The Failure of Theology
Dr. Nathan Hitchcock is a consultant for the Alliance of Reformed Churches. He led the launch of Pathways, a competency-based process to help pastors get ordained the Alliance. Now he's working on a major discipleship initiative.
I remember the moment our discipleship plan died. The pastor came back from a committee and said, “Our people are out. They say it sounds like a lot of work, and that they’ve already been to school.” The pastor and I had proposed discipleship training as a “reasonable addition” to existing church programs. But church members didn’t have room - not just in their calendar, but in their paradigm.
It hurts to say it, but the first point of failure in our disciple making culture has been a failure oftheology. Our discipleship initiatives tank because we’ve strayed from the biblical truth. And it’s not just a problem of rank and file members. We leaders are guilty too.
More Than Just Add-On: Recovering the Call of Jesus
One expression of our failed theology is that discipleship is seen as an optional add-on. As Greg Ogden summarizes it, there arises “a false distinction between being a Christian and being a disciple.” The Christian life gets reduced to belief in eternal life through Jesus’ death, or baptism, or attendance of Sunday services. Discipleship is portrayed as something above and beyond. Accordingly, “Christian” becomes the plain vanilla version and “discipleship” is the fancy toppings.
Discipleship as an add-on, of course, is nothing like what Jesus taught. “Follow me,” is our Lord’s basic invitation (Matt 4:19, 8:22, 9:9, 16:24, 19:21). The Great Commission is not to make barebones believers, but to “make disciples,” which includes “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded” (Matt 28:19). Discipleship is primary.
Leaders I spoke with expressed frustration with the discipleship-as-add-on paradigm. Church people are reluctant to fit “elective” programming into their busy schedules. Life groups go unpopulated. Times for the class never seem to work. If training doesn’t fit into Sunday morning or midweek “church night,” people aren’t doing it.
Yet here’s where we leaders need to take some of the responsibility. We contribute to theological misunderstanding by having a dedicated “discipleship” category, as in dedicated “discipleship programs.” We may know that discipleship has to do with following Jesus in order to become like him, but we keep equating discipleship with special programming, whether it be Sunday school or small groups or that weekend retreat. I’ve also come to find that few Alliance pastors have anything about equipping disciples in their job description. We’ve surrendered to the broken paradigm.
From Passive Faith to Participating Disciples
All this ties in with a second failure of our theology: discipleship is seen as passive. Being a good disciple is about consuming Christian content. People “get fed” on Sunday morning, then during their midweek group, then in that marriage seminar. The programs meet their needs and give them lots of edifying information.
Voices from the disciple making movement (DMM) have been protesting the “feeding” idea for years. Discipleship is not passive, they argue, but participatory. Disciples make disciples. That’s why Jesus says, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matt 4:19, ESV). Upon following Jesus, disciples start witnessing and serving and making other disciples.
While I’m not on board with every DMM idea, I’ve come to believe that their foundational concept is biblical. Disciples are disciple makers. Being discipled includes being activated to make other disciples. It means receiving the gospel, yes, but then beginning to share the good news. It means studying the Scriptures, yes, but also then taking steps to hold a Bible study with others. It means accepting God’s grace, but then also serving others with gratitude. Discipleship is a lot like apprenticeship.
Leaders I interviewed lamented the passivity they saw with discipleship. Christians they knew were happy to listen to the sermon on Sunday but didn’t invest in the follow up. They might do a deeper study, but resist invitations to pray or serve or evangelize or lead groups. According to one veteran pastor, only 15% of church groups he’s worked with have been willing to adopt a more active discipleship model. “If we don’t get to people early,” another pastor told me, “it’s really hard to train them to be disciple makers.”
Yet again, we leaders need to own some of this failure. We continue to invest heavily in Sunday worship services. Lifeway Research reports that churches continue to be very Sunday-centric, with pastors identifying the weekly sermon as an important, even their most important, discipleship tool. Again, Lifeway found that pastors were most likely to say that corporate worship was their “best aspect.” Why would we expect whole-week discipleship to be taken seriously if most of our resources are still being funnelled into Sunday?
It’s not just a Sunday problem, of course. Passivity can be unintentionally encouraged in all sorts of programming. Pastors and other staff get in the pattern of providing the content and digesting the material for congregants. Rev. Seth Sundstrom told me he had an odd epiphany watching a show called My 600 Pound Life. In it, morbidly obese people fought to lose weight. Sundstrom said that there were indeed “600 pound Christians,” but his real a-ha moment was that, just as with extremely overweight people needing an enabling family member, so too spiritually obese Christians needed enablers.
A Call to Return to the Way of Jesus
I don’t mean to heap on the guilt, only to put a finger on the problem. Jesus teaches that discipleship is paramount and supersedes any of our other commitments (e.g., Luke 14:26). We have to drop our nets and follow him. At this point, that only comes by reframing the problem: “Instead of treating discipleship as an optional or advanced stage of Christian maturity,” Debbie Owen writes,“churches must recognize it as the central calling of every believer.” It’s not secondary but primary. Discipleship is not passive, but participatory. It is to follow Jesus in order to become like him.
Easier said than done, right? I don’t claim to have the silver bullet. We’ll need fresh conviction. We’ll need some new approaches, no doubt. We need to cut things to make room, probably. However it’s done, the Alliance is daring to restore discipleship to its chief calling.
Dr. Nathan Hitchcock is a consultant for the Alliance of Reformed Churches. He led the launch of Pathways, a competency-based process to help pastors get ordained the Alliance. Now he's working on a major discipleship initiative.
This is part of a series called Four Failures That Undermine Discipleship. It will be released over the end of Lent 2025. For all released articles in the series, see below.
