Our Discipleship Problem (Part 5)

Church business meetings are from Satan, I am convinced of it! I am grateful to be done with them. Most frequently the sessions turn into all out gripe-fests. This person is upset about the music, that person doesn’t like new Bibles. So-and-so wants to know why we stopped the bus ministry (they of course don’t want to drive the bus), and miss what’s-her-name wants the preacher to wear a tie. And so the business meeting become s chance for everyone to vent their own frustrations and identify all the church problems. Any attempts to resolve a problem are met with immediate resistance (except when said attempts return to the “old ways” of doing things). The key here is that everyone knows the “problems” and is happy to talk about them…but no one wants to offer a realistic solution. It’s like this when we talk about discipleship too.

Discipleship is one of the worst areas in the national church. We have dropped the ball majorly as Christians in this discipline, and everyone knows it and everyone talks about it. Rarely do realistic answers and solutions get discussed. Oh, sure everyone has their canned program for building your church, etc. But as we’ve seen the nature of discipleship is organic and messy and that’s the part we need to tackle if we’re really going to present solutions. I have proposed that what we need is a culture of discipleship and that requires us to shift our focus as a church from consumers to servants. It’s really a shift away from what I call “Me Church” to “Church Us.”

This partly describes the situation at the church in Corinth. Paul writes to the church because he has heard that there is “quarreling among” them (1 Corinthians 1:11); they are a divided church. They are constantly seeking their own self-indulgence: they sue one another over their rights (6:1-11); they gorge themselves at the Lord’s Supper while others go hungry (11:20-22). They are a picture of a Me Church. To them Paul writes these strong words of correction:

16 Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?  17 If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. (1 Corinthians 3:16-17)

Our Lord takes the unity of the church very seriously, and we ought to reevaluate whether or not we do. In Colossians Paul highlights for the Christians that they are not only to care about unity, but in fact, he says, they actually have a responsibility for one another. You see a Biblical model of corporate life actually goes beyond a desire to avoid divisions and stresses mutual responsibility. Here’s how Paul terms it in Colossians:

16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:16)

The Christians, according to Paul, then actually have a duty to teach and admonish one another in all wisdom. This is not a command to pastors, it is a command to the people in the pews! How crazy this seems in contrast to the way modern church is done.

The contemporary church is all about providing goods and services for the average Christian to come partake of and it requires no commitment and no service on their part. We have made church a business instead of a community, a body, a family, etc. The metaphors of the Bible speak of church in those terms not in corporate terms. We must shift our focus from Me Church, where I go to a building in order to get something, and instead see Church Us as a model of ministry that says I go to a building to get prepared to serve others. Church Us facilitates discipleship, Me Church facilitates selfish consumption.

If we’re going to answer, seriously, the dilemma of discipleship then we must look carefully at building a new culture in our church. A culture that has real expectations for its people, a culture that promotes serving and accountability (like that of Colossians 3:16), a culture that says your wants are secondary. We need Christians who see it as part of their spiritual duty to build up the faith of others. Discipleship is a culture, not a program, and that means our churches need a change in focus from “me” to “us”!