No Disciples, No Mission

Having been believers and ministers for over 25 years now has given Debs and I an appreciation for just how hard it is to be an authentic follower of our Lord and Savior. To be an authentically radical disciple requires a relentless evaluation of life’s priorities and concerns—together with an ongoing, rigorous, critique of our culture—to ensure we are not adopting values that subvert the very life and message we are called to live out. For true followers of Jesus, discipleship is not simply the first step toward a promising career of being a Christian, rather it is itself the fulfillment of our destiny. So, Debs and I have decided to write a book on what we call “missional discipleship.” Appropriately called Untamed, it is meant to be a penetrating look into the things that keep us from becoming all we were made to be and has many practical suggestions about how to become wild followers of Jesus again.

The truth is that discipleship, at least the way the Bible understands it, cannot be limited to a personal exercise in personal spirituality. There are much greater, perhaps even global, consequences at stake in our becoming more like Jesus. So much so that we have actually come to believe that discipleship is a frontier issue for the people of God at this time in history. Why? Because most commentators would now agree that the Western Church, because of its deep embedding into the prevailing consumerist culture, has all but lost the art of discipleship. Reggie McNeal has concluded that “church culture in North America is now a vestige of the original [Christian] movement, an institutional expression of religion that is in part a civil religion and in part a club where religious people can hang out with other people whose politics, worldview, and lifestyle match theirs.”

If this is indeed the case, we should be clear that this is not what the church is called to be, and is, in fact, directly caused by a failure in discipleship and disciple-making. And it will have to be addressed if we are to give faithful witness to our century. Therefore, rediscovering what it means to radically follow Jesus is now an area of strategic—and definitely missional—concern. To recover mission we are going to have to take discipleship seriously again, but the reverse is also true; to rediscover discipleship we are also going to have to take mission seriously. We cannot be true disciples without also being missionaries (sent ones) to our worlds.

The gospel is the power of God for the salvation of the world (Rom. 1:16), and God wants to redeem the broken and lost world around us and through us. Our lives, individual and corporate, play a vital role in the unfolding of the grand purposes of God. The gospel cannot be limited to being about my personal healing and wholeness, but rather extends in and through my salvation to the salvation of the world. To fail in discipleship and disciple-making is therefore to fail in the primary mission (or “sentness”) of the church. And it does not take a genius to realize that we have all but lost the art of disciple-making in the contemporary Western church. No wonder Dallas Willard calls the systematic non-discipleship of the Western Church “the great omission” in his book by that name.

There is much talk about missional church in our time—and we completely agree. The church must become missional or fade into increasing irrelevance in the 21st Century. But we simply cannot get there from here without factoring discipleship into the equation. We can’t have one without the other: if there be no mission there can be no discipleship, and if there is no discipleship there will be no mission. And there can be no missional church if there is no disciple-making church—it’s as simple as that. If ever there was a time to recover the true meaning of the Great Commission to make disciples of the nations it is now. The future health and viability of Western Christianity is at stake. We must not waste time.

5 Comments »

1. What a tease!  Can’t wait for that book to come out.  Fantastic question to pose.  Thank you.

   Comment by Jeff - Nov 09, 2009 @ 01:19 PM

2. It is wonderful ministry, needful and very important, but how can i get it to my Church in Uganda?

   Comment by Simon Yese Muwereza - Nov 19, 2009 @ 05:50 AM

3. STOKED for Untamed to come out. ReJesus is far and away one of my favorite books ever written. Love Alan and his heart to ReJesus the world! Looking forward to the release!!!

   Comment by John Alexander - Nov 20, 2009 @ 02:35 PM

4. Wow.  This is also the message that God has been giving me regarding our ministry’s discipleship work in West Africa (their views on discipleship have been shaped by our own). 

   This article just resonates as confirmation in my heart.  It is past time to return to a Jesus centered view of discipleship.  The questions that I have been asking recently are:

   “Why was the discipleship process I went through growing up so boring?”.... 
   “Why have discipleship and mission become separate activities in our churches?”... 
   “Have we become admirers and worshipers of Jesus instead of disciples?”...
   “Are we bad at engaging the lost world because we are bad at discipleship?”....

   I know that mine are not original questions, but this just seems like a very important conversation.  We need to hear the heart of God.  Looking forward to this book and hopefully others like it.

   Comment by Ash Zook - Nov 24, 2009 @ 07:26 AM

5. Can’t agree more! Thanks for continuing to raise awareness and challenge thinking and praxis regarding the call of the individual and the church to make disciples. Both the U.S. and the western church need to embrace this reality.

   Comment by almost an M - Dec 07, 2009 @ 09:27 PM

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