Missional Discipleship After Christendom

Hardy, Yarnell

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781498244831
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

It is not a changing culture, reduced resources, or a rescinding Christian memory that creates the greatest challenges for the church in the West. It is the lack of a clear commitment to the intentional, authentic, and contextual expressions of missional disciple-making, which will shape current and future generations of followers of Jesus to express the values of the Kingdom today. This book offers stimulating historical, biblical, and theological reflections on discipleship and considers some of the possibilities and opportunities afforded to us by our post-Christian context. Missional discipleship allows the missio Dei to shape us in our engagement our practices and sustain us in the lifelong journey of becoming and developing disciples that follow Jesus today.

Section 1

Backgrounds to Discipleship

The After Christendom series has focused on what is coming next after a former Christendom period. Indeed, the series has also recognized that more than one version of Christendom may be said to have existed. The first version was that which was birthed in the time of Emperor Constantine, with the official acceptance of Christianity as the new religious faith of the empire. The second came in Europe among the tribes that followed the fall of the empire in the West. This section will focus on developments during Christendom which have been important precursors that will help to frame and inform discussion of discipleship after Christendom.

Chapter 1

Exploring Discipleship During Christendom

By Dan Yarnell

I think it is fair to say that in the Western church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple making. We have done so partly because we have reduced it to the intellectual assimilation of ideas, partly because of the abiding impact of cultural Christianity embedded in the Christendom understanding of church, and partly because the phenomenon of consumerism in our own day pushes against a true following of Jesus.1

Discipleship has always demanded an informed response to the story and experience of Jesus as an outworked expression within its various contexts and cultures over the centuries. As we begin to consider the importance of missional discipleship, it is worth noting that discipleship is not a new contemporary concern or issue. Each generation and expression of the faith has had to consider what it means to become a follower of Jesus. At its best this has involved a strong consideration of the local context where becoming and being a disciple finds authentic expression. According to the author of Luke-Acts, this state of affairs was first encountered by the earliest Christians, as they had to prayerfully and intelligently consider what it meant for a Gentile to become a Christian. The first church council in Jerusalem (Acts 15) therefore became a model of action-reflection approaches2 that have been at the heart of missionary involvement across the centuries.

The advent of postmodernity, and thereby post-Christendom, has provided a new context for us to consider what and how discipleship can be expressed.

This challenge is especially so within the Western context, and hence the importance of this book. The strong Christian memory that once dominated the worldview of Western Europe enabled and perhaps encouraged a kind of subtle complacency, which meant that the Christian narrative was assumed to be the same as the cultural heritage of all Europeans, often being confused as one and the same. This inevitably meant a lack of consideration of what was authentic discipleship within a largely Christendom context of faith.3 It would be this Western European version of the Christian narrative and its implications of discipleship that would be exported to other nations during the great missionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

An important way of engaging in this current challenge is to reflect on how followers of Jesus in different times of history and movements have sought to actively participate in the new life of the kingdom. The late missiologist David Bosch, following Hans Küng, identified six main Christian paradigms for an understanding of mission. Each of these paradigm shifts forced the Christian community to rethink and reengage itself in the missio Dei. Bosch’s six paradigms are:

• The apocalyptic paradigm of primitive Christianity;

• The Hellenistic paradigm of the patristic period;

• The medieval Roman Catholic paradigm;

• The Reformation paradigm;

• The modern Enlightenment paradigm;

• The emerging ecumenical paradigm.

Bosch’s contribution enables us to see this development and the affects and effects each of these paradigm shifts caused in the worldwide Christian community, which in each phase caused it to rethink and therefore repurpose itself for its mission. The church in each shift could not remain as it was and have a future. Neither can we. Discipleship must be reexamined and lived as a significant testimony to the transformative power of the Jesus we love and serve.

Snapshots of Discipleship Practices

Bosch’s framework is a seminal contribution in considering the church’s adaptive engagement in mission. While recognizing and valuing the importance this framework has played in subsequent writings on mission and history, I am going to suggest my own modified version of these paradigm shifts which seem to make better sense of the way the church refocused itself as a discipling movement which I will be discussing in this chapter. They are:

• Early Eastern Church;

• Medieval Roman Catholic;

• Protestant Missionary;

• Enlightenment;

• Postmodern;

• Ecumenical.

My reasons for suggesting this adapted version of the six paradigm shifts relates to how I understand the relationship of the approaches to discipleship that seemed to be true of the epochs of history I suggest. Hence my revised suggestions to the nomenclature of these possible paradigm shifts better represents, in my view, the focus of discipleship in each age.

Earliest Christianity

The first Christian engagement of discipleship may seem to be a bit of a challenge due to the rapid changes that these earlier followers faced. We have brief summaries in the book of Acts to some of the potential ways in which the church grew and developed its approaches, but there are very limited details. We may reasonably assume that the earliest believers, who were primarily Jewish converts, continued to follow a pattern of community formation based on the learned practices of the synagogue,4 the main difference being the development of the centrality and worship of Jesus, and in light of this, the celebration of communion with its theological, spiritual, communal, and psychological significance.5

It is also likely that these first Christians understood discipleship more succinctly, since many rabbis had their own disciples who attached themselves to these teachers and in their shared life journey would literally follow them, learning by example, by innuendo, in formal and informal ways.6

Hengel makes some important observations about the leadership and disciple-making practices of Jesus.7 First, Jesus was not in effect a rabbi, as he did not follow any school of learning, thereby standing outside the traditions of Judaism. He further notes that unlike other disciples who followed after their masters by learning their particula...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Section 1: Backgrounds to Discipleship
• Section 2: A Biblical Basis for Missional Discipleship
• Section 3: The Qualities, Values, and Convictions of Missional Communities of Praxis
• Bibliography