Why Discipleship Fails
In Acts 2:42, we see that the early church focused on “the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” The apostles’ teaching helped the disciples grow in Christian maturity. The word disciple means “follower” or “student,” and these students of the Gospel were learning from the apostles, just as the apostles had learned from Jesus. We typically call this learning-and-growing process discipleship.
As disciples mature, they in turn make other disciples. We know that churches are supposed to be making disciples because Jesus said, “Go and make disciples…” (Matt 28:19). This isn’t rocket science. Or, maybe it is. Why? Because we do such a poor job of making disciples.
Ouch! How can I say that? I mean, we have Sunday Schools, and small groups, and Sunday evening meetings, and Wednesday evening meetings, and on and on. To which I say: yep, and how’s that working out? In addition to what we can observe with our own eyes, surveys show we aren’t very good at discipleship. Many (most?) self-identified Christians are not biblically literate. Quite a few have some really messed up doctrinal views. And as for living out our faith—gathering regularly for worship, praying daily, reading Scripture, sharing the faith—while there was a slight uptick recently, we have nothing to brag about, and that’s before accounting for the halo effect.
Why are we failing at discipleship? There are several reasons. Here are just a few:
Instead of challenging people in our classes, we often teach to the lowest common denominator. This forces us to stick to the simplest of themes like “Jesus loves us,” “we’re all sinners,” “keep the faith,” etc., rather than getting into what can sometimes be thorny discussions on different—yet orthodox—interpretive viewpoints, historic teachings and dogma, etc.
Some of what is being taught is actually doing more harm than good. Doctrinally-solid discipleship that conveys useful, retainable information is sometimes hard to come by.
The study material is sometimes irrelevant to the disciples’ situation. For example, why have a class on “Outreach to Buddhists” if there are no known Buddhists in our outreach community, yet at the same time ignore addicts, homeless, immigrants and others who are in our communities?
Most of what we would call our “discipleship programs” are on cruise control. The same material is ordered year-in, year-out in a routine manner, rather than considering the disciples’ maturity level in Christ and tailoring it to their needs.
We tend to categorize discipleship by age: college age, young couples, older men, mature ladies. Yet, a college-age Christian may be more mature in their walk than an old guy like me. The point is that we group by irrelevant categories rather than by the need of the disciple.
Maybe one of the worst culprits is when we rely so heavily on sermons to do our discipleship for us. Can sermons help us learn and grow as disciples? Yes, but a one-way lecture with no opportunity for questioning is of limited use for the purposes of discipleship.
Some churches recognize the deficiency in discipleship, so they have short-term “discipleship classes.” They spend a lot of time discussing discipleship, going over what it means to a “Man of God” or “Woman of God,” or otherwise instructing people on how they should work towards being a disciple. And yet, not much progress is made in actually making disciples. It is hard to disciple others when we haven’t been properly discipled ourselves or even seen truly effective discipleship.
What is the solution? We’ll take a look at some ways to help improve discipleship in the next article. A little preview: let’s stop talking about discipleship and start doing discipleship!