Four Moments in Four Days

Sunday mornings are a lot different from how they used to be. I have a lot more time for reflection these days. In the quiet hours, while the kids were still asleep, I had a chance to consider the last four days and what they were.

On Wednesday, I flew into Omaha. Thursday, I flew home. This morning, while the sun was up but before the kids were, I drove out to Liberty Hill to see a friend teach a class on discipleship. And not too long ago, I was at The Austin Stone Community Church for the final Sunday of a series on what discipleship is for a church I served for eighteen years.

And in the middle of those days, while I was sitting in Olivia’s aunt and uncle’s guest room doing last-minute preparation for my talk in Omaha, a podcast was released about a woman my wife and I had once helped disciple. I finished listening this morning.

Four days. Four moments. One thread: Discipleship.

Four days ago, I stood in a room in Omaha and taught this verse for an hour:

Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

~Matthew 4:19

This simple little verse has three little movements with a ton of depth. It’s an invitation to a relationship. A promise of transformation. And a call to mission. Jesus says it to a few working men standing by a lake, and it is the whole shape of discipleship in one sentence.

24 Hours in Omaha

I was invited to speak at a regional gathering of pastors for The Gospel Coalition in Omaha. The trip was so fast. Fly in Wednesday, teach, fly home Thursday. I often wonder about scenarios like this, if it’s something God is pleased with. But two days before the trip, I was on an unrelated call, and one of the men on the line turned out to be a pastor who had served in Omaha for many years. He prayed for me without my asking and encouraged me to be bold. I did not expect it, and it seemed like a providential nod from the Lord.

I was also pretty nervous heading in. For the last couple of years, I have been in the background of other people’s ministries, cultivating leaders and building something new at the Greater Austin Mission Society, not standing in front with the microphone. I was honest with a good friend who happened to be at the gathering about my nerves before, and he prayed for me to be full of the Spirit, and that prayer was answered!

The talk was about whether our churches are actually making disciples and whether the communities we have built are designed to produce the results we hope for. I keep coming back to a line from Alan Hirsch that has lived in my head for years. You are perfectly designed to reproduce the results you are currently getting. I walked through the data on Austin, a city that went from an almost-majority-Christian metro to an almost-majority-non-Christian one in roughly 12 years. And all that while everyone I knew was working hard to make disciples and multiply leaders. I tried to be honest about the effect that had on me, and tied it to likely trends in Omaha.

I then taught a simple exercise called “Who is the missionary?” After it, I asked the question that always lands prophetically in a room of pastors. When we invite our not-yet-believing friends into our churches and Christian communities and ask them to adjust their location, schedule, language, and social habits to match ours, who is the missionary in that scenario? Our lost friends are. We so often ask them to be more like Jesus than we are willing to be. It had the intended effect.

After a great question-and-answer session and a long chat with a small group of leaders, I boarded the plane home on Thursday with that strange feeling of having entered a time warp. I had just spent a day and a half in a place and challenged the fundamental assumptions that many leaders don’t or won’t consider about discipleship. And now I was flying back to my own house in a different context, but with the same struggles and disappointment many of them have.

A Podcast and Someone Else’s Story

Friday morning, the podcast was released. I am not going to name the woman or the podcast here.

For context, years ago, Olivia and I invested in a young couple who eventually went overseas to serve the church. We didn’t just walk with them in discipleship. For more than a decade, we bore some of the weight of their lives in prayer and responded with care as needed and desired, even though they were half a world away. We connected with their ministry partners, I visited them overseas, and had them in our home when they were stateside. They received our care, our accountability, our counsel, and we made sacrifices in our own family that I will not lay out in detail here. We loved them faithfully and long-sufferingly.

Much later than any of us would have wanted, we discovered the marriage had abusive patterns, verbally and emotionally. I was involved in the intervention and in the long season that followed. She suffered real harm inside that marriage, and I will not minimize that. And there is assuredly more I could have done, as there always was in the role that I played.

In the years since, she has also sadly walked away from faith in Jesus. In the podcast, the story of her suffering is told in her words, with her frame around it. There are specific claims in her telling that I genuinely disagree with, and I am going to leave that for a conversation with her if it ever comes to pass. It would not be kind to her, or useful to anyone reading this, for me to spend a thousand words arguing with a story that is hers to tell.

What I will say is this. I listened to the whole thing and finished this morning. I grieved while I listened, and I am grieving with sadness and anger while I write. Some of that grief is for the harm she endured inside the marriage. Some of it is for her and her children. Some is for what those experiences contributed to her beliefs about God, the church, and the gospel.

And some of it is for what happens in any of us when the categories of Scripture subtly get replaced by the categories of the moment in the world. Sin becomes a word no one can speak. Repentance becomes a door people aren’t looking for. Involuntary (and voluntary) suffering is read through only the lens of oppression and harm. Pastoral encouragement and rebuke create an unsafe environment. And the old claim that caring for image bearers is somehow incongruent and more important than caring about eternal souls, as if they could somehow be separated.

None of that is written to minimize what she lived through. I refuse to do that. What I will not do is pretend the world is not also a discipler. The world catechizes relentlessly. Its curriculum runs twenty-four hours a day. It does not require anyone to gather. And when a discipleship rooted in the Word and the Spirit through the people of God loses its grip on sin, suffering, and repentance, another discipleship with other categories is crouching at the door. And sometimes that deceitful scheme wins.

I grieve because I invested in her. I grieve because she followed Jesus for a long time, and she fought hard. And I grieve because now she is preaching another gospel, and others are heartily approving it. And I grieve because it’s not the first time I’ve seen this play out.

I do not know the end of her story. Neither does she. The God who called her once has not stopped loving her. Olivia and I have not stopped praying for her. And the tent of his mercy has not folded up. But it’s sad and scary to see where she is now… read Hebrews 6:4-6 if you don’t believe me.

Liberty Hill Discipleship Training

And this morning, I drove out to Liberty Hill to see my friend Shawn. He ran a successful business as an entrepreneur for a long time. He’s been a friend who’s always been there when I need and also always asked me really good and deep questions about life and faith.

About seven months ago, the Lord began rearranging his life, and he stepped somewhat out of the business and into vocational ministry at another church here in the Austin area. I have watched him move from a young, zealous man a long time ago to now, standing in front of a room full of people with a (digital) Bible open on a stool beside him, training on discipleship. He is honest, clear, and hungry to see people meet Jesus. It is contagious and made me rejoice in God’s redemptive arc in his life.

At one point in his teaching, he walked through a tool called BLESS. Begin in prayer. Listen. Eat with people. Serve. Share your story. A simple frame for putting discipleship into the hands of ordinary people who live in ordinary neighborhoods. I first learned BLESS from a man in Chicago more than fifteen years ago, a faithful, prolific discipler who has probably trained more leaders than I will meet in my lifetime. I have thought about that tool plenty over the years, and I still use it.

Watching Shawn teach it this morning was something so different than that podcast episode. I could see the chain of discipleship in real time, hand to hand to hand, through people I know and people I don’t.

The room included single construction workers, young moms, families with teenage kids, and a couple of retirees. And I felt the kind of joy you feel when you see something beautiful handed forward from one set of hands to another. The man in Chicago gave it to me. I shared it with others. Someone shared it with Shawn. Shawn is giving it away now. The tool is not the point. The point is that Jesus keeps raising up people and putting the work of making disciples into their actual hands.

What I loved most was what the church is doing around Shawn’s class. They are treating discipleship as something the people of the church do in their everyday lives, not something the church delivers from a stage. They are trusting their members. They are handing out simple, reproducible tools. They are saying, by their design, that an ordinary believer with a Bible and the Spirit and a neighbor can be used by God to make a disciple, both in the church and in the harvest.

I drove out of there with a lump in my throat. It was the kind of joy that makes the next thing harder to sit through.

Simple Discipleship at The Stone

A few hours later, I was at The Austin Stone, where I served for eighteen years. I love this church. My family worships there. My friends are pastors there. And it’s a community of people trying to be faithful to Scripture in a city that has shifted under their feet.

Today was the final Sunday of a two-week series called Simple Discipleship. Following Easter, the church has been walking through a definition and a strategy. The definition: a disciple is a follower of Jesus, obeying what He teaches, loving what He loves, going where He leads, and enjoying the life He offers. The strategy: Gather, Grow, Give, Go.

There is nothing wrong with that definition. I can say amen to all of it. But the delivery of the vision was anything but simple. It was really confusing to know what we could do. It’s unclear how all this makes sense in our everyday lives. There were some vague references and timeframes. And there’s a lot of renaming and redefining with little to no relationship or training opportunities.

What is harder for me is the shift underneath the language. For a long time at The Stone, we worked from a definition I helped write. Meeting people where they are and taking Jesus where he wants them to go. The vehicle we built was a missional community. The processes we built were meant to align with that definition. The posture we taught was that the primary disciplers in the life of the church were not the staff but the partners (what we called members), living in the everyday. And the mission of demonstrating the kingdom and declaring the gospel was theirs in neighborhoods, networks, offices, and soccer sidelines. The church existed to equip the members to do the work.

What I hear today is a quieter shift toward strategies and structures that carry more of the weight. The church will disciple you. Through Gather, through Grow, through Give, through Go, we will help. That is a cleaner offer, and it is probably easier to communicate from a stage to a tired, distracted congregation. And I understand why leaders I love are moving in that direction.

Honestly, it is a little sad and a little strange to watch. It’s a loss for me personally, as I still believe in the efficacy of the missional community strategy, and it’s only more important and relevant now. I spent eighteen years helping build the previous model, and I am proud of the work we did.

The fruit of those years is real, and it is wide. Marriages were rebuilt, and neighbors met Jesus. Missionaries were sent to the nations. Some returned. Leaders were formed who are now planting and pastoring across the country. Some have fallen away.

What God did over the years vastly outweighs the places where I got it wrong. This is not a critique from someone disappointed after departing from his kingdom assignment, although a tinge of that is there. This is a reflection from someone who loves the church, who helped put one model in place, and who is watching a new season emerge in our city, and asking, “Who will step into the harvest fields that are ripe?”

The question underneath the shift for The Stone is not a small one for me. Do we trust the members to be the primary disciplers, or is the church taking more of that work back into its own structures? I know our leadership believes in the priesthood of all believers, but the implementation of strategies and structures suggests something different to me. Alliterative statements and new definitions are no replacement for rolling up your sleeves and equipping saints for real discipleship in everyday life. And that’s been in short supply.

In all that, I sat in the service and worshipped with my family. I will keep praying for the men preaching and leading, and I trust the Lord with a church that is not mine to steer. And that’s a strange spot to be.

What Doesn’t Change

Four days. Four moments. Four different witnesses about discipleship.

Omaha, where I asked a room full of pastors whether their systems are designed for the results they actually want. A woman from my past, whose suffering is real and whose discipleship by the world has moved her to a place I grieve. Shawn, in Liberty Hill, teaching a tool I first learned in Chicago, to a room of ordinary saints who are about to be sent. And The Stone, redefining discipleship for a congregation and people I love deeply.

People change. Churches change. Definitions change. Strategies change. The city I live in has changed. The city you live in is probably changing. I have changed. Shawn has changed. My friend has changed. The Stone is changing.

But the gospel of Jesus Christ does not change. The character of God does not change. And discipleship, though the terms will always shift, stays shockingly the same. The Word of God. The Spirit of God. The People of God. The Mission of God.

Those four ingredients make up how the church has always made disciples. Omaha has them. Liberty Hill has them. The Stone has them. My missional community (or I guess now DComm) has them. My friend had them once, and by God’s mercy may have them again, even if Hebrews 6 seems to suggest otherwise.

What is Discipleship?

Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

~Matthew 4:19

Follow me. An invitation into a relationship with Jesus, who moved toward us before we could move toward him.

I will make you. A promise of transformation, because the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is patient and is not finished with any of us.

Fishers of men. A call to mission with the people of God in the world. God is still moving in Omaha, Liberty Hill, Austin, and the neighborhood where you are sitting right now.

The terms will keep shifting. The vehicles will keep changing. The cities will keep drifting. I will keep getting it wrong in ways I do not see yet. And Jesus will keep saying the same three things to the same kinds of people, and somehow, by grace, a few of us will keep following him.