Experiencing a Discipleship Pentecost
They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? “(Acts 2:7-8)
As I handed out the descriptions of the Gospel Discipleship types, the woman to my left took a look at the first category, and emphatically said, “Well, James is Markan.”
James, their pastor, was in my eyeshot at the back of the congregation. He threw his arms up, ecstatic with joy and celebration. He knew in that moment that she really knew him. He also hoped, at the end of that day of training, that not only would all his people know him, his predominantly Lukan church would finally understand him.
Another pastor, Doug, had a two-point charge and was struggling to know how to lead them both. After testing both congregations, he understood what his difficulty was. He had one Matthean church, and one Lukan church, and he is Johannine. All of them were approaching discipleship in different ways. Now he knew he needed to do some translation for his people, because in some ways they were all speaking different languages of discipleship.
Different languages of discipleship. How are we supposed to understand each other then?
So far, my favorite part of working with churches through the Gospel Discipleship process, besides just watching everyone suddenly have a vocabulary to talk meaningfully about being a disciple, is helping churches understand their pastors and their pastors understand their churches. As I have watched things unfold following the results and training, if there is a place where I have seen the most immediate transformation, it is in how everyone has a new frame for relating to each other and working together.
When we boil it down, many of our conflicts in church are not really about people being self-centered and picky. What I have found is that we actually have very deep commitments to how we understand discipleship. The thing is, though, we have different understandings of discipleship. We come by these honestly. Our understanding of what it means to follow Jesus comes to us from 4 distinct Gospels that have 4 distinct understandings of that discipleship. Then those Gospels are interpreted through distinct faith communities. And most of us have been nurtured by multiple faith communities in this day and age. That creates a vast array of ways of conceiving of, talking about, and living discipleship.
Is all this diversity of discipleship what God had in mind? People often bemoan the plethora of different Christian expressions, easily recognizable in our number of denominations, but honestly also recognizable from local church to local church. I think sometimes we think that our ideal is to be one church, under God. Here’s the thing, though. God presumably has the capacity to make us uniform, and yet God continually insists on our diversity.
What God does then is equips us to reach all that diversity with the story of Jesus. We see that at Pentecost when God enables either the disciples to speak the languages of others, or enables the others to hear the word in their language, or perhaps both. But we speak more than one language. We may have our native tongue, but we also speak a language of living. There are ways of being that we speak, and that manifests in what we like to do with our lives. Some of us like to spend our lives in constant motion, while some of us are drawn to spending time in deep relationships. Some of us like change and creativity, and some of us need constancy and tradition. God knew this about God’s own creation. So the story of following Jesus is also framed in different ways of being. Why else would we need four Gospels to share the story of living for Christ in four different ways?
All we have lacked at this point was a clear means of translation. It is my hope that Gospel Discipleship is a tool to aid in that translation. My hope is, like the pastors mentioned above, as discipleship is interpreted and understood, then we all know how to work together better. We can understand each other’s strengths and needs, and work with those to reach others for Christ.
And finally, in this last full week of Pastor Appreciation month, let me advocate for spending the time getting to know each other and appreciating each other’s perspectives. Once we understand that things like the arrangement of chairs in worship, or the desire to hang on to a particular ministry, or the need for significant time to prepare a sermon are not driven by personal preference, but are instead driven by trying to live more fully into our own discipleship, then the wind gets knocked out of so many conflicts. And hopefully, hopefully we all understand, and love, each other better.
For more information about Gospel Discipleship, visit Gospeldiscipleship.net.
Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash
