The Seven Preliminary Questions You Need to Ask Anyone Who Wants To Be Discipled (Including Yourself)

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Pastor Foley

From Asian Access via Out of Ur comes this list of seven questions you need to ask anyone who wants to be discipled (including yourself):

Are you willing to leave home and lose the blessing of your father?
Are you willing to lose your job?
Are you willing to go to the village of those who persecute you, forgive them, and share the love of Christ with them?
Are you willing to give an offering to the Lord?
Are you willing to be beaten rather than deny your faith?
Are you willing to go to prison?
Are you willing to die for Jesus?

I love the list but would recommend adding the same follow-up question to each of the seven noted above:

And how would doing this affect your discipleship today?

Absent that additional follow-up, the first seven questions can regrettably become an exercise in rah-rah, as the Apostle Peter discovered:

36 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered him, “Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.” 37 Peter said to him, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” 38 Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow till you have denied me three times.

All Christians are called to martyrdom. And all Christians are called to sell all they have, give it to the poor, and come and follow Jesus. The only question is whether God intends it to happen for you in a moment or across a lifetime.

As you disciple others, help them develop a credible plan for either possibility. It will help them (and us as disciplers) move quickly beyond the rah-rah.

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The One Thing That’s Better (and More Biblical) Than a Personal Relationship with Jesus

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Pastor Foley

Mormons do it.

Muslims do it.

Even non-Christian religions do it.

Let’s do it. Let’s evangelize and disciple on the basis of something better (and more biblical) than a personal relationship with Jesus.

Cole Porter references aside, the 2012 Religious Congregations and Membership Study points to a pivotal insight that ought to urge us back to a more Scripturally faithful approach to evangelism and discipleship, namely:

When Christians evangelize and disciple on the basis of inviting people to a personal relationship with Jesus, not only do we undermine the fundamentally corporate nature of our relationship to God that is portrayed in the Scriptures, but we also inadvertently, grievously construe church as a stumbling block in our “personal” relationship with God.

Or, as Church of the Nazarene researcher Dale Jones puts it, his work on the 2012 study leads him to believe that “our chickens have come home to roost”:

Churches have talked about needing to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ — what you hear is, ‘I need a relationship, I need to be born again,’ but not, ‘I need to be involved in a congregation.’ Guess what? That’s where we are.

Permit me to recast Jones’ insight into discipleship language, since our Work of Mercy focus for the month is Making Disciples:

“Born again” is a birth reference. When we are born again, we enter a new family and find ourselves enmeshed in a rich, deep family framework where God is father over the whole brood and Christ is not ashamed to call us brothers. In one of the least quoted verses in the New Testament, the Apostle John states very straightforwardly that the very sign of our being born again is love for our new brothers in our new family:

We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers.

John is talking here about brothers, not neighbors, as is made clear by his reference to Cain in the wider 1 John 3:11-18 passage. It is doubtful he would be much sympathetic to Christians explaining their absence from the weekly family dinner known as the Lord’s Supper by noting that our brothers and sisters in Christ are “a bunch of hypocrites.”

As ensconced as it is in the parlance of modern evangelism, the Scripture does not use “personal relationship with Jesus” language. And this is of course not because it commends or even comprehends an impersonal relationship with Jesus. (Parenthetical note: the “Lord, Lord” passage is not about Christ’s spurning of someone who has an “impersonal” relationship with him but rather of someone who claims a relationship but does not obey him.)

Instead, it is because just as your family is at the center of your heart, God’s family is at the center of his. A family in which the children have personal relationships with the father but no relationships with each other is not a very good family, as I can personally attest from my experience with my birth family. Instead, a very good family is one where all the members enjoy rich, deep, full, loving, caring relationships with each other, according to the rules of the house laid out by the father.

Jesus thought this was such a big deal that he puts it in the climax of his “high priestly prayer” before his death, in John 17:20-23 (ESV):

20 “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word,21 that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

With apologies to Dale Jones, the moment we talk about the necessity and importance of congregational participation, we’ve officially missed the point. We’re not born again into a congregation. We’re born again into a family.

That this is such a straightforward and noncontroversial and basic proposition biblically is undermined by the dearth of evangelical Christian websites out there that address the topic. Grievously, there are scores of cult sites that focus on the family-of-Christ nature of God’s design, and, as Jones’ comment attests, the religions that stress the corporate nature of faith are thriving these days, even (perhaps especially) in our individualistic age. Even book clubs promote book reading as a group activity; that is, participants read and grapple with contents in light of their relationship with the club as a whole. But in an eerie twist of church history, evangelical evangelism strategies have perfectly de-emphasized the inescapably familial nature of the Christian life, omitting its mention completely from, for example, the Sinner’s Prayer and day-to-day church life. Church is often portrayed as a non-hierarchical association of believers rather than brothers and sisters joined at the hip by a praying Jesus.

Maybe it’s an effort to staunchly hold on to the idea of the priesthood of all believers, i.e., talking about a personal relationship with God means, rightly, that there are no intermediaries between us and God. But if by that we mean that God is willing to relate to us each in a vacuum, that is very, very wrong. In a human family I can of course have an unmediated relationship with my father, but this does not mean that that relationship dissolves, neutralizes, or minimizes the importance of my relationships with my brothers and sisters. In fact, were we to minimize relationships with our brothers and sisters in an effort to have a personal relationship with our earthly father, our earthly father would almost certainly say, “Why are you treating your brothers and sisters like that?”

And if that’s true of earthly families, how much more so of our heavenly one. Which is all the more reason why our evangelism and discipleship strategies must not only be ones where we teach everyone to obey the commands of Christ in an accountability framework; they must be ones where we understand that we are being obedient to our Father in a family of many brothers and sisters.

Perhaps at our evangelistic rallies we should call people forward to the Gaither’s Family of God rather than that other old classic, Just As I Am.

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How Gifford Claiborne Made a Christian Disciple Out of Me

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Pastor Foley

I did not learn discipleship in a book. Even the Bible is not intended to be a self-study course in discipleship. Instead, it contains sayings like this one from the Apostle Paul:

Imitate me as I imitate Christ.

Discipleship always comes with skin on (how blessed are even the feet of those who bear good news!), and in my case God sent Gifford Claiborne to make a disciple out of me.

Humorously (to Gifford, anyway), I was not much discipled when we met–this despite my having served for three years as an associate pastor just prior to our meeting for the first time.  I had bumped up against discipleship practices a few times at the church I’d served, most particularly as we implemented an Every Member in Ministry campaign. But I prized Every Member in Ministry mostly as a volunteer activation approach. The idea of teaching others to obey everything Christ commanded? That seemed to me to be a call to use the lectionary when preaching. That was about as deep as it went for me.

So when I went to work for Gifford at the Los Angeles Mission, he began a systematic process of helping me take discipleship beyond my head and into my life. He referred to that systematic process as “life.” The process was never pretty. I went along kicking and screaming, and poorly. (Disciplers, if a disciple kicks and screams and goes poorly, rejoice! For so have disciples persecuted their disciplers before you.)

One time Gifford and I were walking the few blocks back to our development office from the main mission building. Gifford asked me nonchalantly, “So what do you think about demon possession?”

“Oh, I think there are a lot of contemporary ailments that in Jesus’ time would have been called demon possession,” I said, always happy when I sensed an intellectual conversation dawning.

“Ah,” said Gifford. “Then it will be interesting to see what you do about this.” And with that a homeless woman was upon us. Howling. Distorted. Menacing us against a wall. She was like an actual person made of Silly Putty. All stretched out–over us, against us, on top of us, beside us, all at once. My jaw dropped. My brain froze. This was not a person with a contemporary ailment. It was a person with a contemporary Legion. I looked at Gifford to see what he would do. He looked back at me with the face of an angel, perfectly content to let me obey everything that Christ had commanded with regard to Ms. Legion. If only I could remember what Christ had commanded in situations like this one…

And that was the way Gifford discipled. It was never next to life, or outside of life, or reflecting on life. It was always in life–in real time. Obeying Christ without warning in whatever situation arose. And oh, the situations that arose! I would have been lucky just one time to sit and philosophize idly about discipleship with Gifford over coffee!

Gifford would take me to meetings with the many famous and desperate Christian leaders who were always seeking him out because they badly needed his help, typically in fund raising but often in very personal and private issues ranging from marriage to addiction to lawsuits. They were always very excited to see him. But when Gifford would show up with 22-year old me in tow, their response was always somewhere between puzzlement and resentment. They wanted private time with Gifford. I knew that. They knew that. But Gifford seemed oblivious to it. “This is Eric Foley,” he would say. “He is a student who will one day surpass the teacher.” He’d chuckle. They’d frown. And then they’d really frown when they’d pour their heart out to Gifford and he would turn to me and say, “What do you think they should do, Eric?” My jaw was permanently slacked around Gifford.

Gifford opened up each element of his personal and professional life to me, as if a very important reason he had a personal and professional life at all was to use it to train me. I simultaneously smile and wince as I think back on all the bad advice and prayers and ministry I dispensed to Gifford’s friends and colleagues as Gifford subjected all of us to his training me. He truly withheld no opportunity from me that he felt would help me grow in Christ.

I marvel at it still. It simply is absolutely true that no project was ever more important to him than discipling me and the others whom God entrusted to his care. I learned to take the same approach in my own life, specifically because Gifford lived it out in front of me.

I drafted a lot of fundraising letters and marketing materials in those days, and every time–every time–I sent a piece to Gifford for his approval, he’d send it back to me marked up with more red marks than the previous version I’d corrected just as his red pen  indicated I should.

One day I got fed up. “Why do you keep making new corrections on each version?” I sputtered. “Why can’t you just put all of your corrections on one version and I can make all the changes at once and we can get the work done on time? It’s piling up beyond belief.”

Gifford just chuckled. “You can stop submitting drafts to me at any point that you’re satisfied with whatever you happen to be writing,” he said gently, as always. “But every time you send me something, I will always look at it as if for the first time and ask, ‘How can I help him to become an even better proclaimer of the gospel?'”

12 Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13 Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. 15 Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. 16 Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

17 Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.

–The Apostle Paul, Philippians 3:12-17 (ESV)

Brothers, join in imitating me as I imitate Gifford imitating Christ. Make disciples in this way, the way of real life, drawing them out of their heads and into the craziest and scariest parts of the world God has made, for the sake of growing each of us, with the assistance of men like Gifford, to fullness in Christ.

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