Discipleship needs the raw reality of friendship

One of my dilemmas in thinking about a theology of discipleship is the very practical "what" question.  What does this actually look like in the life of a church, for a small group ministry, even within an academic institution like a seminary or college?  This often ultimately comes down to a question of curriculum - a group after all needs something to do when tackling issues of discipleship.  However, I am often quite dissatisfied with the standard "discipleship" curriculum that is in current use.  Now, I believe that such curriculum has its place, and I am sure that it has played a crucial role for people in establishing key components of the Christian life.  But most discipleship curriculum also runs the grave risk of perpetuating a very narrow and limited view of discipleship, often just schooling people in the basic spiritual disciplines of Bible reading, prayer, worship, and fellowship.  These disciplines certainly must never be neglected, but they can also never be simply the end of our "discipleship" training.  And my fear is that when we lead people through these types of discipleship workbooks, we perpetuate a tragically limited practice and theology of discipleship.

The argument of course is that people need to start somewhere, and so they need to start by building good spiritual habits.  Again, you won't hear me saying that there is anything wrong with personal spiritual disciplines - but when we talk about discipleship, we are talking about something much greater, something that encompasses the entirety of our lives.  We are, after all, talking about what it means to follow-after Jesus Christ.  And I certainly hope that a life of following Jesus Christ means more than reading my Bible everyday. 

But what do we teach people to do in their following Jesus?

Here we come to the heart of the issue - that is the wrong question.  Discipleship is not a task; it is how we live life.  It is a worldview.  It is a set of beliefs that so permeate our lives that every decision we make is a part of our discipleship.  After all, if discipleship is following-after Jesus Christ, how could our every move and every relationship be anything but another unique aspect of the life of discipleship?

I want, then, to propose that discipleship requires much more than a curriculum and workbook.  It needs relationships; and more, discipleship needs dear friendships.

This hit me the other night talking with - who else - some friends.  There we were, informally hanging out, but I would say quite formally talking about the real hardships, joys, and questions of life.  As friends, we could be honest and share hurts and struggles.  As friends, we could laugh and relax.  As friends, we offer prayers and encouragement.  And I want to say that as friends we were in that moment growing in the life of discipleship.  We were not only learning from each other, but experiencing quite tangibly what it means to live life following-after Jesus Christ.

I went home that evening with a renewed energy to read and meditate on scripture and pray - and I had this desire not because of a curriculum workbook, but because I had, through my friends, pressing issues to pray and think on.

So, what I want to say is that when we are teaching people about discipleship, we really need to teach them how to be a good friend.  As disciples, we are called to journey with each other and be with and for each other.  Bonhoeffer describes Jesus as the man-for-others, and so we as Christians are called to be ultimately for-others - for our friends, our neighbors, and ultimately for all the world.  This is the "loving more" theme that I wrote about last time.

I wonder if discipleship can be separated from friendship?  It's curious - Bonhoeffer participated in the conspiracy against Hitler in large part because his close family and friends were deeply involved in the plot.  So, Bonhoeffer's discipleship was intricately linked to his relationships/friendships.

I guess I am trying to get at the fact that discipleship is most potent when it rubs up against others in our life.  And life is not a series of habits.  Life is the journey of discipleship, best experienced in the raw reality of friendship.

The "what" question of teaching people about discipleship just got a lot more complicated and nuanced.  And more fulfilling.

Turning away from loving less

I'm constantly amazed with the people that God puts in my path.  We've moved quite a bit in the last few years, but God always blesses us with special and unique friendships.  Last night I was out late with a couple of these friends, just sitting out in the warm evening talking about life and, in this case, the difficult joy of trying to follow God's call on our lives.  We inevitably end up talking about the church when we get together, and we are all burdened with a longing for the church to be something more - or, to put it a better way, to live into what it really is.

So when I got home late last night, I felt I should meditate a little on John's letters to the seven churches in Revelation.  I only had to read about the church in Ephesus in chapter 2 before coming upon my prayer, in verse 4: "Nevertheless, I have this complaint to make: you have less love now than formerly."  That stings.  Less love now than before.  How true is that, in my own life, in all our lives, and so subsequently in the churches.  Now, I'm not trying to be a downer on the church.  The church is real, it is alive, but God certainly weighs in a complaint every now and then.  And so, I'm praying first that I can repent of my less love, and I'm praying that the church will repent of less love.

But what does this mean?  Less love than what?  Than when?  The text says less love than before...  Perhaps, before, when I was more zealous, or more trusting, or more willing.  Perhaps before, when the church reached out to those in need, when it believed in and was laser focused on its mission to be the gospel in every nook and cranny of society.  Before, when the church did not exist to subsist as an institution, but as a living witness to the very reality of God's revelation in Jesus Christ.

So, this has been my prayer today.  That I would repent of loving less, and that the church would repent of loving less.  And I meditate on the promise in Revelation 2:7: "Let anyone who can hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying: those who prove victorious I will feed from the tree of life set in God's paradise."  Certainly the fruit from the tree of life will be bursting with the fullness of love.

And I'm finally struck because one of my friends from this late night hang out is preparing to set off for Santa Cruz to plant a church.  And he's picked up on this - that the Christian life is about loving more.  I think he's on to something.  New City Church Santa Cruz is about loving God, loving people, and loving more; and that is the truth and reality that we all need to bear witness to and experience.

Leadership Development and Discipleship

I just had a few quick thoughts I wanted to get down...

I'm starting to think more about the relationship between discipleship and leadership development, especially in the context of ministry and church planting.  What is the difference between them?  Can one take place without the other?  At the moment, I feel like the questions of discipleship need to be addressed prior to the issues of leadership development, because I think that leadership development will come naturally out of discipleship.  Maybe focusing on leadership development without first establishing a clear sense of discipleship among potential leaders is like putting the cart before the horse.  But I'm thinking that a first step of discipleship formation is learning how to listen both individually and collectively to God's call.  Leadership development can have a sense of go-go-go (at least, that's how I can feel about it).  And there's certainly nothing wrong with urgency and leadership growth.  However, the urgency can sometimes overwhelm us, and we can lose sight of (or even never really grasp) the work and will of God in our unique situation.  I believe that starting with discipleship serves as a sort of guard against just developing leaders for the sake of having leaders.  More importantly, I think, is the issue of discernment.  How do we learn, and how do we teach our leaders a posture of listening and of the subsequent readiness to respond to God's unique call.  When we talk about leadership development in ministry - and especially in church planting - I want to talk first about discipleship.  Because I sense that all too often we can develop leaders apart from disciples; but I think it would be difficult to develop disciples apart from leaders.

Revelation as the Foundation of Discipleship in the Theology of Barth and Bonhoeffer

Here's the introduction to my recent seminar paper...

            It is a fascinating theological exercise to investigate the places of contention, disagreement, and misunderstanding between the two theological giants Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  While belonging to the same dialectical-theological camp, and united in their opposition to the National Socialists as leaders in the Confessing Church, there are striking theological differences.  A natural place to start to investigate this question is at the end of Bonhoeffer’s career, when he accuses Barth, his mentor, of “positivism of revelation.”[1]  Barth is aghast, and perhaps rightly so, for he feels misunderstood and misinterpreted; he then offers his own less-than-enthusiastic critique of the mysterious direction of Bonhoeffer’s “worldly” theology in Letters and Papers from Prison.[2]  Further divergences can be traced to different emphases within their respective Reformed and Lutheran traditions, as in their differing explanations of the dictum, finitum non capax infiniti – the finite cannot comprehend the infinite.  As a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer feels he can challenge the Reformed interpretation, and Barth makes his own defense of it in his Church Dogmatics.[3] 

Most of these issues have already been thoroughly explored in Barth and Bonhoeffer studies.  Scholars such as Charles Marsh, Andreas Pangritz, and Heinz Tödt offer valuable in-depth analysis and evaluation of these and other issues.[4]  What is more, while Barth and Bonhoeffer clearly have their differences, these differences seem to be a matter of nuance and emphasis, rather than points of major theological divergence.  Most of the seemingly glaring disagreements can be settled as nothing more than misinterpretations or misunderstandings.  In fact, both men are, in large part, pursuing similar theological projects, and their differences are often not much more than matters of focus.[5]  The German theologian Heinz Tödt suggests that a way forward in the Barth and Bonhoeffer discussion is instead to focus on the meeting and merging of their understanding of revelation and the world and its impact for today.[6]  This paper builds upon Tödt’s suggestion by exploring the convergence of the concept of revelation as it relates to a theology of contemporary discipleship in the thought of Barth and Bonhoeffer.

Barth introduces his concept of revelation in a lengthy chapter entitled, “The Revelation of God” in Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2, and he continues to treat the concept throughout the entirety of this work.  Bonhoeffer’s approach is quite different.  Never having produced a systematic theology, his explanations of revelation are scattered throughout his books, papers, and letters, building and working off of each other.  It is admittedly difficult, therefore, and at worst inaccurate, to organize the convergence of Barth and Bonhoeffer’s understanding of revelation into three over-arching movements, as in this paper.  However, the purpose here is not only to describe the similarities and unique nuances of Barth and Bonhoeffer’s respective concepts of revelation, but to explore these understandings in terms of setting a foundation for a contemporary theology of discipleship.  With this goal in mind, it is appropriate and necessary to propose three aspects of revelation that are readily present in both Barth and Bonhoeffer: revelation is first and foremost Trinitarian; revelation is then Christological-ecclesial; and revelation is finally ethical, in its existence as faith and obedience.  These are certainly not comprehensive categories for describing the concept of revelation in Barth and Bonhoeffer.  What they attempt to offer, however, is a clear framework for understanding a theological foundation for a life of following Jesus Christ.

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[1] Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, vol. 8 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, ed. John de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 364, 373, 429.

[2] Cf. Charles Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (Oxford: University Press, 1994), 25f.

[3] Cf. Joachim von Soosten, “Editor’s Afterword to the German Edition,” in Sanctorum Communio, vol. 1 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, ed. Clifford Green (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 302.  Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, vol. 2 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English edition, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd, Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 84 and editor’s note 7.  Cf., for example, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics (CD) I/1 (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 2010), 407f.

[4] Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 3-33; Andreas Pangritz, Karl Barth in the Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000); Pangritz, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer: ‘Within, not Outside, the Barthian Movement’,” in Bonhoeffer’s Intellectual Formation: Theology and Philosophy in His Thought, ed. Peter Frick (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 245-282; Heinz Eduard Tödt, “Belief in a Non-Religious World: Must One Choose Between Barth and Bonhoeffer?” in Authentic Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Ethics in Context, English edition, ed. Glen Stassen (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2007), 30-39.  Additionally, see Ernst Feil, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 175-177; Ralf Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 60-65.

[5] Marsh, for example, suggests that “the way to make sense of Bonhoeffer’s theological relationship to Barth is to distinguish, as Barth does, between the primary and secondary objectivity of God.”  Barth stresses the primary objectivity of God’s aseity while Bonhoeffer focuses his attention on God’s promeity.  Cf. Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 31.

[6] Tödt, “Belief in a Non-Religious World: Must One Choose Between Barth and Bonhoeffer?” 39.