In Praise of the Pathway

Countless books have been written on the topic of “discipleship.” Many thousands of conference hours have been applied to discussing what it means and how it works. It isn’t uncommon to hear exhortations from speakers or authors who say something like, “If your church doesn’t have a ‘disciple-making pathway,’ then in all likelihood you’re not really making disciples.” We also commonly hear of research suggesting that if your church adopts some form of a pathway approach to discipleship, you’ll see more growth. This “pathway” focus on discipleship has had both positive and negative effects on the way we attempt to make disciples.

Positively, it has motivated many churches toward intentionality in ministry. The idea that Christian growth and maturity will just sort of work itself out in the church apart from actively pursuing it—that it will just sort of happen via osmosis—is wishful thinking, at best, and negligence, at worst. It does not reflect the clear instruction of Scripture for the church as it relates to its spiritual life and health. This gives us a lot of reasons to be thankful for the Disciple-Making Pathway (what we’ll call DMP).

The Problems with the Pathway

Negatively, however, this newer focus on the pathway has caused confusion. Read 100 different DMP books on discipleship and you’ll get 100 different definitions of what “discipleship” means (or no definition at all). It has become classic “junk drawer jargon.” In other words, since the word can mean practically everything, it doesn’t end up meaning much of anything.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that these definitions are so varied and confused, as they often reflect how DMP material tends to approach the Bible. The biggest problem with the pathway approach is that it appears to be rooted in a genre of Scripture that wasn’t intended to be read as a pathway. Most of the DMP books on my shelf make their case by pointing to the life of Jesus in the Gospels as the primary example of how the local church should go about the business of making disciples. The entire philosophy appears to take a WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) approach to ministry, appealing to specific narratives in the life of Christ and attempting—awkwardly, at times—to apply them in our context.

Now, please hear me. I’m not saying that Christians shouldn’t seek to become more like Jesus. Of course we should. As John wrote in his first epistle, “By this we may know that we are in him: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:5b-6, ESV). I also believe that the Gospels put the heart of Christ on display that we might emulate him.

WWJD or WJDTWCND?

I am arguing, however, that these gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not primarily written to show Christians what to do (WWJD). They were primarily written to show Christians What Jesus Did That We Could Never Do (WJDTWCND—patent pending). These narratives reflect the historical reportage of the gospel events. They tell the story of what Jesus did for us. They make it clear that his disciples were unable to live like him. That’s precisely why he had to come.

Another way of saying this is that we must draw a clear distinction between description (describing what has already been done for us) and prescription (prescribing what we must do) as we read the Gospels. To be clear, some of what we find in the Gospels is prescriptive for the believer, but most disciple-making pathways root themselves in passages that were meant to describe the work of Christ for us rather than prescribe a certain method of disciple-making.

This is perhaps the greatest weakness of the DMP approach to Scripture. How does one take these passages of Scripture and distill from them a disciple-making strategy? Which details from Jesus’s ministry should be included? Which ones should be left out? When we call people to discipleship, should we primarily focus on those whom we desire (Mark 3:13)? When we teach, should we regularly speak in parables with the expressed purpose that people may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand (Mark 4:10-12)? If not, why not? Since Jesus had twelve disciples he taught more generally, three he taught more specifically, and one he taught more regularly, should we have a similar discipleship ratio? Did the author share that detail for this purpose? The determination of which parts to apply or leave out seems arbitrary.

A Few Specific Examples

A good example of this problem is shown to us in the book of Mark. As New Testament Scholar Grant Osborne pointed out, Mark’s entire Gospel account centers on the theme of “discipleship failure.” He writes, “In the success-oriented society within which we reside, Christians tend to believe that discipleship failure should not occur. For this the healthy realism of Mark is a valuable antidote.” Indeed, how one forms a successful disciple-making pathway on the basis of the details in Mark, when a major theme of that account is “failure in discipleship,” is just another example of the confusion. Rather than a guide or pathway for us to distill, Mark’s gospel emphasizes “faith and prayer” in order to “counter the problem of self-dependence.”

This tendency to read the Gospels—all of the Scriptures, for that matter—through the lens of what we should do isn’t anything new. This is the default mode of the human heart. One of the reasons that Christians must seek to preach the good news of Jesus to their own hearts daily is because we will always be inclined to read these accounts primarily through the lens of what we need to do rather than what has been done for us.

And the teachings of Jesus in the Gospel accounts make this clear. Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount by saying, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” That is to say, the blessing of God through the cross of Christ will be given to those who recognize that they are not capable of walking like Christ without the grace of the gospel. As D.A. Carson writes in his commentary of Matthew,

“To be poor in spirit is to acknowledge spiritual bankruptcy. It confesses one’s unworthiness before God and utter dependence on him. Therefore those who interpret the Sermon on the Mount as law and not gospel stumble at the first sentence. The kingdom of heaven is not given on the basis of race, earned merits, the military zeal and prowess of Zealots, or the wealth of a Zacchaeus. It is given to those who are so ‘poor’ that they know that they can offer nothing and do not try. They cry for mercy, and they alone are heard.”

We see gospel grace as the primary driver of the narrative even when Jesus sends out his own disciples (Luke 9-10). As pastor and author Jonathan Dodson explains,

“Certainly, Jesus did model, and instruct, and send disciples, though his criticism when they returned wasn’t that they failed to multiply. In Luke 9, the narrative of the sending of the twelve ends oddly, not on their triumphant return, but on their faithfulness to the gospel (9:6). In Luke 10, however, the seventy-two sent disciples do return triumphantly. Oddly, Jesus does not ask if anyone repented. In fact, he warns them of rejoicing in the power of disciple-making. He essentially says, ‘Don’t rejoice in your power to make disciples and topple demons, but rejoice that you are God’s children. Rejoice in your identity and not in your activity.’”

In other words, the primary purpose of these accounts is not found in us unearthing some ancient strategy for disciple-making by reading beneath the surface of the narrative and then applying that to our ministry. The primary purpose is seeing Jesus accomplish for us what we were unable to accomplish so that now we can be reconciled to him. This is the lens through which the Gospel accounts must be read.

Two Different Approaches to the Christian Life

DMP material, however, seems to be inclined toward the opposite. While every “pathway” is different, they tend to place individuals on some kind of a continuum—an infant-to-parent continuum, or a new-believer-to-mature-leader continuum—and they’re often pictured with such images as a funnel, a staircase, a certain number of chairs, or a baseball diamond, in which an individual is called to make progress. And this progress is described in terms of attaining various spiritual disciplines for each level along the way (e.g. prayer, Bible reading, church attendance, ministry, tithing, etc.). This should immediately tip us off as to why the Epistles are so rarely mentioned. This is not how the Apostle Paul, for instance, viewed the spiritual growth of believers. It’s not how he wrote about what it looks like to be conformed to the likeness of Christ. For Paul, it was less about focusing on spiritual disciplines themselves and more about living in line with the gospel.

See, in most cases, the first step in the pathway is to “repent and believe the gospel.” This is good and right. But after this initial step of repentance and belief (usually mentioned as the thing that “gets us in”), every step or level following is attained by means of our spiritual disciplines. In other words, the gospel is assumed in the discipleship process. The Scriptures make it clear that every step of our discipleship includes repenting and believing the gospel. We will be unable to attain any spiritual fruit apart from repentance and faith.

This is not theological hair-splitting. While DMP material often measures progress by the attainment of spiritual fruit, the Scriptures make it clear that these attainments are secondary and flow out of the gospel. The gospel is primary and should be explicitly positioned that way in all of our disciple-making strategies.

This is also not semantics. It actually reveals two different approaches to the Christian life. It shows us two different beliefs about how Christians grow. One tells us that the source of our justification is the same source as our sanctification—the cross of Christ and the work of the Spirit. The other (intentionally or not) places our spiritual disciplines as the driving force, which is less like putting the cart before the horse and more like believing that the cart can pull the horse dragging and kicking behind it.

Moving Forward

See, there’s no question that the church has been commanded by Christ in the Gospels to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” This is a prescriptive command. The Great Commission is not optional. The question, then, is not whether we are to make disciples. The question is, how? All of the Scriptures work together in giving us the answer, and it shouldn’t surprise to see gospel grace at the center.

To sum up, this is the primary problem with the pathway as we know it today: it doesn’t appear to be found in the Bible unless we attempt a reading of Scripture that fails to account for the author’s intent and therefore awkwardly reads between the lines of the text (“Jesus did such-and-such a thing first, then second, then third,”) in order to “discover” what we must do.

Here are some questions to consider: What would our pathways look like if we adopted the biblical framework of intentional gospel application both individually and corporately for the people of God? What if, instead of placing people on a continuum based on their spiritual disciplines, we equipped them to apply the gospel and see the cross of Christ as the source of their growth? What if, instead of a pathway for people to attain a higher degree of spiritual disciplines, we created a pathway for the gospel into our hearts that we might regularly repent and believe? What if “Repent and Believe the Gospel” was the heading over every aspect of our disciple-making? My next two posts will address these questions.