I’m still trying to wrap up Ed Anton’s Repentance. It continues to bring more things to light that are helping me find my way. In a chapter titled “The Church Reorients us”, he asks if the early church, being counter-cultural, were, in fact, non conformists.

Was that the secret of their strength?
No.
They were conformists. But they conformed to a different community. Through repentance, converts to Christianity chose to conform to a different norm, a different nous, a different worldview, a different society. They conformed to Jesus and his Kingdom. They conformed to a culture of selfless love, sexual purity, marital fidelity, stunning generosity, purposeful living, revolutionary zeal, secure humility, undeserved persecution and joy beyond understanding. God’s perfect plan for repentance provides the support and camaraderie of the church because it’s daunting to be different. The world hates holiness. Moreover, the world hates holy saints.

We need the church, each other, because the tide of the world rushes past us, trying to sweep us away to where it’s going. It doesn’t let up, but our determination wanes at times. We falter and begin to get pushed along. Alone, we cannot stand, but together we cannot fail.

Discipling is on my mind today. There’s been some talk about it around ICOC sites lately. Of course, Mr. McKean has been on his discipling rant for a while (well, since 1979 actually) decrying all these “lukewarm” churches abandoning “God’s requirement of discipling”. (He likes to use quotes a lot too.) There was also an article at ICOCnews about the South Florida Church making having a discipling relationships a requirement for membership. That idea did not go over well with the general ICOCnews readership. One of the most challenging comments there was from Nonnymoose (the head muckety-muck over there). He asked “Requirement for membership — but not salvation? You are suggesting that you are quite willing to exclude brothers and sisters in Christ for not accepting your “rules bound by men” are you not?” I think that’s a good question that I’m not sure how to answer yet. Maybe by the end of this I’ll have one.
Beyond all that talk on the web, I’ve had a recent conversation with a friend over his dismay that his church is moving forward with a similar expectation. Here in Columbus too, we now have the expectation that a person will be in some sort of discipling relationship. We haven’t answered the ‘or else ..’ part of that, nor really checked up on people, but it is still a stated requirement.
This whole discipling thing is quite a conundrum for me. It was once the hallmark of our movement. Before we were the ICOC or even the Boston Movement, we were the ‘Discipling Movement’ if I recall correctly. It was who we were. Back in the day, you could trace from Kip himself, down the tree through a string of discipling relationships to the new guy who was just baptized. Everyone, except Kip I guess, had a discipler.
Let me park a minute on that. Why is it that we never thought about that word, discipler? Saying it now it has a somewhat sinister sound to it. Couldn’t there have been a better term? A few times in recent years, my parents have related how I told them during my college years how my discipler had approved or disapproved of certain decision I had made. They’ve recalled those things with a certain disdain: “We didn’t like the idea, but you said your discipler had thought it was fine.” I certainly can’t blame them. Here’s this unnamed person, not really much older than I was, with a sinister sounding title taking on the role they had always played, and should still be playing. Not that a name change to something more neutral (Life Coach? Mentor? Adviser?) would change that these relationships were frequently out of line, but still. Didn’t anyone stop and think that perhaps discipler was a little harsh? No wonder Mom and Dad were peeved.
Anyway, so my church and many others are returning to some sort of discipling. One of the problems is that we are still using that same term. Anyone that’s been in the ICOC three or four years or more has a very well defined idea of what that meant. It was authority. It was complete involvement in your life. It was accountability. It was advice, both solicited and unsolicited. What’s weird though is that none of those things seem to be true of these new attempts at discipling, with the possible exception of Mr. McKean’s, yet we are still using the same term. These are a new, kinder gentler form of discipling, intended to be closer to the Biblical collection of ‘one another’ scriptures. The expectation is more that we will be involved in each others lives. But we still call it ‘discipling’ and we wonder why folks are peeved. (Of course, the folks who are peeved would be perhaps more peeved if we called it ‘mentoring’ but it still smelled like discipling.)
No matter what we call it, I think the thing we blew it on in discipling before, and we risk it today as well, is that we have put the responsibility of discipling on the disciple rather than the discipler. Back in the day when i was in college, the expectation was to talk to your discipler every day. If it didn’t happen, who was in trouble? Not the discipler, at least not at first. The disciple was told something like, “You’re responsible for your own spiritual growth. You need to initiate.” I’ve come to think that this is completely backwards. After all, when someone is weak or in sin, they usually don’t realize it. They need someone who cares for them to take the initiative to pull them aside and challenge them. This is radical love, to care enough to put your neck, and the relationship, on the line to challenge someone.
I think we’d do much better to foster the mature giving of their knowledge & experience to others. Let’s figure out how to set that expectation. That seems to better match the spirit of the one another scriptures and the heart of God. There are few folks who are able to put themselves up and go get the help they need when the need it. The theme of the Gospel is salvation, who when in danger saves themselves? So when we say we are a discpling ministry, let’s make that mean not that we expect you to get yourself discipled, but that we are committed to discipling & helping you.
So to sort of address Nonny’s question, I think we need a new term. Rather (and since I can’t think of a good new term), we just need to live it in a new way. It’s not the old power and control mind set that tells folks how they should be. Rather let it be a statement or who we are and how we are committed to treat you and each other. A statement of our commitment to you rather than an expectation for ryou to live up to. Then maybe folks, like me and my friend, who cringe a little when we talk about returning to discipling, won’t be so leery.