Swap Blog

Milton Stanley of Transforming Sermons is back from a few days off and is talking about a subject this morning that is near and dear to my heart - discipleship and/or the lack there of. Full Post Here

Milton bounces off of piece at Christianity Today by Peter K Nelson that evaluates how the church is not teaching the particular need for brokenness and humility to it’s members. We agree with that, and we have long been pushing for better and more discipleship within the body along similar lines. A life that is owned by God is one where God has reassembled the broken pieces, not just put a band aid on a few cracks.

As much as I agree with Milton and Peter, I do not think the discipleship issue is solely one whose problems are related to faulty preaching. I think the core issue is deeper and more in the nature of the modern church. It has always been of great frustration to me that we seem to be satisfied with “merely saving” a person, and never expecting them to or helping them to mature.

I think this nature of save them and leave them has resulted from several reasons -

1) We are all busy and it takes more of our precious time and personal investment in others to mature and grow them. We are simply not willing to do that
2) Many leaders fear growth as it could result in them being challenged on issues of faith, and the things of God
3) With maturity comes greater responsibility, and we do not desire the extra responsibility. It is easier to remain a child spiritually and point fingers and blame then to take some of it for yourself
4) We do not encourage strong leaders within the body, we celebrate mediocrity (some of #2 is the cause of this).
5) Socially we want to be church members, but spiritually we do not desire to be Christians as it may require us to stand for some things that would cost us social. Biblical truths will and do offend some, so it is easier if we just ignore those truths and remain palatable to others.

Those are just a few, and there are far more, but I think the ones listed above are some of the biggest reasons that we fail to work to disciple and mature others. The modern church, for all the above and many more reasons, is doing a bad job of growing their members. The failings of the church are far deeper then failings in the pulpit. The heart of the believers have remained callous and unchanged. As long as that is true the words from the pulpit will be ineffective.

The members hearts and lives have to really change for God to work. Salvation is not just a short term emotion, it is a life changing shift. It should rumble throughout your body from your thoughts, to your actions, to where you go, to how you speak, etc. As Peter and Milton said that is a issue of humbleness and brokeness, but is also a issue of desire. Even if I am broken and humble, and I am satisfied in that state - which some are, until I decide to apply myself to the work of God I real remain undiscipled and immature.

As I said before, church leaders can not do it all, but the revolution must start with them. That means leaders sharing their responsibilities, i.e. building those around them, and also holding others in leadership to their commitments.

This problem is sometimes related to the laziness of Christian leaders (the actions of leadership tend to dictate the actions of followers), but not always. Many times the leaders / teachers are trying to go deeper, study more, teach better, etc but their students will not go with them. You can not lead a man (woman), or a mule, where they do not want to go. So, though the real beginning of change must occur at the leadership level, the followers have to be willing to go along for the leader to succeed.

Great leaders can be undone by bad followers, and bad followers can / will flourish beneath both good and bad leadership. So, the problem may or may not be with the leadership, and it may or may not be with the followers. The solution, and the responsibility for providing it, does rest with the leaders though. In many places, there are be followers that yearn for more, but do not know how to go there, or do not have the leaders around them to take them there. So, wow, after all of this what I am saying is one simple thing - we all (regardless of our position) need to pray for a revival of God’s people within the body and a deeper personal walk both for ourselves and our leaders. We can not and will not change on our own, we all must have a heart change from God. If that occurs, as either a individual or as a local body, then we will be able to move into learning / teaching new and different things, while being able to learn / teach deeper points and ideas on the things that we current know. - from our post Forgotten Lessons

Milton thanks for making us think about how we need to improve and challenging us to be the best Christians we can, not just good church members.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 8:59 am and is filed under Faith, Family, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.