Transforming Discipleship

Greg Ogden

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830893416
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Many church leaders, yearning for church growth, look to the latest evangelistic strategies or seeker-targeted worship services. But lack of growth might not be due to lack of concern for new people—it may be because we are not effectively discipling the people we already have. Greg Ogden address the need for discipleship in the local church and recovers Jesus' method of accomplishing life change by investing in just a few people at a time. Ogden sets forth his vision for transforming both the individual disciple and discipleship itself, showing how discipleship can become a self-replicating process with ongoing impact from generation to generation. This revised and updated edition includes a new chapter on discipleship and preaching.

PART ONE

THE
DISCIPLESHIP
DEFICIT
What Went Wrong and Why

1

THE DISCIPLESHIP GAP

Where Have All the Disciples Gone?

I was intrigued by the cover story of the June 2013 edition of Christianity Today, which asked “Does Child Sponsorship Work?”1 Since my wife and I have sponsored children for forty years and are currently engaged with three different organizations, I had a vested interest in the answer. The author of this article, Bruce Wydick, professor of economics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, was responding to a question he would often get: “What can the ordinary person do to help the poor?” He reflexive response was, “Sponsor a child.” Then he realized that as an economist he had never scientifically tested whether sponsored children were any better off in the long run than unsponsored children. This prompted him to search for a graduate student who would take this on as a PhD project. He found the student, but was surprised with how difficult it was to do the research. When Wydick’s PhD student approached several relief organizations, only one agreed to be evaluated. Even this lone organization would only do so under the condition of anonymity. I frankly was more than miffed when I read this article. I wanted to call up one relief organization I had been with for almost forty years and give them a piece of my mind. What do you mean you don’t want to know whether your organization is actually making a difference?

But then it dawned on me that it requires courage to face the truth about myself or even the churches I have served. Have you ever asked someone for honest feedback, and he or she says to you, “Well, do you want the truth or would you rather I make you feel good?” Everything in me screams, “Lie and make me feel good!” But once I have settled down, I sheepishly say, “Okay, break it to me gently.”

Bill Hybels, founding pastor of Willow Creek Community Church, often says, “Facts are your friends.” Willow Creek Church lives up to this motto. Among the many things I admire about them is their desire to live in reality, no matter how painful that may be. In 2004 they did an internal audit, which later became the REVEAL Spiritual Life Survey.2 It revealed some glaring gaps in their self-image. Ministries and programs they thought were effective were, in fact, ineffective.3 But they had the mettle to allow the truth to provide course corrections.

The State of Discipleship Today: You Are Here!

This chapter is designed to help you do the sober work of finding out where you are. Unless we can see the gap between current reality and our desired destination, we won’t be able to assess what it will take to get there. Business leader Max DePree says, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.”4 Jesus himself commended this approach, saying, “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?” (Luke 14:28 NIV). When I was directing a Doctor of Ministry Program, the counsel I would give students at the final project phase was to spend a considerable amount of time defining the need, challenge or problem they were trying to address. I told them to write, rewrite and write again a one-paragraph summary of their focus until the need they were addressing was crystal clear. Similarly, only as we get the need internalized will we be motivated to marshal the necessary resources to complete the disciple-making call.

Most of us have had the experience of searching for a particular store in a shopping mall. In order to find our desired location, we first look for the mall directory. Once the store is pinpointed on the map, we need to identify where we are in order to plot our course. Usually a red dot marks our location with an arrow and the words “You Are Here.” Only when we know where we are can we see where we are going.

My own one-word summary of our current state of discipleship is superficial. Tim Stafford, senior writer for Christianity Today, asked the late John Stott how he would evaluate the enormous growth of the church since he had been ordained sixty-one years earlier. Stott replied, “The answer is ‘growth without depth.’ None of us wants to dispute the extraordinary growth of the church. But it has been largely numerical and statistical growth. And there has not been sufficient growth in discipleship that is comparable to the growth in numbers.”5 Having taught internationally in Asia, Central America and Europe, the repeated lament I hear is that we are much better at conversion than we are at transformation of these converts into disciples of Jesus.

This superficiality comes into focus when we observe the incongruity between the numbers of people in America who profess faith in Jesus Christ and the lack of impact on the moral and spiritual climate of our times. The Pew Research Center’s 2015 study notes that still 70.6 percent of American population identifies themselves as Christian, with 25.4 percent categorized as evangelical.6 The Pew study classifies someone as evangelical if they are member of Pew’s defined list of evangelical denominations or that have identified themselves as “born again” or “evangelical” in their interviews. The Barna Group, an overtly Christian polling organization, comes at these statistics somewhat differently. They make a distinction between “born again” and “evangelical.”7 The Barna Group has shown a fairly consistent figure of four out of ten adult Americans who would say they are “born again.” For Barna a person is “born again” if their personal commitment to Christ is currently significant and they believe they will go to heaven based on confession of their sin and trusting in Christ for salvation. And yet with this significant percentage of professed Christ-followers, there is a lot of handwringing among Christian leaders about the spiritual state of American culture. I am suggesting that the lack of Christian influence on culture is a direct result of the lack of depth of transformative discipleship.

Barna has sadly concluded, “My research shows that most Americans who confess their sins to God and ask Christ to be their Savior—live almost indistinguishable from the unrepentant sinners, and their lives bear little, if any fruit, for the kingdom of God.”8

To repeat Bill Hull’s prophetic word, “The crisis at the heart of the church today is a crisis of product.”9 What kind of followers of Jesus are we producing? How deep is our discipleship deficit?

Before we even consider proposing a solution, we need to do the hard work of self-examination. Before we can get a handle on our ministry, we need to check the directory for the arrow that says, “You Are Here.” To help you do this, I have chosen seven biblical marks of discipleship as the grid for this self-evaluation.10 With each of these qualities I will sketch the biblical ideal and then examine some indicators of reality we might see within our ministry communities. At the end of each section you have the opportunity to look at your ministry setting through the lens of each of the biblical marks and give yourself a grade on the quality of discipleship you witness among the people you serve. The biblical marks of discipleship are

• Ministers: Passive vs. Proactive
• Christian Life: Casual vs. Disciplined
• Discipleship: Private vs. Holistic
• Culture: Conformed vs. Transformed
• Church: Optional vs. Essential
• Bible: Illiterate vs. Informed
• Witness: Inactive vs. Active

Ministers: Passive versus proactive. The Scripture portrays the church as full of proactive ministers; the reality often is that majority of church members see themselves as passive recipients of the pastor’s ministry.

The New Testament pictures the church as an every-member ministry. The “priesthood of all believers” is not just a Reformation watchword but a biblical ideal. Writing to scattered, persecuted Christians, Peter refers to the church in aggregate when he writes, “You [plural] are . . . a royal priesthood” (1 Peter 2:9). Every believer comes to God via Christ, their Mediator (vertical dimension), and every believer is enabled to act as a priest on behalf of fellow members of the body of Christ (horizontal dimension). Ministry that is biblically envisioned calls up images not of the paid priests (pastors) hugging ministry to themselves, but views ministry in the hands of ordinary saints. The apostle Paul has the everyday Christian in mind when he writes, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). Playing off the image of the church as the body of Christ, Paul says that the Holy Spirit has given all believers ministry gifts, and therefore each believer is equivalent to a body part that contributes to the health of the whole. The New Testament describes a full employment plan that dignifies and gives all believers value based on the contribution their gifts make in building up and extending the church.

The reality is that the 80-20 rule applies to many of our congregations.11 Churches fight against the barrier where 20 percent of the people provide ministry for the 80 percent who are recipients, and 20 percent who give 80 percent of the finances. In The Other 80 Percent, Scott Thumma and Warren Bird observe that the 80 percent who evidence limited engagement fall into three categories: (1) 10-20 percent of the congregation are declining in participation (often have left a role and no longer feel needed); (2) fully one-third have low or marginal participation levels (these are occasional attenders); (3) the remaining percentage are infrequent a...