“I refused to read your column because the [print] headline said ‘Xmas’ not Christmas. I shall now start referring to you as X-ty rather than ‘Christy’.”
“After reading your column, I wish you had skipped FUMC-Denton.”
Both of these comments came from long-time readers of my popular weekly religion column in the Denton Record Chronicle. Both came from people who are long time church members and would very much consider themselves good Christians and disciples of Jesus. The second writer, after expressing the wish that I had not attended worship and unhappy with pretty well everything I had written except the praise for the music wrote, “The headline was very nice and appropriate only for the paragraphs about the music.”
Now, I don’t write the headlines for my print columns–they are done by newspaper staff.
I can also deal with the critiques. They come with the territory of bring a writer and putting myself out there. No big deal.
What gets me is that the writers consider themselves mature Christians, but utterly innocuous headlines and a few minor critiques are enough for them to indicate that they need to either insult me or hope I never visit their churches again.
I was in conversation today with a young woman who told me the reason she and her family left their church (in a town in West Texas) after years there: the usual worship wars, where the older members of the church insisted they have their way and nothing ever be changed in the worship service. What has been for the past must be for the future. The family ended up at a non-denominational Bible church, welcoming and flexible.
These examples do not speak to the whole of the church, but they leave me sad for this reason: apparently, too many of the older adults in our congregations have never actually been formed into disciples who are willing to follow Jesus, no matter where he leads, particularly if it means welcoming change or the unfamiliar.
We need to know what a disciple of Jesus looks like. I need to know so I can work on being one. Clergy need to know so there is a way to help form them.
Here’s how I see it:
What is a Disciple?
Disciples are those who love the Lord God with all their heart, mind, soul, and body and who love their neighbor as they do themselves. Becoming a disciple is a life-long process. No one can honestly say he/she has “arrived.” The journey continues until we pass from this world to the next and probably after that as well.
So, how does one make a disciple?
First, by being one. As disciple-makers, we engage in the frequent observance of the Sacraments, consistent prayer, humble service, rigorous self-examination, frequent confession, generous giving, radical hospitality and healthy living. Furthermore, as disciple-makers our own lives must be integrated as those who operate fully out of love for God and love for neighbor. Hypocrisy, lying, asking others to live faithfully when we privately cut ourselves huge amounts of slack simply must end.
Second, we recognize that we ourselves are incapable of “making” disciples in the sense that we can control the outcome. We throw ourselves and our ministries onto the grace of God and seek to live with faithfulness. That may mean being huge risk-takers at times which could launch us into the public spotlight and bring about ministries with unusual growth. It may mean quiet and unnoticed ministry with the voiceless of society, living in poverty and finding contentment in obscurity. We trust that the Spirit of God is working in the lives of those around us and recognize that ultimately, each of us must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. We cannot decide for others specifically how his/her own journey to full love for God and neighbor will look. We can only model our own faithfulness and invite others into a similar commitment.
Third, we invite those who do seek to love God and neighbor most fully into the spiritual disciplines that we ourselves seek to master. We teach them to observe the Sacraments, to pray, to serve, to examine the self, to confess, to give, to offer hospitality and to live healthily by inviting them to work alongside us in transparency and vulnerability. We discover the power of the necessary committees of organizational life to be means of disciple-making. We learn that in raising money and setting budgets and repairing broken toilets and deciding on the color of the carpet in the Narthex and changing dirty diapers in the nursery that we are being the hands and feet and mind of Christ in all we do. We eliminate the sacred/secular division and bring all things into obedience to Christ.
Fourth, we lay down our lives for our enemies. We go to the cross for them and offer forgiveness to them at the moments of our most extreme agony. Here, we model for all what the love of God is all about.
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