Last week my blog post referenced the Iowa United Methodist School for Ministry event and some of my thoughts about two of the speakers, their comments on acts of service and small group discipleship, and how those relate – or often don’t relate – to our understanding of Church and worship.
On her blog “Salvaged Faith”, Katie Z. writes this week about “making members, making disciples”. Katie’s ponderings about how and where we often define discipleship happening is well worth taking a look at. You can follow Katie's blog at (http://salvagedfaith.blogspot.com/.
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Katie -
ReplyDeleteYou rock! Thank you for your ongoing stream of thoughts and struggles.
If I recall correctly, you posted some information about a recent survey of United Methodists and discipleship--something like only 9% of UMCers actually desire deep discipleship. I may be wrong, so please correct me.
At the school for ministry, I appreciate the discussion around discipleship and its relation church membership. My greatest struggle, though, is that the guy from GBOD kept referring to the church model around the 500s. I appreciate the history of three years of learning before baptism and membership, but what are we to do with scripture that describes entire households being baptized or a eunich who is baptized in a puddle?
I think that is why I personally am leaning more towards a model where we just realize there are believers and there are disciples in our congregations. I think as a pastor, my job is to get lots of those believers into the body of Christ AND equip the disciples. And then the disciples can be the equipper of the others in the congregation.
ReplyDeleteThose statistics I posted are from a blog that Taylor B-E pointed me to: Do United Methodists want to BE disciplesWhat I found most telling is that there is only that small percent of people who really desire deep discipleship, but very few of them believe the church actually helps them to undertake it. If the church really focused on making disciples and if lives were transformed, I think it would be contagious. But we are so focused on making members that we have forgotten about our higher calling.
I'm living in the tension of both/and... we need to both baptize every person who comes into our midst desiring a relationship with God in Christ (like the grandbaby of someone in my congregation that I'm baptizing this week... kind of like the "hit and run" baptism of the eunich), helping them to become believers AND help those who want to go deeper, do so.
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