A Vision for Healthy Discipleship in the Church Webinar

My guests, John and Isaac, may not need an introduction, but I’m going to go ahead and give an introduction anyway. I’m really happy to have both of these brothers in this conversation with a vision for healthy discipleship in the church. Isaac Funk is an employee here at ACCFS and has a lot of experience in our Abide program.

Isaac, would you say maybe a bit about Abide and your intersection with that ministry? Sure. So, Abide is ACCFS’s discipleship initiative that actually started as a local initiative here where I live in Peachtree City, Georgia. It was a discipleship program designed to lead people into a more experiential or more holistic walk of faith following Jesus.

And so, we create resources and trainings that help people live as disciples of Jesus in every area of their life whether that’s in their church relationships and activities and their personal devotional habits, but also beyond that, how they understand their lives, their work, their schooling, et cetera as a part of living under the kingdom of Christ.

Thanks in advance, Isaac, for your insights into tonight’s topic. I personally have benefited a great deal from Isaac’s experience and wisdom in this area. Brother John is an elder at our church in Silverton, Oregon. Brother John, maybe you could mention how discipleship is an initiative that the Elder Body has pointed out and targeted.

Am I right about that? It’s true. We’ve talked about evangelism for a long time and saw the gap in wanting to share the gospel with others. But seeing that partnership and the need for discipleship to be in a healthy place to worship God and that our lives could be for him and then equipping us in evangelism as well.

So, I think we’re going to learn a lot from these brothers. I really appreciate them being here. Just a few upfront comments. We’ve got this set up to go through some slides and we will have a conversation. If you have a question, there’s a chat feature.

Brother Arlan Miller’s in the background. He’s monitoring any chats that come in and will share those questions with us when it’s appropriate. Once we get towards the end of the presentation, 45 minutes or so, we would perhaps have an opportunity for you to un mic yourself and ask a question if something is on your heart.

We really want this to be time well spent for all of you on this call. We really want it to be beneficial to you. And so that’s the format. Thank you for your registration. In your registration, you’re asked to share a question, and many of you typed in wonderful questions, and it’s so helpful for us as we review those questions to give us an idea on where the audience is at, where you’re at, what’s on your mind, and your thoughts. And so, I want to come out right off the start and maybe set a little bit of expectation because as those questions were coming in, we see them all very practical in nature.

Wonderful questions about boots on the ground. How do we do this? What does it look like? Is it a program? Is it grassroots? Some tremendous questions about, I think John and Isaac would say, 201 level discipleship in the local church. And so, we want to come out and be up front here at the beginning that we’re going to try to address some of those questions, but we may not because we view this presentation perhaps to be more 101.

And that is beneath the hood of discipleship or in the background. Understanding discipleship in the local church is maybe a bit more of a vision. So, I want to be out front with that as to guide our expectations as we move through tonight’s topic. Having said all that, I hope you don’t tune us out because I actually think this presentation holds a lot of promise and maybe pouring a foundation for all of those questions to stand on.

And there will be further teaching and further opportunity for some of those questions to be addressed in the future. So, I wanted to be up front with that. John or Isaac, either one of you want to comment on the larger scope of this? If not, that’s fine too. Yeah, I would just observe that if we would do this in a course setting the number of conversations we could have about discipleship is endless and the pool to explore is large.

So hopefully this focus on setting us up will prove valuable for individuals’ personal reflection. But also, more follow up. Go ahead. Isaac. Well, I was going to say right along with that, I think discipleship is one of those topics that you get as many definitions as people you ask what is meant by that.

It just means so many different things to different people. And hopefully we can try to lay the groundwork so that we’re all talking about the same thing when we’re addressing discipleship in the church. I really like that. So, I think there’s a lot in store. I certainly have been blessed engaging with these brothers and others about some of what happens beneath the surface and behind the scenes with discipleship in the local church. So, here’s our objective. I’m going to go ahead and identify our objective as this.

It’s to see discipleship in the context of our churches, how it happens both knowingly and unknowingly. And that’s an important nuance. People are being discipled sometimes without us knowing it or even intentionally doing it and sometimes very much intentionally. And why it matters for good or bad, positive or negative, and that’s going to be made clearer.

And the exciting hope discipleship to Christ offers. Certainly, there is so much hope embedded in discipleship, and it’s no wonder because that was Jesus’s idea and his model in discipleship. But also, I just want to maybe point out with that first bullet here to see discipleship in the context of our churches.

Discipleship happens in many places. It happens in individual lives apart from church, it happens in the work setting, it happens in somebody’s private life, going through trials, and all kinds of things. God disciples us in a thousand ways, in lots of contexts, but tonight we are focusing in on this church environment.

And I’m almost using church here as an organization more than just the body of believers. So, we’re talking about the organizational effort of our churches that we all identify with. I go to the Bloomington Church and Isaac the Peach Tree City Church. And so, to have your local context is really healthy going into this.

Brothers, any comments on the objectives before we jump into it? Yeah, I would just share another encouragement towards everything that we share in this webinar to contextualize this within your own space because each of these organizations, as you just pointed out, Matt, is going to be slightly different. Although we have certainly commonalities and shared experiences, each of us is affected by different things, different personalities, different experiences in the church.

And yeah, all of this discipleship needs to be contextualized to our individual spaces. I think that’s helpful. Let’s start at a really important passage that we’re all familiar with. The great commission there in Matthew 28:18-19. I’ll read it aloud and then brothers, I want you, Brother John to jump in on the particular Great Commission thoughts that you have where discipleship is this commission.

It says, and Jesus came and spake unto them saying all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

The Great Commission. And Jesus calling us, again, to labor with him, recognizing he is God. As the framing all around is he is God, and he says, I am with you. So, we start with I am God, and he ends with I am with you and in between he says labor with me, go and teach and so we have this go and teach happening and in fact it’s sharing in two ways.

I’ll be interested Isaac how you would unpack this further, but we have teach all nations baptizing them, which is this teach them in this way of entry into a relationship with God. This beginning step of being baptized. A disciple of Jesus but then continuing on teaching them to know the truth of what Christ has taught.

He has taught already teach that to each other in this ongoing way. So, there’s this entry into being a disciple and then there’s this continual learning to be taught and to live into what the life of Jesus is really like. Yeah, well stated. At risk of muddying up anything that was made crystal clear right there.

I would point out that this verse 19, go ye therefore and teach all nations. There are some translations that just translate that as, go ye therefore and make disciples. That to teach is from, I think, the Greek math, it’s you owe or something like that, probably not pronounced correctly, but that is just translated.

The root word of that is disciple, which is simply Jesus’ method of getting his life into the world, right? He’s giving this commission to disciples. To go and make other people, regardless of ethnic distinction, make more people disciples. Which is really just another way of saying students of me, make people to become students of me and bring them into this reality, as John said so beautifully of this Trinitarian relationship, into communion with me, into relationship with me, and then once you’re there in that context, we teach them to do all of the things that Jesus commanded his first disciples to do.

And there’s plenty there for us to be working on throughout our lives and beyond. Yeah, so discipleship is all throughout this. It is essential that we start and end with the power of Jesus, the power of God and then based on that, we’re able to bring others to become his students and to learn to do all that he asked us to do.

I think I’ve heard you speak a little bit about teaching them to observe whatsoever I’ve commanded you. That’s such a hopeful phrase. And one that’s easy to gloss over, isn’t it? Speak a little bit more to that, Isaac. Yes, so I think sometimes this can be interpreted, perhaps teach them that they ought to do everything that I said to do.

But that’s not necessarily what Jesus is saying here. I think we get a lot of ought tos, we ought to be more loving, we ought to be more patient, more kind and all these things. But Jesus is actually commanding his disciples to teach them to do those things. Teach them how to become more loving. Teach them how to live lives of sacrifice. Teach them how to prefer their brother over themselves. Teach them how to go the second mile, et cetera. You can continue on with that.

But I really like that Isaac and my teacher background, right? I can really appreciate that. It’s a lot easier to teach a student what the right answer is. But it’s another thing, another matter, to teach them how to get the right answer. Right? I teach math. So, it’s one thing to teach a kid how to get the right answers. It’s another thing to teach them to understand how you get it right. And really that’s what you’re teasing out.

There is not only what they ought to do, but this really is a high calling, but also a super hopeful calling that this can be done. Hopefully that can be done and hopeful that even if it’s not done now that it can yet be done. So, the status of a student is a pathway of learning, right?

There’s a progression that goes on there. And I think that’s goes hand in hand with the idea of being a disciple. You’re somebody who is on this pathway of progressive learning of something, not that you just get it all at once. So, another hopeful element is growth and that is meant to happen over time.

This may be a tangent, but I just want to make sure I’m tracking. When I think of being a student, my mind goes to being a college student where I’m learning the picture and I’m going to figure out the details later. And when I hear you describe student and apprentice, I’m hearing a picture that’s closer in our experience, closer to the trades.

Where you’re learning in very practical ways an ongoing way of stepping in refining. Is that a fair expression of that? Well, I’d say great segue Matt to the next slide probably. Yeah, and Isaac, why don’t you take this slide? Yeah, use his analogy and go from it. Yeah, okay, and you brothers interject wherever but what we have is this vine image here.

We call it the ABCs of discipleship, Abide in Jesus, A, become like Jesus, B, continue his work, C, and these are just the basic elements of any apprenticeship to master relationship, any disciple to rabbi relationship, and this what Jesus had called his first disciples into is a sort of relationship where they were expected to abide in Jesus.

As we have this Scripture in John 15:5 that this is based off of, I am the vine, ye are the branches, he that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit. It’s in Mark 3, Jesus talks about him calling his disciples to him so that they might be with him. And that’s just what this first step is about.

This is and I think what John was really hitting at there was that it’s a relationship. It is a student master relationship where you are with your master all day and all night eating by his side, sleeping by his side, engaging in conversation with him. All of that with Jesus. And so that’s the abide bit.

And then from that place, we get into the B, into this becoming like Jesus. And on this graphic, the abiding bit is just where the vine of the disciple is connected to the big vine of Jesus, or the branch of the disciple is connected to the big vine of Jesus. And then become like Jesus is pointing towards the fruit that is born through this abiding relationship.

So, we’re drawing our strength, our resources from Jesus. And so, we are bearing his fruit, his character. We’re becoming like him in the innermost deep parts of us. In Luke 6, Jesus talks about discipleship. And he says a disciple is not above his master, but everyone, when he is fully trained, will be like his master.

And so, he’s just saying the basic idea of a discipleship relationship, is that a disciple learns from the master to become just as he is. So, this is our become like Jesus and then we get to the C of continuing his work. Only once we recognize that Jesus is always with us as he says in the great commission and that all authority is given to him and that he actually can make us into people who are like him, only then by his power can we continue his work. So, just as this branch is extending outward in this image, bringing its life into its surroundings. And that’s very much what the work of Jesus is, to carry on the kingdom work or what have you but extending the good of God’s kingdom into the lives of other people.

So, there’s your general progression of the ABCs of discipleship. Thank you, John. Love any comments you have on this. I think these three things are easy enough to agree with. I don’t think anybody’s disagreeing with them. And in some ways, they’re plainly simple. But yet also very thoughtful and again, we’re getting under the hood or behind the scenes of discipleship.

And so, I think it’s okay to linger here. John, what observations do you have on these ABCs that you want to point out? Yeah, well, a couple of thoughts come to mind 1 and I think it’s possibly our heritage and possibly other impacts. But sometimes I’m inclined to begin with continue his work, recognizing what we’re called to do and find the abide in Jesus and become like Jesus.

They’re soft items and we can almost slide by them. And I would say in my walk of faith, I started at continuing his work and it’s become more and more clear to me that the abiding and becoming are the basis of being able to continue. Isaac, you explained it. I could have used this clarity 40 years ago.

But there’s this natural desire that I think we all have and that is to get to the doing. And the transformation that occurs within us by being with Jesus and becoming like him is really important. So, I would say that’s one thought I would run with. There’s a related thought to me. When I hear abide and become, and again, this is just my mind, I don’t mean to project this on others but abide and become feel like things that I do in my quiet time. In various safe places and it’s happening there, and it does happen there. And I would say as part of our building blocks of faith, we start there, but abiding is about abiding with Jesus in all times.

It’s in the quiet times when we’re highly reflective, but as we’re more naturally in tune with him, we’re more equipped to abide when it’s more chaotic and more difficult to abide and maybe that connects the first thought I shared here, which is, that’s why coming back and doing these things that we might just say, yes, of course.

In fact, I think that’s how you introduced the question, Matt. Yes, of course, we should abide in Jesus and become like him. It’s something that we actually have to take time and want to take time in that we can both appreciate it and value it and then live with him. I really appreciate that. You almost described that as somewhat of a spiraling and come back to this idea of abiding in Jesus is a prerequisite. It is a but yet it is something that you come back to with more maturity and later.

And I really appreciate that. And furthermore, Brother John, this idea of continuing his work being somewhat out in front. That’s certainly been my experience too. You can think of that as a living for God life, which is exactly what I was supposed to do live for God. And yet the first one is to live with him, live like him, and then live for him and grow in all three of these aspects. Again, as I said we might not be answering your questions at the 201 level tonight on how to implement and what this looks like, but hopefully we’re going to give some things to think about to flesh out this idea of discipleship in a robust way.

I think I want you to speak to this next slide here because this next slide is how disciples are made. And I’ve got disciples in quotes here. So, we’re going to use this term very loosely. We’re disciples of a lot of things.

Certainly, we’re disciples to Christ, but we can be disciples of a political affiliation. We can be disciples of a diet plan or an exercise regimen. We have a lot of allegiances. You have helped us understand Isaac how disciples are made. Use this model to explain that. Sure. So, this is a model that’s been adapted by some others that people over the years have put together.

So, it’s derived from many people’s thoughts, but I would just give an example of my own experience if we’re talking about disciples as followers or as students or apprentices. My background is actually in music, and I started off very young being a listener and a participator in music, going through church and hymns and listening to the radio, et cetera, but eventually that interest grew, and I actually went to school to college to be a music major. And while I was in that space, I began taking on these narratives, which you see at the top of this model, driven to learn more about music. I started diving into the history of music. I started learning things about music theory. I started learning about other people who have been shaped by music composers and people who learned to express themselves through it and really dove into the narratives surrounding that particular thing.

And that started to change my interest into something greater. And then I started taking on habits in conjunction with that. So, I’d take on different habits of practicing hours and hours on end, practicing, learning new instruments, going into the practice rooms, plunking on the piano, experimenting in composition and conducting.

Okay. So, I’m embodying my interest in music and then I start to get involved at the same time with relationships with other people who share this passion with me. They share the same sort of practices that I am engaged with, who are helping me with that, giving me feedback, sharing my work with audiences.

Okay. All of these are relational activities. And then through all of those things combined and the culture that is holding them all together, you could call that my university culture or whatever school of music culture. Then over time and through those experiences, I became a musician. I become someone who has formed into the image of that thing. And so, in that way, I was a disciple of music and became someone whose intentions or whose affections, whose perspectives were all shaped by that pursuit, by that follower relationship.

And to overlay that with our previous slide, Isaac, you really abide, you lived with music, you became the type of person who did music, and then you produced it, and you contributed to music, and so you can see those ABCs in your musical discipleship.

Exactly. Yeah. And so, whatever it is, whether it’s music or something else, these are just the various elements of the things within that ideology or that interest that are at play forming our narratives, habits, and relationships. I think of another thing that might actually lead towards that coming in it from the continuing in the work of Jesus side.

This might be this achievement culture. You could plug that into the middle of this model, achievement culture, which has a narrative, something like your worth is derived by what you produce. Okay. That’s a narrative that we believe in an achievement culture. And that leads us into habits of things like overwork, perfectionism, avoiding rest and relationships at the expense of achieving status or something like that.

Our relationships become networking relationships that are meant to move us up the ladder of success or whatever, rather than a genuine interaction with somebody. And again, if we buy into that ideology, achievement culture or whatever, then over time and through the experience of that, you become formed into a certain type of person who is characterized by the values and the character of that culture.

You’ve given us two examples, one positive, one negative, and both secular. One being music and what this looks like and becoming a disciple of music and another one being a disciple of living a merited life where you have to produce something, and you’ve really shown us what that looks like and how we are produced and shaped as people. I think this is really fascinating. As I look at this, I say, oh, that’s why I think the way I think that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing because of the relationships, habits, and narratives that I’m taking in. Brother John, what are your observations?

Well, I think it applies in big, big ways and also in smaller ways. So, I’d like to share an example, which I would consider a smaller example, but it shows this trio of impacts. I’m going to focus on the bottom two more, but I’m a ping pong player and have been since my youth. So, that’s something I did and I never thought I was going to become a professional ping pong player.

So that was never a real big deal, but this idea of spending time in practice and learning. And one of the things that happened over time, I was a degree self-taught with me, my siblings, and my dad. We got exposed to others and to better training. And we learned that some of our habits were poor habits.

So, some of the things we did were poor habits. And in fact, to get to better habits, we actually became less good along the way. So, in getting our habits to where they needed to be, it actually caused a sideways trip and unless you have really good equipment to practice ping pong, you actually need somebody else.

So, relationships are critical. And I learned that I was less patient with my own wife and children who wanted to play ping pong with me, and I was not super inclined because it was an experience of me giving, and I was interested in receiving, right? So, I wanted to be refined in it. So, there was this dynamic afoot and we see this in various places as we’re engaging about being willing to be a disciple maker as well as to be formed as a disciple. So, again in a small way. I don’t want to over stretch the analogy, but I think we all encounter this in many life experiences

I think that’s just a brilliant example. And I think we can see it in lots of our lives from the things that we’re interested in, the things that we fill our time with, and the type of people we’ve become. Anything else before we move on, either John or Isaac? Let’s move on then to the next one.

We’ve been going slow, but we’re laying a foundation here on disciples. And so, we’ve taken a look at disciples at a secular level. And now let’s recognize then that the church disciples. The church also had these three components always in force. And again, we’re using the church here is not the believers. When we think of Capital C Church of Believers in all places, in all time, we’re using church here to be our local setting and organization of worship. And so that’s our context here.

But brothers, feel free to take us from the last slide now to this slide as we shift and think about what our churches are producing. Yeah, so again, interject as you like John or Matt, but walking through this model we have narratives from the culture at large behind us, popular culture, achievement culture again, or whatever consumerism would have you in the church setting is now hopefully in a healthy church setting replaced by truth and we find that particularly through God’s written Word. And the Scriptures presenting truth to us and through receiving that, whether that’s through the sermon, through other things like podcasts, other books you’re going through with other people.

In your church setting, those things are reframing our worldview. They’re shifting our paradigms away from what the world says is the way and the path to what Jesus said is the path. What he said was right and good. And then the habits that we live into down from the left corners you see on your screens the habits of practicing that align with those narratives.

Then we have practices that align with that truth. And so, these are going to be the things that as we’ve discipled ourselves to Jesus and entered into that apprentice relationship to him, we’re learning from him how to live our life. What sort of rhythms of life did Jesus have? What sort of practices did he engage with?

We start to take those on as his disciples and we start to do that in a church setting and so our church delivers that to us. It could be eating meals together. Jesus did that with his disciples. It could be that we are gathering with the faithful on a regular basis.

And so over time, those practices have an effect on us too. And again, all of that relationally based in our right corner, we have fellowship, which is a deeper reality than just our relationships. Because the fellowship is a spiritual reality of all those who have been given new life in Christ and we engage with each other all under the umbrella of the Holy Spirit now who’s working within us and between us in each other’s lives.

All of that’s happening in the context of fellowship, and so we’re formed by all of that, and fellowship can also take many different forms. We have the larger church fellowship where we gather with our Sunday crowd. Perhaps a Wednesday night crowd is another size of fellowship that has a different effect. Some people have mentor relationships within the larger church body. There’s a certain effect that comes there. All of those have a place within this church organization, this church structure, to form us into people who are more like Jesus and less like the world.

So, there’s a stab at it. Thanks, John. You know, the title here is a little provocative. The church disciples and we have disciples in quotes. I think that’s kind of an aha that I had. We can talk all about how we should do this, but we are doing it. It’s almost important to recognize we are doing this.

It’s because the church had these elements all in play, there are narratives and things being spoken out over a group of people that they collectively hear communication. There are practices. And you’re going to always have practices whenever you have two people live together, two people that bump into one another in life are going to fall into sync. So, we’re going to always have practices. And then there’s fellowship of interaction. So, what we have is the table is set for a disciple to be made. That’s the big aha. And that can be done. We might have a disciple that’s good, or we might produce something that’s maybe unsavory.

I don’t know. Brother John, do you want to speak to that? Yeah, I’m going to start optimistically on this point, this chart may be new to us in many regards, but it’s been happening for some time. And each of us on the call here has come to faith in a church that disciples and we do this better and worse and by being aware. We’re hoping it’s an opportunity to do it better over time.

But the point is the Holy Spirit has been at work in his church, in God’s church for some time and he’s been leading people to faith using the church to speak God’s Word and to let us understand reality as it truly is not in terms of the ways around us and to live important lives living in to the way of Jesus and what he did. We could take those on and encourage each other.

So, I would like to start with good things that have been happening, but I would say a lot of it is maybe unintentional, which means we can have unintentional positives. But we could also occasionally overemphasize side points, and we could value some things out of way.

I’ll just share a thought here in this picture. A picture that I got is the church as you talked about it, an organization. It can almost appear exclusively internally focused in this and self-focused. There is an important part of that internal focus, the nurturing of the believer. But there’s also this stepping outside of the church to invite others in which could get missed in the picture and we can be vulnerable to the performance culture ourselves.

And we can get into a place where our expectations about how the Spirit’s working in us and in others causes us to get distracted from living into truth and growing into who we’re called to be. That’s just a couple thoughts of places where we can kind of get distracted to the side of where we intend to be in this.

I appreciate that. And I appreciate you mentioning that this is a model, but we have in front of us a model and no models are perfect, but they can sure be helpful. And I think that’s what we have in front of us here. It’s not a perfect model, but it can be helpful. I think it’s helpful if we can kind of put some examples through it.

So, we’re like, oh yeah, I think you mentioned music. By and large, ACs are pretty musical. We understand, we can worship anytime because we’re used to an acapella worship style. So, hearing my own voice, I’ve heard my own voice as long as I can remember. And it has produced in me the type of person who is able to sing and willing to sing with another person, even if we sound bad.

I have been discipled in that way of worship for, I believe, the better, and it’s not something that anybody set out to do, I don’t think, but it was the instruction, the practice, and the fellowship, and the culture that produced that in me without knowing. Is that a good example? Yeah, I think that’s a good example of what John was bringing out about how these things happen.

Intentionally and unintentionally. And I think that’s part of the opportunity ahead of us. And we’ll always have this opportunity to examine the things, the types of people that are being produced here in our churches and did we intend that to happen or not? And if not, what’s the step forward? Well, these are all various elements of our church gatherings that we would be able to look at and say, hey, is there a way to do this in such a way that maybe counteracts a negative expression of a way that church activity is forming someone into something that is more closely connected to the picture that the New Testament gives us or Jesus himself, obviously.

Well, maybe speak to the New Testament, to the Holy Spirit’s role in all of this too, Isaac. John mentioned it and we saw it in the Great Commission as well. Again, models are helpful but never perfect. Where would we see the Holy Spirit here?

Yeah, well, if we could make it without this model getting too jumbled, I think you could just put them in as many places as you can fit the words on the screen. But yeah, I think all of these things are needed in order for them to be transformative. I think something that we’ll just have to continually come back to is that we can’t make any of this transformation into Christ likeness happen.

It’s not something that we can actually manufacture, but it’s something that, whether it comes to truth practices, fellowship relationships within the church body, all of those things have to be done in such a way that they are done meeting the grace of God through communion with his Spirit. And so, we have to leave space for the Spirit to speak the truth that we would be able to receive that truth into the deepest parts of us. And there’s deeper teaching that can go along with this, but John hinted at it earlier about how we really just probably have to slow down in a lot of ways so that we give the Spirit a chance to be present in each of these elements of our church organizational, our church structure, the practices.

My experience of our church growing up is the high emphasis on reading your Bible every day. You ought to be praying every day. These are excellent practices that Jesus and his close followers did throughout the ages. But there is a way in which you can do those practices that actually don’t transform you into a person who looks more like Jesus, someone who’s more loving, peaceful, joyful, kind, generous, self- controlled et cetera. That’s the transactional way of, well, I just got to get through my Bible in a year. That’s my schedule. And I’m just going to flip through until I do that. Not that that’s a bad thing. A lot of good can come from that. Or getting through my prayers. Okay. Lord, I got to get through them. I’ve got a lot to get to today. A lot of emails to get to and just say my morning prayer and then so I can get on with the important things of the day or whatever, right?

There’s a way in which we can do these practices that actually are more unhelpful than helpful. But if we slow down enough to allow the Spirit into those spaces, into the reading of the Scriptures, so that we’re with the Word of God, the living Word of God, as we open up the Word of God, so that when we’re in prayer, it’s in a communal, conversational sort of experience rather than a one-way need.

Not that there’s no place for any of these things, but there’s a lot to be said if the Spirit’s going to be transforming us into people who are like Jesus, which is not something we can do on our own, then it’s going to take us allowing space in all of these aspects for him to actually work.

Yeah, I really appreciate that, Isaac. And going back to tonight’s vision of discipleship in the church, we told you we’re not going to be able to answer all the questions that you submitted about how to put this in place and all of that. But hopefully you can see now we’ve given some categories and some buckets to really think about.

Thinking about the church and these three components happening, and what that looks like, and then the role of the Holy Spirit, what you just mentioned there, Isaac, so critical, and then also in producing a person who lives a with God, like God, and for God life are all very helpful. Some might ask how about this other thing and so we want to go now to some obstacles and dangers.

Some obstacles and dangers are akin to being on the right road. So, just because there are obstacles and dangers doesn’t mean necessarily, that we’re on the wrong road. It just means maybe we’re on the right road with those obstacles and dangers, and we want to be clear. I’m going to do that in my next slide, and then I’m going to open up to the brothers to speak about it. I am looking at my time. If you have a question or a comment, you can type that in at any time. We’ll pause what we’re doing and pay attention to it. So, feel free to do that if something’s on your heart here. But brothers, let’s go to some obstacles and dangers.

There’s a lot written here. Brother John, speak to any of these points here that lie on your heart as we think about obstacles and dangers on the road of discipleship. I don’t want to oversimplify, but the first several, in fact, maybe many of them speak to the busyness that we experience and the influences around us.

And I think we’ve talked about it before, but I would like to just reiterate that one as a vulnerable point to all of us, we have expectations self-applied in many cases of desiring to do good and we get busy and doing less might enable us. I was going to say in some cases, Isaac, you might come back and say, in most cases, doing less might enable us to be more in the place that we’re called to be. And we just know around us, there’s pacing things over the course of my lifetime, the work expectations that I experienced from my early career to later career went from working a full day and maybe an extended day to being connected 24/7 And the weekends disappeared, and the evenings disappeared pretty easily and it just kind of happened along the way.

So, this obstacle of busyness, I think, is a big one. So, I’d like to at least reiterate it and remind and encourage us. In saying, it’s okay to desire to be less busy, it’s actually living in to the way of Jesus. He was and made a conscious effort and patterned this taking time away. He chose to do it, being fully God and fully human, he still chose to take time away in rest. And I think he was encouraging us to do the same. To your point about relearning some ping pong skills and maybe cutting back and I think that goes well with that advice.

Isaac, share on any of the points on the screen here. I guess just along with that. It’s good to know the waters we’re swimming in, so to speak, the pressures that are around us. There has been no church that has existed outside of a time and a place. And with a culture existing behind it, and so that first obstacle there of cultural influence, I think is just so huge.

And there are other things that could be closely tied to that on this list as well. I think of distraction being one of them, just the cultural draw towards busyness and towards distraction, whether that’s digital influences and especially I think of our younger generations. If we can identify what our major barriers are towards becoming people who are more formed into the likeness of Jesus versus the likeness of the world.

If we can identify what some of those main cultural influences are and know that we have to work against those actively in order to offset the way that they’re already changing us, forming us, I think we’d be well served by that activity.

I was going to step over to the dangerous column affirming what Isaac shared earlier, but sometimes we can get into this place of thinking doing these good things and building these good habits become the most important and again, they’re supportive to help us in this and a phrase that I use is failure is a gift.

Our failure is a gift from God to realize our limitations and it’s not about our doing. Our doing is putting us in the place of supporting our communion with the Father, our walking with the Son. And so, when we come short, it reminds us of who we are when we err. And if we can be in a place of leaning in and learning from that, embracing who the Holy Spirit is and not getting miss wired thinking I did this, it’s all about me and my own my good accomplishment here.

We’re not talking about improved ping pong skills or better music here. We’re talking about being in right relationship with God. And even in this, we need to be careful that we don’t let our Bible reading plan, which is a good thing or our prayer time, which is important to become a checklist.

Rather, we want it to be what it is that we are singing. We want our singing to be worship. Not asking ourselves at the end of the song, what song did we just sing? We want the spirit to be touching us and bringing tears, hope, joy to us in song. That’s so good, John. And you’ve really called us to have a really in tune and laser focus on the likeness of Jesus, seeing all these things good to that only end.

Just like Isaac doesn’t glory much in his minor and major scales on the piano but he enjoys playing a really good piece. And so, we can sometimes get sideways, and I really appreciate that mention of dangers. Isaac, would you mind speaking about the expectation of full participation? I’m guessing people probably don’t understand what is meant by that second to the bottom there on obstacles.

Sure, so you know, Jesus didn’t seem to really concern himself so much with outcomes. If you were to look at the group he brought along with him, by the time he left, they weren’t in such great shape. And not everybody was yet on board. And I think sometimes when we’re going to engage in discipleship or look at reframing our church practices or all these different elements of discipleship in the church, we shouldn’t be expecting that it’s an all or nothing approach, either. Everyone’s just going to be gung-ho about this. And off we go. Then we probably won’t go anywhere. But if we can be okay with just really starting small even in terms of the kind of people who are getting behind this vision, that’s okay.

We can let it be a bit of leaven hidden in the lump of dough and just let that begin to work itself into the larger whole. So, that I think is an obstacle. That main thing is probably related to an achievement culture focus. We want everything to be at full speed ahead. Everyone’s got to get it, and it is full participation and everyone’s getting affected and all this, whatever. I think we should just be aware of that tendency to think that way. And to know that oftentimes it doesn’t look like that always in God’s kingdom. That’s helpful.

That’s helpful. We have three minutes to the bottom of the hour. I want to be respectful of time. If anybody has a chat in question, feel free to chat it in or even un mic yourself and feel free to offer that. Either one, John or Isaac, any other thoughts that you want to share on this idea of obstacles and dangers?

I would share the danger in going alone and the value of the church as discerning together, walking together, serving together as a help as we serve. We’re talking here about our hearts being transformed. That’s an individual thing, but this being willing to help each other, and this is not about full participation.

But this willingness to engage with each other and to be helped and to be a helper. Well, John, I appreciate that too, because I think if I reflect on my own discipleship, I think we all have a context of individual discipleship. Well, this is what I do, and this is what I’ve done, but really to expand that, to see this as a collective endeavor.

Jesus did it in a group and he’s going to ask us to do it as well. Again, this pushes us and helps us with vision, which is exactly what we’re talking about. Looks like we do have a comment. Someone was thankful, so I appreciate that. Well, we are towards the end here. We don’t want to leave on obstacles and dangers. Those are the ditches that would be keeping our eyes where they need to be. So, as we think about the ABCs, it is a beautiful vision as we think about the context of our churches and discipleship in this space.

Isaac, John, any last thoughts? Parting comments here.

Yeah, I just really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation for one and know that it will be a continual conversation amongst all of us. And no one has the corner on discipleship. No one has it. No one is a real expert in it. We’re all just participants in it. Under Jesus. So, yeah, thankful for this opportunity and just reiterate again, the importance of all of this being done in community. I just think of the most important, impactful changes in my life on a real deep level, like a character, will, heart level in me have been done in the closest most intimate relationships I have with other people.

And I think that that seems by design. And so, all of these things are in that context, relationally based, I think. Appreciate that, Isaac. Thanks to both of you. John, thanks for being on. Isaac, thanks for being on. We’ve got a beautiful hope that we could become more Christ like. That’s so exciting, isn’t it?

And this will conclude our time together. Thank you. We’re at the bottom of the hour. Appreciate everyone for being on again. This has been recorded and there will be some webinars in 2025. Those are being arranged and you’ll hear more about that in the coming days. Thanks, each one. Have a good evenin