In order to make, be...

Over the past couple of years I’ve stopped viewing discipleship as an inherently religious term. Interestingly, I’ve found that this has led to some new clarity on a subject that I’ve given a fair amount of thought to over the years.

It all started when it dawned on me that it’s not uncommon to hear about gang leaders, warlords, or tech moguls (to name just a few) having disciples. What I realized is that, in those spheres, discipleship is simply viewed as the formation of certain values, habits, and lifestyle traits that result from spending a lot of time with someone who already embodies those qualities. It’s more a matter of FORMATION than EDUCATION.

This has led me to the following equation: relationship + time = discipleship.

(I realize that it’s possible to be someones disciple from a distance, but this requires substantially more interest and effort from the one being discipled. So much so, that such a person will tend to feel like they have a “relationship” of sorts with the one they’re diligently/obsessively following.)

Simply put, if you spend a lot of time with someone you look up to, you tend to become like them to some degree.

This poses a bit of a problem for modern day Christians.

We’re so far down the road of tailoring Christianity to meet the needs/preferences of individuals, that the idea of devoting a lot of time to spiritual formation is pretty foreign. We’ve been told that God meets us where we are and we take that to mean that He meets us on our terms, in our comfort zones, and within the confines of the tiny pockets of time we carve out for Him. Our short weekend services (offered at various convenient times) are already apparently inconvenient enough to drive Christians to their couches to just stream it on a device (as if church was merely a transaction of information). In light of this, the idea of giving even more time seems almost unthinkable.

On the other side of the coin we have the issue of the ones who will supposedly be followed. First of all, they have to be willing to let people get close enough to them that they can actually be followed. Secondly -and this is the big one- they have to actually be someone worth following.

Ouch.

That takes a lot more than a head full of knowledge or a piece of paper with some signatures on it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of knowledge, but it takes time for knowledge to become part of who you are rather than just something you know.

It seems like a really followable person actually IS something; they don’t just KNOW something.

Sadly, we've cultivated the mindset of: “don’t look at me, I’ll only let you down” (hey, that reminds me of a song I heard once), but I seem to recall someone (Paul) in the Bible saying something like “follow me as I follow Christ”.

Misunderstanding all of this, has led to the formulation of program, after program, after program trying to teach people how to be disciples rather than just showing them. I realize it's cleaner and less intrusive...but is it actually working?