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.

As we are going through this process of Corporate Repentance, we’ve looked a lot at Revelation 2-3. These letters to the churches were a wake up call to most of them, I bet. Nearly all were recipients of a serious reproof by God. I suspect none of them saw it coming. They did not know the serious sin they had allowed themselves to slide into.
As we open our eyes & ears to what the spirit is saying to our church, our minister has asked each of us to write our own ‘Letter to the Church in Columbus’, in the spirit of those in Revelation. These are short (not my writing style!) and direct. Jesus does not mince words. He also does not follow a strict formula. Some churches get praised others do not. Most, but not all get challenged. So, if He were to write us a letter, what would it be? Here are my thoughts:

To the angel of the church in Columbus write:
These are the words of Him who is both grace and truth, man and God, word and flesh. I know your deeds, how you give of your wealth and time when there is a need. You rise to the occasion when there is an outcry for help. I see that you have a reputation of love, yet one on one you are distant and isolated. Your relationships are polite and pleasant rather than honest, vulnerable and challenging. Wake up! Remember how deeply you once loved, how you gave of yourselves, how you held nothing back and sacrificed to strengthen each other. Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your love complete in the sight of my God. Therefore repent! Give of yourselves completely to one another again, get involved in each others lives. Speak the truth in love to each other that you may save each other from a multitude of sins. To him who overcomes I will give life to the full, in fact it is already there for the taking, if you would only love deeply. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

This is a little hard to do for several reasons. First of all, I am not God nor do I have the direct line the Apostle John did when he penned Revelation. This is from the Bible, my observations and discussion with others, yet filtered through my perspective, emotions and whatnot. So this is perhaps closer to what Doug says to the church than what the Spirit says. Others may not feel this way. They may feel that they personally have given much and loved deeply. I feel that I have on some levels, but held back on others. I am confident that what I’ve written does not apply to some individuals in the church, but from my perspective it is accurate for the church as a whole. We have become shallow.
I’m interested in hearing tonight what some others have written.

Whenever three or more are gathered, a critic is always there among them. This is just as true in heaven as on earth. The critic stood up and said, “Now wait a minute. You are telling us that you’re going to leave heaven and go down there and be born like every other person. I was watching this kid be born the other day and it was a bloody mess. You don’t have to put yourself through that.”
The Word said, “I know. Sit down. Next question.”

Jesus calls a press conference to announce to the Angels his plans “to turn the rebels back to the Father”, as told by Wade Hodges.

Do you really think they will let you be their King?”
The Word gave the critic’s question a thoughtful pause before he said, “Most won’t, but some will. All I need is a few.”

Go and be a fly on the wall of heaven and listen to what it might have sounded like as Jesus laid out his outlandish plans.

The union between the Father and the Son is such a live, concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I know that’s almost inconceivable, but look at it this way. You know that among human beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trades union, people talk about the ‘spirit’ of that family, or club, or trades union. They talk about its ‘spirit’ because the individual members, when they’re together, do really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they wouldn’t have if they were apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of course it isn’t a real person: it is only like a person.

CS Lewis from Mere Christianity

A few weeks ago I posted about the renewed cooperation among the deacons and our minister. It has been an exiting turn of events as we’ve continued to meet and talk about the direction of the church. I had feared that we would be starting over, rebuilding the level of trust we had acquired a year ago before we could move forward. While that’s been true to a small degree, we have been making some rather significant and exciting plans, which I’ve been hinting at as well.
Well, for some reason, though I’m excited about what’s been started and what’s to come, I can’t seem to write about it. Maybe it’s the business of the season or the difficulty in describing what it is, but I keep coming back to tweaking the layout on my site. (Did you notice the now look on blockquotes?)
What’s happening is the title of this post – Corporate Repentance. It’s something new to me in practice, but makes so much sense I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. Actually I’ve seen a version of it before, but not this version.
What it’s not is the old ICOC ‘reconstruction’ or church wide sweep when things weren’t going well. In the early days of the ICOC, entire churches were reconstructed. The theory was to make sure the church was only fully committed disciples. Actually in the day they just said ‘disciples’, I think. Later it was ‘fully committed disciples’ now some are using the term ‘sold out disciples’. Whatever. The idea was to rid the church of the uncommitted, either by attrition or change. The result was if you weren’t ready to bare your soul, deal with your sin and start ‘being a disciple’, which usually meant evangelism, you were rode pretty hard until you fell in line or left. Good riddance, they’d just slow us down. A simplistic representation, but all too accurate. Not very Christ like either.
If that’s what this new Corporate Repentance isn’t, then what is it? In some ways the goals are the same – restoration, revival, change – but the focus is different. Before we had identified the problem (lack of growth and baptisms) and we knew how to fix it (evangelism and Bible studies) so we just needed to get back to work. In this Corporate Repentance there’s the realization, by looking plainly at the evidence in the church around us, that we’ve fallen short of God’s desire for us. There’s no presupposition that we know how we’ve blown it or how we can fix it. We simply acknowledge that we’ve fallen short, and then await for the spirit to work, leading us and revealing our sin. We’ve prayed individually and gathered in small groups to talk and confess. We will talk in our families about how they stand before God. We will meet in our small house churches to talk about it and get open. It will culminate in a meeting of the church, a Solemn Assembly to stand together before God to confess our shortcomings to him, to repent (return to Him) and to take communion (more on that later).
In the old days one of the goals was to weed out the uncommitted. We didn’t actually state it as a goal, but it was clear that if you weren’t on board, you’d be left behind. In fact, it was often stated that “you’re either with us or against us” or something similar. In what we are doing now, one of the stated goals is that no one will be left behind. We are going forward, but we are mindful that the pace be set by the Spirit. Our sister church in Dayton went through this very quickly, but they were in a different place than we are. I think it will be slower for us. We are committed to listening to the God and His Spirit and giving this process the time that it needs.
This isn’t just about finally dealing with the things that Henry Kriete showed us nearly three years ago. (Although, frankly, this is what those open forums should have been after the letter came out, not the attack session that too many of them became.) That must be a part of it, but it’s also about what we’ve become in the absence of the old ICOC structure. It’s not as if Henry wrote a letter and then everything was new and good. Post HKL has brought it’s own problems and sins. What we must do is deal with who we are today. We are where we are today is a result of both pre-HKL and post-HKL culture.
This entire idea hinges on the concept that the church as a corporate entity has a personality and culture of its own, like C.S. Lewis said in the quote above. Just as an individual can sin, a church, due to the culture created within it, can sin too. We can set up an environment that fosters, encourages or hides sin allowing it to prosper unchecked. These kind of things cannot be fixed one on one very successfully. This is a very new concept, but one that seems so obvious now. Over the past couple of years, as the sins of our church, locally and worldwide, have been exposed, there’s been a certain level of denial on the part of individuals that has been difficult to deal with. They protest that they never believed that we were the one true church or that they never lorded over their disciples or whatever else so they will not take responsibility for those things. On one level, they are right. There are many who didn’t take part in the sins of our fellowship in their own lives. But the sins were there nonetheless, and prevalent. In the sense that that was the culture and personality of our church, we all bear the burden of that sin collectively even if we didn’t practice it individually. The same is true of who we are today.
Looking at the Bible, Ed Anton pointed out that more calls for repentance go to groups than to individuals. I think he said around 85%. Throughout the Old Testament, Nations (primarily Israel) were called to repent. In the New Testament it’s churches. A particular focus in this study has been Revelation 2-3. There God calls out these churches, some rather hard others lightly, to repent. One of the questions our minister has asked us is if God were to write us, the Columbus Church of Christ, a letter like in Revelation, what would he say? He’s asked us all to write one.
Aside from the general excitement I feel about the concept and the process itself, I’m particularly excited that it is our minister that is driving this process forward. I’ve seen a marked difference in him over the last weeks. He’s looking at his leadership and the state of the church lately quite differently. The level of cooperation between him and the deacons has been heartwarming. I’ve been rather frank about my disappointment on occasion with him here on my site, so I figure it’s only right that when I am encouraged – and I am – that I mention it as well.
And yet, I have not been eager to write about it though I managed to, I guess). I think it has more to do with what I wrote about last week. I’m frankly not excited to change. I’ve grown comfortable in my life and the boundaries I’ve drawn for myself, and I don’t want them challenged. They must be, however, and I cannot just sit by and wait to feel good about change. I feel as though, on some levels, this is exactly what I’ve been longing for, but now that it’s here, I want to hide from it. God help me pursue you and let me stand and hear your reproof.

One of my favorite artists, J. Brian Craig, has released a new CD of Worship Music. It has 74 minutes of music, 19 songs in all. It’s called “Be With Me Lord” and it’s availabe here. You can also listen to samples of nine of them there.
There are 6 of his songs in our church’s songbook, and they are among my favorites, and new versions of 5 of them are on this CD. I don’t have the CD (yet) but I’ve heard different versions of many of several of them and it’s great stuff.
Be sure to visit his website too for some other MP3 downloads.