Two Pastors, Two Answers

Discipleship is something of an enigma. On the one had we all know what it means to be a disciple, on the other hand, we really have no idea. I cannot count the number of times that as a paid member of a church staff I have asked myself the question, “Is what I am doing consistent with the Biblical model of discipleship?” Maybe I am just ignorant, or shallow, but my guess is that I am not the only one in the world who has asked him or herself this question.

The first pastor that I asked the question, “What does discipleship mean?” Was the pastor at my home church. He looked at me squarely and said, “Discipleship means duplicating oneself.” I thought about that for a second and it scared me. Do I want to duplicate myself? My first thought was, absolutely not! I walked away from his office wondering what the world would be like with more me’s in it. I saw a place that was full of guys with curly hair and big ears that was very loud because everyone was trying to be the first one to make a wisecrack about something. I did not like what I saw, it scared me, and confirmed my initial reaction. Then I thought about it some more and realized that in a place where everyone was like me nothing could go wrong because everyone would have the right opinion about everything. At least that was my opinion. If discipleship is about duplication, it is not about duplicating me. That is the conclusion that I came to after considering the consequences of a world packed with people that are only willing to pay for a burger when they can get another one for free - not good for a struggling economy - and have a habit of leaving their car on empty whenever someone else is going to be driving it - not good for making friends. This would be a less than perfect place for one to make their home, to say the least.

The second pastor that I talked with is a youth pastor and he defined discipleship as, “the process of raising spiritually mature believers.” And like any good youth pastor he came up with that definition off the top of his head – in my experience youth pastors either learn how to think fast or drown slowly. I must say, the word raising did not sound as scary as the word duplicating. Where duplicating seemed quick and uncontrolled, raising seemed steady and structured. If you’re duplicating something you don’t have much time to make sure you get it right, but when you’re raising something you have the benefit of time and correction to make sure that the product develops the way you intend it to, and ultimately looks like what you expect it to. Duplication is one big trial and error. Raising is a process of smaller trials and errors where the risk of failure is spread out over time. Of course maybe I am totally wrong about all of this, and I am completely willing to accept that.

The heart of the issue really is not what my definition of a word is, or for that matter what anyone else’s definition of a word is. The heart of the issue is what does it mean to disciple? This is probably the part when you expect me to tell you, and I don’t blame you for having that expectation, that is how our minds have been trained to work. But I am not going to say what it means to disciple someone; not because I don’t have an opinion, simply because in the grand scheme of things my opinion means squat. The only opinion that holds an ounce of weight comes from a man who died on a tree thousands of years ago, and then rose from the dead and proceeded to take his place at the right hand of his father, and in the hearts of all men who would allow him to enter - please excuse my run-on sentence. And what did he say? Was it something controversial, something charismatic, something mysterious, something esoteric, something brave? I guess that all depends on how you interpret the words, “Come follow me!”