Missional Discipleship Cannot Be Microwaved

Discipleship is at the heart of the missional movement or at least it should be.  Jesus provoked followers to become gardeners that would till-and-toil for the flourishing of his in-breaking Kingdom.  Jesus was a rabbi.  Like other rabbis before him, he invited others to journey along side him. The rabbinic teaching style did not primarily consist of attending lectures, reading texts or going through a preset study.  The primary learning approach was through Midrash which was a way of processing with story, conversation, questions and reflection.  Today we are challenged with excavating an apprentice-heart in Jesus-followers for the sake of God's mission in the world.  But I wonder if we have time and patience for Midrash anymore?

Microwave Discipleship

In many ways in the evangelical imagination, discipleship has become so intertwined with our consumerist tendencies that we are blind to how fused they've become.  Discipleship, beginning with the twelve and moving into the early church, did not have embedded expectations of programs for felt needs, affinity groups and fill-in the blank accessibility.  It's become so innate that discipleship be quarantined to one night a week or to a 12 week notebook or to a one-year intensive.  Certainly, the previous options present people with potentially the right information in an arranged environment.  People may even have an ah-ha moment in settings like these.  But I believe this modus-operandi of practicing discipleship over the last 50 years has created some unintended consequences. You cannot microwave disciples. With these programs, participants often receive high emotional return on completion but dare I say without the invasive, conflict-exposing, vocation and life-integrated, initiative-required, vulnerability-based, relationship-saturated, locally-rooted qualities.  I‘m convinced there is a bit of smoke-and-mirrors when it comes to what discipleship tracks actually foster in us.  I understand the demand for organized ways to funnel people through essentials in an efficient fashion.  But when we establish that discipleship is a “system" we short circuit the impulse of the Holy Spirit found in the stew of community.  If you apply discipleship in-a-can you will get processed results. Discipleship needs to be purposely fastened to the rootedness of oikos, integrated into our rhythms of life.  For as much as it challenges our patience and need-for-speed, we should never detach from a communal orientation in order to fast track discipleship.

Cross-Pollinational Discipleship

We need to develop a community that begins to disciple itself.  I know that sounds impossible or idealistic. But our vision should stimulate discipleship becoming “cross-pollinational”-- circular and reciprocal. Yes spiritual leadership is required to model, direct and stir-up this ethos (more on this at the bottom).  Still we should be compelled to kindle a culture that disciples "one another" outside of formal, organized programs. Resist the factory mode of building Jesus-followers.  The “producers” in us might struggle with this.  We often want to guardrail and quantify how people are developed.  We are afraid of people telling each other “bad stuff.”  Honestly, this is happening anyways in the most highly organized environments.  Learn to push discipleship subterranean and make it less-and-less dependent on spiritual gurus and experts.   Develop people to practice mutuality and initiative with each other to intentionally “work out their salvation” (Phil 2;12).  High control works against viral disciple-making.   I promise you this is not a buy-off-the-shelf approach that becomes a simple “plug-in” for your church.  Take the long view of recalibrating over a steady period of time. 

 

Mutual Diagnostics

This is a communal diagnostic instrument we use to help empower priesthood.  This tool below is a guide for those currently tethered to a community who are working a habit of Midrash into their active life.  This tool can be used one-on-one or in a triad to "spur one another on to love and good actions" (Hebrew 10:24)  Each domain has questions to mutually ask each other.  I personally don’t bulldoze through all the domains in one sitting.  Mutually and incrementally we converse our way to a better future.

Identity - "What is God's spirit doing in me?"

Community - "What is God's spirit doing around me?"

Renewal - "What is God's spirit doing through me?"

Becoming -  "What step do I need to take?"
 

A Diagnostic Tool for Discipleship
(click to increase size)

Missional-Marinating

I am not a good sleeper.  Almost fifteen years ago I had a 10 month bout with insomnia. I went through all kinds of testing to figure out the problem.  At the end of the day it came down to one issue, my inability to deal with stress. I was only 22 at the time and my life really was not all that complicated. I had average stressors for a youngster.  I just felt every pressure and responsibility like it was a cinder block laid on my neck.  I wanted to convince myself I was a contemplative person but I really had a deeper rooted issue.

I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of not impressing the people around me. I was afraid of missing out on opportunities.  I was afraid I was not measuring up to some invisible standard that haunted me. I could not rest.

 

It was in that dark season that I came face to face with how self-conscience and impatient I was. I wanted to make a big impact and I wanted it to happen immediately. With all this external passion, internally I was riddled with insecurity, caught in an identity scramble and looking for approval.  
I could hide publicly by compensating with my personality but I could not hide it from my wife and from my physical body. It all eventually caught up with me.

The Spiritual Laboratory

What I learned years ago from this personal breakdown has directly informed how I view the formation of a Missional-Community in the present.  Missional Communities are more akin to a spiritual laboratory than they are an organization. The difference is not small. Cultivating an environment where people learn how to love unselfishly and reorient around community and mission is a process that requires a lot of massaging. No program can shortcut around this. No electric preaching series can speed this up. No event can launch this. Clarifying your communication won’t get everybody on board. Instead there is a slow process of transformation I've learned to welcome called Missional-Marinating. 

Seeking Slow

I’ll tell you up front, my old-high-capacity-leader-self resists this marinating process. My old self can’t rest, it can’t sleep. It needs quick returns, escalating numbers, regional buzz and high excitement. All of those pieces previously helped me to outrun feeling like a failure. But here in the laboratory of a Missional-Community, slow is our friend. Seeking slowness is essential in the stew of discipleship. Cultivating a culture saturated in the embodied life of Jesus requires purposeful patience. A new character needs to be developed while leading in this type of atmosphere. Slow is not something to bear with, it’s something to embrace. No longer am I trying to launch an organization that sparkles before its consumers. The call is to shape a way of life; to create a conducive setting for transformation. In this stew we need unhurried time and grace-filled space for: long conversations, unearthing conflicts, detox from consumerism, facing missional fears, relearning how to listen, frustrated prayers and moving beyond suspicion to trust.   

We certainly need to be intentional and honest in evaluation, but I've learned to be careful with measuring.  As a leader my tradition and culture tell me to quantify my success, set visible goals and find fulfillment from their achievement. So many of us live impatient lives materially and spiritually. We want to climb. We need to claw for attainment. We need to find angles to get control of the outcomes. We long for an immediate return on investment. But Jesus lingered in anonymity for 30 years in his neighborhood before going public with his mission. There is something to digest about the quiet and incremental nature modeled for us in Jesus.  

Everything about the formation of a vibrant community of people on mission is slow, seriously slow. I’m now convinced it’s a very good thing and more importantly where the Holy Spirit marinates with his people.