. He didn’t try to accomplish by preaching alone. His friend, George Whitfield, was probably a better and more effective preacher than Wesley was. At the end of his life, George Whitfield looked back and said that all the people turned into a rope of sand. He realized that Wesley at that point had the better way by putting societal people into smaller groups of people, but from the beginning for those small groups, there were high bar standards.

So, what do we mean by high bar standards? First we have Intentionality. We have a goal and we are going to intentionally work toward that goal. So, not only intentionality here, but there is going to be frequency of meetings. Don’t do discipleship casually; set a standard meetings time and stick to it over a long period of time. At what point do they graduate out of the discipleship process? We never graduate from it. There were daily requirements as well and these revolved around the means of grace. They were expected to pray daily and be in a disposition and life style of prayer. They were expected to be in the Word daily and required not only attend every Sunday but they were required to be in these small groups. They were required also to fast every week and to do works of service and mercy with others within their scope of living. They were required to give a certain minimal amount of giving as well. Tithing was simply a requirement. There was also accountability which involved sharing with others about their prayer life and their study of God’s Word. If you are leading one of these small groups, it is important to have everybody on the same page of Scripture every day, to have words of encouragement and enlightenment. When everybody is on the same page, you share what insights the Lord has given you this week. The accountability was to ask about them. When we ask about things, then that shows that we do think that they are important; I have found that people do not take it in a condemnatory sense but they are thankful that somebody loves them enough to care about how they are doing in these areas.

And when they didn’t fulfill the covenant as all of this is under a covenant where we ask people ahead of time as how we will live and work together. It revolves around the things we have covered earlier on, such as devotional living, relational strengthening, vocational serving and temple nurturing. All of that is built into this covenant. You help people and work with them through a process. We have accepted an incomplete mode of discipleship where merely coming to a service has become our default discipleship approach. Yes, we want people to come to church, to a service and certainly God is sovereign and more than capable of growing disciples through church attendance. But he gave us his son to show us the full path of discipleship and if making disciples was one of the most important works of Jesus, I need to learn how to be a disciple and how to share that process and bring others into that discipleship process as well. You will not have people standing in line to go through high bar discipleship processes. Jesus starts out with twelve and ends up with eleven and the world was transformed because of that. Perhaps he will give you three or four or more; that is up to the Lord. But the slow pouring of your life and shepherding of others; it takes about two years to get someone set in the way of being a person of prayer, a person of the Word. There is no weekend approach to any of this; that just doesn’t happen that way.

IV. Family Atmosphere

The second climate or environment that I hope to develop will be in context of a family atmosphere. We are thinking that it is like a family moving toward this. One of the great tragedies that you will see in congregational leadership in the life of the leader today is in regards to leaders having friends. When I do clergy conferences where I am just dealing with clergy, I ask how many close friends do they have around you now. This is a North American response; this is different than other places. The usual response is that they don’t have any close friends. For the leaders in the body of Christ, the spiritual life is going to lead you into a tight long lasting strong relationship with at least a few others. This business of solo leadership just sets you up to be picked off by the evil one. You become easy prey for the devil. This business is a ‘we’ and not a ‘me’. We need to put people together in family like groups and encourage them and love them and have them to encourage others. We are going to bless them. The disciples ministered together with Jesus; they travelled with him and ate with them. They debated various distractions along the way with him. Who knows how many one on one discussions they had or three on one, etc. They had nearly three years of that. He was available to them; he interacted with them. He spent a considerable amount of time with this small group of people who were in close relationship with one another. One of the greatest gifts you can give someone in your local congregation is to give them the gift of friendship and allow them to have an environment where they are able to develop true friendship; people who pray for one another. They do life together. I think discipleship is best done today the way it was done two thousand years ago where people learned how to do life together in a committed covenantal community. This is why discipleship is a process, not a program. Programs have a start and endings and there are so many points to it. Discipleship has to transcend any kind of programmatic approach. We need the living body of Christ to actually be present to us. Many people have never experienced someone praying for them and to have someone who they can call in times of joy and in need.

The leader’s main job in such a setting like this is not to impart information, not in these small groups in didactic teaching through sermons. Instead you are to help these people into grace and the Gospel into there every day mundane lives and their relationships. So, what does it mean to live out the Gospel in your business and your family and work and neighborhood? There is a winsome and attractive power to the Christian faith that emerges when people within the community of Christ actually demonstrate the love of the Lord to one another. Our eldest child at this moment is a part of a megachurch. I have never been in a church so large. It is in Dallas Texas and it is an awesome church with sound teaching. I have no idea how many thousands are a part of this congregation. But, our Robin is part of a community group and so she has people who also have children. They faithfully meet together to work out the implications of the Gospel in their own lives. Discipleship that unfolds within the context of a small community of people where leaders help set the atmosphere by truly focusing on the spiritual flourishing of those people in that group. This is going to draw others by itself and it may only be a few. But how many does it take to change the world anyway? How do you change the whole culture where you know that the entire culture of this local congregation really needs to be transformed? You just can’t force this on anyone; you can only do this by allowing the Holy Spirit transform just a few. Genuine winsome attractive transformation in their lives and they attract others in turn and before you know it, the culture can change through those few.

V. Biblical and Theological Grounding

The third through process involves biblical and theological grounding. I have had to realize that the people in church know very little about their bible and theology. In fact, it is fairly much given that the majority of people that I work with as a pastor really didn’t have biblical or theological grounding at all. Now, this discipleship formation can never be reduced to mere technique. The technique is the how we live the Christ life. You don’t want the how or technique or the integrating structure to lead it. You want the why in doing this. The why is what the Word of God says and what Jesus came to reveal to us. We want to know the way, the truth and the light that is Jesus. Frankly, this is why the whole spiritual formation movement today has gotten such a bad response. In some of its circles, you will see people divided into disciplines or techniques first to the neglect of Biblical foundation. So the content or the why is what directs everything. With biblical theological grounding, we want people to know God’s Word and what the Lord has to say to us. This is a critical issue for us today and to sum this up, God’s people don’t know their own story. We want to know our own story; why? The culture will be glad to give us plenty of stories to direct us in terms of how we should live. We want to articulate the great narrative of redemption. We are to give others what we have first received and if you are going to hand anything on, you first have to receive it. Do what Paul says; what we have received from the Lord telling Timothy to guard the good treasure that was entrusted to you (2 Timothy 1:14). You do this by knowing and loving and living and teaching the way of Christ.

You would hope that we didn’t have to cover this today, but you cannot assume that these things are covered. I also want to say something that comes from Dallas Willard. It is somewhat confronting, writing it in the last part of the 20th century. He describes a process saying that we would intend to make disciples and let converts happen rather than intending to make converts and letting disciples happen. For example in the great Wesleyan revival that went through England in the mid to late 1700s, did John Wesley ever have an altar call? No, he didn’t, but he did have calls. Now, there is nothing wrong with having altar calls today for I had many. But Wesley called people to attend a discipleship small group. The conversion happened within these discipleship groups. There were substantial conversions. Willard wasn’t pointing toward Wesley at this time; he was just saying to get priorities correct. When you make disciples, then conversions are going to take place. People are going to accept Christ; they are going to be deep in the Lord. Rather than trying to make converts and letting disciples happen, instead put your emphasis on the discipleship process when calling people to Christ. Before Wesley instructed his followers in the disciplines of the faith, he ground them in the word and in theology and put them in small groups. But today, we have failed to ground people in biblical faith and the result has been a lack of clarity regarding core Christian doctrine. And then an alarming malaise in large segments of the church, there is a malaise that allows the culture to set the agenda rather than the Word of God. We are seeing a steady rise of agnosticism to outright atheism even in church members. We need to repent of our poor stewardship of biblical theology and get right back into this.