A lot of people ponder why discipleship runs thin in Western Christian circles.
Why does it always fall to a pastor, or a recognized leader to get people started in a discipling journey? What causes discipleship to be one-offs, sporadic fits and starts in communities of believers? Why do so many walk off on their faith, or refuse to bring their identity in Christ into their workplaces and relationships?
It’s as if there’s a kind of force that suppresses the discipleship Christ taught, in ways we can’t see or perceive.
Adam Smith coined the phrase ‘invisible hand’ in his seminal work on economics The Wealth of Nations—describing forces that, like an invisible hand, steer the behaviors of a marketplace.
We want to borrow Smith’s phrase, to help leaders recognize the effects of another invisible hand, one stifling the development of disciples. In this case that “hand” is the distraction of an unguided organizational culture.
The “unguided” adjective isn’t meant to insult anyone.
Churches often have a Vision, a Mission, values and objectives. Those sorts of things are statements and documents. In contrast, the way people are expected to behave in an organization (or society) is often described as “the culture”—in effect, what people do when the leaders aren’t around.
It’s the culture that usually gets separated from the Mission. And that’s a danger for discipleship.
Culture is supposed to be the Mission and values, lived out by individuals in a group or community.
Ironically, culture usually wanders off into the latest challenges facing an organization—things like cash receipts, headcounts and marketing or programs.
The Mission? It can get lost on a server, or in a binder, influencing little else, especially the culture.
Keeping a culture lashed to the Mission Christ gave us is specifically what leaders do.
Does that surprise you? One fascinating example of keeping people focused on their Mission is Jesus, coaching Peter back to his tasks: “So Peter seeing him said to Jesus, “Lord, and what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow Me!” John 21:21-22 [NASB]
Leaders demonstrate, articulate, motivate and reinforce.
That’s how you move a Mission from words to actually being lived-out as a culture. Culture building is like gardening. You don’t plant an idea, water it once and walk off waiting for harvest. Like gardening, culture requires continuous and thoughtful tending. And this brings us back to what’s suppressing discipleship in the West.
Leaders over the centuries have been brought up to operate more as shopkeepers, tending the day-to-day, and divorced from the Mission, and its culture.
Contemporary leaders are taught to be budgeteers, staffers and firefighters—the sorts of people who ride in to rescue problem situations and crisis. Such rescue work can feel rewarding and fun, yet it’s fatal to Mission pursuit and culture building.
The biblical Mission is to make disciples, and everything else leadership does must be addressed through the focusing lens of the Mission.
Yet the urgencies and priorities of organizational stuff have taken a stifling hold over leaders. Stuff like: growing memberships, raising capital, dealing with staff, putting out small fires or fretting the big worries. Efficiency demands we move quickly through things, and in volume, including making discipleship flourish.
At its core, discipleship can never be a seminar or program—discipleship is individual lives tied with other individual lives.
Time compression, growth and daily troubles become an avalanche—in effect, stifling discipleship. Why? Because since the 4th Century Church the way to deal with too much going on is to productionize the situation. Use programs instead of culture to train disciples. Use seminars and small groups to substitute for the life-on-life relationships as true and deep discipleship was portrayed in Scripture.
None of this is intended as a criticism of ministries, mission trips or our pastors who work so hard putting up with all of us! It really isn’t their fault.
But it is leadership’s responsibility to break from the distractions we’ve inherited, and a culture of biblical discipleship is the breakaway path from the Western distractions. How do we create a culture of disciples who go and make other disciples? First a negative thought. It is not in expecting the pastors, evangelists and missionaries to do everything.
How do we create a culture of disciples who go and make other disciples? First a negative thought. It is not in expecting the pastors, evangelists and missionaries to do everything.
A discipling culture results from pastors and other leaders coaching and teaching and pairing us to go together into our lives as servants of Christ. That is a rare kind of discipling culture today in Christianity.
Trouble is, in the West, we have to be convinced. Some you out there can just declare “Here’s how this is going to go” and people gladly go along. But for most Western Christians, this will be a slow and incremental change. A long-term culture change.
It is nearly impossible to expect a leader to be a good administrator and a leader at the same time. A few have the discipline and skills to do both, but it is uncommon. Our New Testament examples show leaders separating the administrative from the deeper discipling work for that very reason. (See Acts 6:1-7 for example)
So leaders need supporting managers and volunteers to keep administrative things moving, and to allow leaders stay focused on the Mission.
Leaders, unfettered by the crush of daily things, must be the ones to explain the true Mission of believers, in ways so people can “get it”, and then want to actually do it. Leaders must likewise place the right supporting people and resources in the organization to bring that Mission to life—which is to practice and demonstrate the culture repeatedly to everyone else.
Culture building requires leaders who understand the strengths, uniqueness and quirks of their people, and who can merge the discipleship Mission with those unique Imago Dei’s. The specialized labor model of the West says “no pastoring without a permit”, which is to say we have become lazy disciples, sloughing off our biblical roles as disciples to the clerical pros. We have to retrain that spiritual muscle memory, away from pastors-do-that-stuff, toward the biblical model—that we are all disciples, and we are all directed to learn, serve, go, make.
The invisible hand of Western living, unchecked in your church, will continue to control the culture, to replicate fragile, distracted and timid disciples. Christ rejects that enslavement, directs us to a culture where we are all disciples and disciple-makers. The Mission of Christ—all of us being disciples and making disciples—requires leaders who know the Mission, then explain and embed the Mission in our churches, our people, our strengths and our callings. That is a healthy disciple-making culture.
Our hand isn’t invisible, and we’d enjoy shaking yours and talking about this.
We want your discipleship to flourish. Use our email (info@thediscipledilemma.com) or reply on one of our social media feeds to connect with us at The Disciple Dilemma.
But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. James 1:22 [NASB]