Where Does Discipleship Happen?
If you’ve been around the blogosphere lately you’ve probably seen several bloggers hashing out the ideas of discipleship/small groups/organic church vs. ‘traditional’ church. I’ve had some opportunity to read some of the stuff that these guys are writing and also had some great conversations with some of them.
Perry Noble wrote a post that basically outlined the things that he is struggling with in terms of discipleship. He mentioned a person wrote to others wondering what their churches were doing to make discipleship. The caveat was that this could not be on Sunday mornings. Being a pastor, Perry obviously didn’t agree with that point. My thought is that discipleship must happen during gatherings such as Sunday worship. Many churches have Bible teaching times outside of the worship setting as well. I’ve seen this done tremendously well in a church plant I was on staff at in the Minneapolis area. I was always impressed that we could gather 50 plus people for an hour each week and they engaged and implemented what we taught. Amazing! Should discipleship extend beyond Sunday mornings? Certainly, but to say that it cannot and does not happen is simply insane.
Perry defined discipleship as teaching someone to walk with Jesus, picking them up when they fall down and teaching them to feed themselves. Pretty straightforward definition if you ask me. Perry did mention that it is difficult to make disciples without first having converts…not sure I agree totally there, but could be a matter of semantics and when the point of conversion actually happens.
Anyway..thoughts? Comments? Smart remarks?
Check out these guys for some more reading in this vein.
Brian Jones — He has a great series of posts on the idea of small groups….Loved it. Thanks, Brian.
