A Quick Recap
As I said in my previous post, the Disciple-Making Pathway approach (DMP) has had both positive and negative effects on the church. Positively, it has given us a right reemphasis on intentionality in discipleship. Negatively, it’s confusing and lacks at its core the consistent biblical framework for this task. It places people on a continuum driven primarily by the acquisition of fruit rather than rooting all of life in the good news of Jesus.
It appeals to a genre of Scripture that isn’t primarily meant to provide a pathway in the same way a hot air balloon isn’t meant for your morning commute. It searches the Gospel accounts to find a blueprint for a disciple-making strategy, reading them through a WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) lens. This is antithetical to the way the Scriptures describe gospel growth in the life of the church.
Rather than primarily asking WWJD, our disciple-making efforts are in need of a WJDTWCND (What Jesus Did That We Could Never Do) approach to the Scriptures. In other words, we’re not called to unearth some ancient strategy for disciple-making by reading the Gospel accounts beneath the surface of the narrative. We’re called to see Jesus accomplish for us what we were unable to accomplish so that now we can be reconciled to God through him.
The Gospels do not primarily offer good advice for our disciple-making strategies. They offer good news that shapes everything in the life of the local church.
And this good news needs to be at the center of our entire ministry, not simply our evangelism. The Scriptures place the fulcrum of discipleship at the cross rather than the implementation of a strategy. You can find more of this argument fleshed out in Part 1.
Some Initial Questions
But I concluded with some important questions: 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? What would that look like?
I want to do my best to answer those questions, beginning with an acknowledgement of my own shortcomings in this journey. While the process of gospel growth might sound simple, it isn’t easy. Our human nature will fight gospel growth, often kicking and screaming. Full disclosure: I haven’t figured this out. We’re all in this together.
Having said that, I believe that the Scriptures give us some guideposts in terms of what this looks like practically that can be helpful in offering some answers to the above questions, thereby shaping the ministries we oversee.
But before answering those questions, perhaps it’s best to begin by clarifying at least some of the reasons we’ve strayed from this biblical approach to disciple-making. We live in interesting times. As mainline churches decline and evangelical churches struggle to connect meaningfully and relationally to broader culture, we have at the very same time embraced something of a distrust in the means that the Scriptures have given us for disciple-making.
It doesn’t take long in conversations from within evangelicalism to hear someone throw shade on things like preaching, gospel-repetition, biblical-theological study, liturgy, or catechesis as a framework for disciple-making. And yet, bathed in prayer and reliance on God’s Spirit, these are the very things the Scriptures instruct us toward.
A Category Error
Some of our skepticism comes from what I’d refer to as a category error. The argument can unfold this way: “How do you teach someone how to fix a car? You don’t stand behind some pulpit on a platform and read the owner’s manual to them. Who would learn that way?! Instead, you roll up your sleeves next to them, get under the car together, and actively do it with them! The same is true of the Christian faith. Nobody will disciple anyone else by primarily reading and explaining something from a platform.”
To be clear, I’m not opposed to this kind of life-on-life disciple-making. In fact, there are clear commands for Christians to do this in the Epistles. In addition, I’d obviously agree that standing behind a platform and reading an owner’s manual won’t really help anyone learn to fix their car. Where I disagree, however, is seeing this as a fair comparison to the Word and how it functions in the life of the church.
Our churches desperately need to rediscover a theology of preaching rather than seeing it merely as a “presentation” in the same way that anything else is a presentation. It’s not. The preaching of God’s Word involves the Spirit of God working through the Word of God proclaimed to put the gospel on display in such a way that it brings about conviction, repentance, and faith in the gospel for both our salvation and growth as believers. That work isn’t something we are able to accomplish. It’s a work of the Spirit through our ministries. We are completely reliant on him to carry it out. And that’s where I think the confusion is—it’s why we reject the biblical means of ministry. We tend to rely on things that we think we can control.
This is a category error with which the Apostle Paul was all too familiar. He had to remind the church in Corinth that while “we do impart wisdom,” it is “not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory” (1 Cor 2:6-7). And then Paul takes it a step further, declaring that the only reason we know this hidden wisdom is that “God has revealed these things to us through the Spirit” (v. 10), adding that “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (v. 14). So, in order to communicate the truth of God at the heart of the gospel, we are completely dependent upon the Spirit to do in and through our proclamation what we can’t do ourselves. This is why we preach. It’s a faith commitment that God knows better than us.
A Faith Commitment
And it’s a faith commitment that we see in the Apostle Paul. This is his argument. Just a few verses earlier, leading him into the theological explanation above, Paul communicates that when he first came to them in Corinth, he “did not come proclaiming the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom” (1 Cor 2:1). What was his approach instead? “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (vv. 2-4). Why did Paul find it so important not to root his strategy primarily in the categories or wisdom of this age? He tells us: “So that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (v. 5).
As it relates to the wisdom of this age, we’re able to approach things like fixing a car with a strategy based mostly on our efforts and what we can control. But while those things can often be useful as we think about contextualizing the gospel in a given culture, Paul makes it clear that—on a foundational level, when it comes to spiritual things—disciple-making will look very counter-intuitive. In comparison to the philosophers of his day, Paul’s approach seemed foolish. His voice trembled in fear as he proclaimed something that he knew was antithetical to the way people viewed the world around them, and he proclaimed it in a way that didn’t seem nearly as appealing to the wisdom of the age. Yet it was the counterintuitive means and message in which he invested, not because it made the most sense to him, but because he believed that God greatly desired to demonstrate his power in Paul’s weakness. Sometimes it sounds like we think God demonstrates his power through us being wise enough or task-oriented enough to apply some worldly method in the midst of our disciple-making. Paul’s argument demonstrates that this is a slippery slope toward a boastful and man-centered approach to ministry.
This means that the act of discipleship itself is a faith commitment. The means that we’ve been given often fails to make sense to us. It’s hard for us to understand how it could possibly bring transformation. But what we see reflected on the pages of Scripture—not only in the Apostles’ posture toward Christian mission but also in their instructions to the local church for how to carry it out—is a reliance on God to speak through us and show his power in us as we move forward in faith.
What are some of those ways, then? When we come to a better understanding of how the gospel works according to the Scriptures, we find at least three areas of focus for discipleship that come with many implications for our ministries. That will be the focus of my final post.
