Welcome to The Humble Harvest.
The Who of Discipleship
First and foremost, I want to welcome you to the blog for The Humble Harvest, a discipleship ministry geared towards the leaders of Union Baptist Church in rural Audrain County, Missouri! I pray that you are edified by what you read here, whether you attend UBC or not or whether you are a church leader or just a layperson. For more information, click here to view the About the Humble Harvest page. Now, we move on from here to The Who of Discipleship.
In the book Devoted to God’s Church: Core Values for Christian Fellowship, Sinclair B. Ferguson wrote that, “It is not possible to be a Christian unless you are a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ.”[1] With that in mind, the simple answer to the question of who is involved in Christian discipleship is Christians. If you are a Christian, you are involved in discipleship. There we are. Blog post over. That was fast!
Not really. While the answer is that simple, to understand better requires a bit more of a foundation. First and foremost, that foundation is what we see in the Bible. The author of Hebrews wrote,
“Therefore, let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.” (Hebrews 6:1-2, English Standard Version).
The “us” in verse one refers to us, to those who believe. Pastors? Check. Church Members. Check. Any professing believer in Jesus Christ, anywhere on the planet? Check. We are all to grow in maturity, and that requires discipleship from start to finish. Here, at the Humble Harvest, we are going to have a slant toward the discipleship of church leaders because church leaders are often the ones who lead discipleship. And church leaders are often the ones whose discipleship gets taken for granted.
Church leaders, whether they be a pastor, elder, deacon, Sunday school teacher, treasurer, or some other leading role within the church, are believers, too. The overarching theme of the book Pastors Are People Too is making the point that pastors need Jesus and His Gospel to be loved and ministered to just as much as all the members of the church do.[2] It’s really all a matter of discipleship, and part of that discipleship of church leaders is to recognize that leaders need it just as much as everyone else, maybe more.
Perhaps one of the best books written in modern times is The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In this work, he wrote that “Christianity without the living Christ is inevitable Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. It remains an abstract idea, a myth which has a place for the Fatherhood of God, but omits Christ as the living son.”[3] In other words, Bonhoeffer writes that Christianity without discipleship really isn’t Christianity at all.
To be a Christian, you must be a
disciple. To be a disciple means that you’re involved in discipleship. If
you’re not a disciple, you’re not a Christian. If you don’t have discipleship,
you don’t have orthodox Christianity. You cannot separate one from the other, two
sides of the same coin; where one goes, the other is always there. So that is
the understanding that we must have as we go forth: If you are a believer, you
are a disciple. You are being discipled. Everyone is being discipled by
something or someone; the question is by whom or by what. As a believer, you
must be discipled by God Himself through His Word and His people. And that is
the answer to the statement of the who of discipleship: all believers on this
side of eternity.
[1] Sinclair B. Ferguson, Devoted to God’s Church: Core Values for Christian Fellowship (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2020), 35.
[2] Jimmy Dodd and Larry Magnuson, Pastors Are People Too: What They Won’t Tell You but You Need to Know (Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook, 2016).
[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1st Touchstone ed (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 59.
Comments
Post a Comment