Kingdom-Minded Discipleship

March 2011

What is the Christian life? How do we live it? Our answers are very telling of how we understand discipleship. While in the last article I sounded the alarm about the gap of discipleship in churches, I am now trumpeting a vision of discipleship that is true to the kingdom of God’s purposes.

Let me chart the experience of many of my generation. We first understood discipleship and the Christian life as attending church, supporting its programs, reading our Bibles, praying, giving, witnessing, and going on mission trips. Denominations provided the framework for understanding discipleship and the Christian life. They supported that framework with literature published in-house. The next step in the Christian life ladder was to go into full-time ministry.

For me, something was missing.
Then came along the spiritual growth movement. Personal and individual intimacy with God swept over the churches. A large menu of 13-week study courses popped up. We called them discipleship too. We studied, course after course. We piled up information and built towers of knowledge that rivaled Babel. We declared ourselves discipled, leaving no blank line behind in our workbooks.

Something was still missing.
Then came the spiritual formation movement. So we added this too to our arsenal of discipleship or the Christian life. We went on retreats of silence and solitude, we gave fasting a try, we got into accountability and small groups where we did community life, and we did our own thing.

Something was still missing.
This generation of Christians is no longer satisfied that these are the total Christian life or discipleship. The denominational model is no longer tempting to them. What is absolutely capturing the hearts and minds of this generation (what was only obliquely on our radar screens a generation or two ago) is a fresh vision of Jesus and his kingdom life and work. Those with this renewed vision kingdom-minded discipleship are not willing to criticize what came before but are also not willing to live by it. They long for a much more inclusive vision of discipleship and the Christian life than they inherited.

Whatever do we mean by discipleship that takes seriously the vision of the kingdom of God that Jesus gave us? What works? What doesn’t? What is the all- important “why” that must be the driving force of discipleship? How do we build a culture in our churches that is recognizably Jesus-like in the way we make disciples? How does KNCSB help churches build this culture in the local church? What does discipleship consist of? How is discipleship to be done? What babies should we leave in the bathtub, and what waters should we throw away? Is Jesus’ way the only way of making disciples? What is discipleship that is based on the kingdom of God? How might that kind of discipleship look different than the “discipleship” of the classroom of yesteryear?
Why discipleship? What discipleship? How discipleship. If we don’t figure out the why, the what and the how will have no staying power. If we don’t start with why our what and how of discipleship will be incomplete and likely wrong. If we don’t start with why, we will start on the wrong foot.

Evangelicals today, young and old are longing for that world where Jesus and his way of life in the kingdom are the rule. They see a world in turmoil, in dire straits, much like we did, but they dare to believe that the solution to a better world has everything to do with the vision of the kingdom Jesus gives: Be peacemakers, be willing to pay the cost it takes to literally rescue the perishing and be part of the salvation movement of God. Full-time ministry does not mean go to seminary to learn to preach and serve in a church but be a disciple 24/7.

The kingdom encompasses more than just the “spiritual”. The division between spiritual and secular, and political, and economical, and social is artificial. The kingdom-minded discipleship this generation has bought into is inclusive of all the changes that need to take place in our world to set it to rights.

Spiritual for them has to do with the work of the Holy Spirit of God advancing the Gospel of the kingdom of God. What then can be excluded from the Christian life or discipleship? Should our use of money and power, rescue of little girls from the sex-trade, food banks or the cups of water we give to the thirsty in his name, loving our enemies, peacemaking activities or sense of what is just and what isn’t in the world, our evangelism and our planting of churches, and our sending of missionaries not frame the work of salvation and the life of discipleship Jesus envisioned? Indeed it should. Anything less is a truncated gospel.

Did Jesus not cure real blind people physically? Did he not set free those who are possessed by demons and those who made a mess of their lives? What makes these acts strictly “spiritual”? What will not come under the Gospel that Jesus proclaims (the Gospel of the Kingdom)?

Frankly, today’s Christians want to move forward and beyond, and they want to chart new waters by revitalizing the Christian life as living out the kingdom vision of Jesus in this world. They seek a new discipleship that is all-life inclusive. They see that the gospel we preached in the past of “going to heaven when I die because of what I believe internally” is a story with less and less sway. This story carries no staying power and is at odds with scripture. Living the kingdom vision of Jesus in obedience to his commands is where discipleship lives. It must have no other address. Those who walk with the Master see it this way too. Journey on with me into an understanding of kingdom living that is transformative.

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