discipleship

I don’t think I’m grossly misrepresenting the book if I say that Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution is basically an impassioned, iconoclastic, mischievous challenge to the modern church to do what the rich young ruler (Luke 18:18-30) so famously failed to do - sell everything it has, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus into life-changing solidarity with the disenfranchised and destitute. So Claiborne’s is another powerful and increasngly fashionable voice calling the church to be a radical Jesus movement again (see also ‘Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough’). But it still seems to me that this desire to revert to the pattern of Jesus-discipleship arises essentially as a reaction against the excesses, hypocrisy, idolatry or ineffectiveness of the modern American church; it is of only limited value for the larger task of reconstituting the people of God following the collapse of the Christendom paradigm.

I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the church in Europe’ and ‘We have to go back, but not to square one’).

There is a fully understandable desire abroad - as a reaction against big church, as a reaction to the distintegation of the Christendom mentality - to recover the immediacy and humanity manifested in the community of followers that Jesus gathered around himself. Sometimes this is expressed as a strong preference for this model of radical, itinerant, liminal community against the seemingly more institutional form of the Pauline churches.

At first blush, asking how faith in Jesus is done might seem like an odd question to ask. Grammatically, it’s kind of odd. But it’s also odd because we often focus on what believers believe. How believers believe is usually of little concern. So, much energy is spent parsing out the differences between what this group believes versus what that group believes, what Catholics believe versus what Protestants believe or what conservative evangelicals believe versus what mainliners believe or what emergent followers of Christ believe versus what non-emergents believe and so on. Asking how faith in Jesus is done, as I’m asking in this essay, draws our attention away from the content of our beliefs and pulls it toward the different ways believers follow Jesus. The shift from what to how is analogous to the shift from content to form.

In this article, we explore the teachings of Jesus on the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the call to discipleship.