Disciples of Who?
This morning I spent a couple of hours in conversation with our pastoral team about discipleship. Clear discipleship is crucial for us to live out our local church mission of creating a community devoted to living out Christ-likeness.
Perhaps one of the hardest leadership components of pastoring is leading the church community toward embracing a biblical pattern of spiritual discipleship. We (the Church) have become so ingrained in institutional growth models (focused on organizational growth rather than interpersonal or corporate spiritual formation) that we often struggle to embrace the accountability of discipleship that happens best in the context of the community.
Our human tendencies lead us to flee from inter-relational discord or conflict that often comes from being in community with one another and instead of benefiting from the formation in these relationships, we run away and stay in our self-centered felt needs. And within the organization, we also tend to resist sacrificial and servant-living because of the desire to be recognized by others as being successful (large crowds, bigger buildings, brand-name recognition, etc….).
This morning I was sent a link to this interview of Dallas Willard entitled How Do we Assess Spiritual Growth? In this interview he was asked, “How can churches know if they are being effective at making disciples?”
His response:
Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.
I love his response. And this shift of attention in what we measure should influence how we look for leaders and disciple-makers, we ought to be looking for those who exude the attitudes of Christ (humility, kindness, love, desire to serve…), rather than just those who meet the requirements for involvement.
This focus on measuring the wrong aspects of faith has led us into the spiritual and relational poverty within our individualistic culture of today. It breeds a lack the biblical understanding of God’s vision for the faith-community and God’s ultimate purposes for His Kingdom.
At the end of the interview Willard is asked, “What can pastors do to change this dynamic?”
Change their definition of success. They need to have a vision of success rooted in spiritual terms, determined by the vitality of a pastor’s own spiritual life and his capacity to pass that on to others.
When pastors don’t have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success—models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture. They begin to think their job is managing a set of ministry activities and success is about getting more people to engage those activities. Pastors, and those they lead, need to be set free from that belief.
Great thoughts from Mr. Willard.
