Is There Discipline in Our Discipleship?
NRSV
Jesus “called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it’ ” (Mk 8:34–35).
Even if you are an athlete, the term “discipline” may not invoke warm and fuzzy feelings of excitement. Yet, discipline is necessary even though it may not be welcomed. So where is the discipline in our discipleship? What routine practices nurtures your heart, informs your understandings, or sets your hands to the work of God? Disciplines of religious faith are necessary for personifying the life and legacy of Jesus. Religious communities must embody activities that shape their attitudes and practices for traveling the cruciform path of our savior. In the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ, the preacher must decide if, when, and how often to implore listeners to the demands of discipline in their Christian discipleship. She or he will be needed to serve as the congregational coach to nurture life together with God.
Discipline and Discipleship
Discipline is drudgery for many of us. The term conjures in us a sense of toil that is akin to the consequences of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience in the garden of Eden (Gen 3:14). The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a disciple as “one who accepts and assists in spreading the doctrines of another; a convinced adherent of a school or individual.” The biblical heritage of the term “disciple” is more straightforward than circuitous. Derived from the Latin term, discipulus, it refers to “pupil, student, follower.” Related ideas include, “to learn,” “to take,” or “to accept.”
Discipleship refers to a process or set of processes for transforming non-adherents into students, followers, and apprentices of a leader. Discipleship suggests a relationship between a “disciple” and “discipline. Discipline is a necessary, though not the only important, task in the life of a disciple. The teachings of Jesus and the writings of Christian leaders make clear the connections between discipline and discipleship.
While each author of the Gospels presents a unique portrayal of Jesus, they all tie Jesus’ character and commitments to the roles and responsibilities of followers.1 In Mark’s account, Jesus displays a perplexed and puzzling persona. Repeatedly, Jesus calls people to become his followers, but he forbids them to discuss their views of his identity and the means by which God’s purposes will be achieved. Mark’s testimony is that for Jesus to save others, he must first suffer and sacrifice his life. According to Mark, the disciples and the crowds misunderstand the savior. They will reject him. They will abandon their leader2 (Mk 8:31–33).
As goes the leader, so too go the followers. The role of the leader is linked to the life of the followers. Jesus invites the crowd to join the disciples in a life of self-denial and sacrifice. Discipleship demands discipline. Following Jesus is not limited to the first followers; it is for all who desire to be in relationship with Jesus.3
Following Jesus requires disciples to take up disciplines that reorient their lives to the strange strategies of success by sacrifice and the way of the cross for the victory crown. Commitment to follow Jesus’ way to life and life eternal must be nurtured in everyday practices of right and faithful actions, frequently reenacted. Like athletes who must push pass the pain to condition their bodies for victory, so too is it necessary for Jesus’ followers to take up actions and behaviors that form and inform them into the likeness of Christ. Disciplines of religious faith are necessary for following Jesus.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, unequivocally connects the chord of discipline to the life of Christ’s disciples. In his opening discussion on grace and discipleship, Bonhoeffer writes: “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”4 He continues:
“Costly grace is the sanctuary of God.
… Grace is costly because it compels a man (sic) to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him, it is grace because Jesus says: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”5
The yoke of Christ–discipline–is unnatural, but it’s not burdensome. Christian disciples are apprentices who embody activities that shape their attitudes and conform their practices to the ways of Christ.
I contend that the ways we learn, nurture, and develop our Christian character and commitments are too detached from the contexts where the application of insights and fulfillment of promises are required. Religious laboratories for learning, such as the pew and the classroom are richly encoded with words, symbols, and artifacts that nourish and enrich our sensibilities. In these settings the community’s culture and ethos feed our hunger and empower us to remember ancestors of our faith and recall our religious heritage and hopes. But the fields of life where we are called on to apply religious sensibilities and appropriate Christian identities are often contexts depleted of the symbols and void of the meaning structures that provide references for our religious language and actions.
Foreign, differentiated circumstances too often challenge appropriations of religious insights beyond the immediate preaching-teaching context. Christian discipleship requires the embedding of religious disciplines within us. Discipline provides contexts–actual and simulated –where forming and informing, nurturing and encouraging Christian character and commitment are referenced. Disciplines help us to discern God’s presence and the unfolding of God’s promises as embodied in the life of Jesus Christ in everyday situations. Religious disciplines mediate within us habits of heart, mind, and body that permit us to carry the attitudes and actions, beliefs and behaviors that express the love and truth of Jesus across boundaries.
Discipline as Knowledge-in-activity Learning
Discipleship is socially situated activity.6 Disciplines embed knowledge-in-activity. They foster our ability to share Jesus’ identity across circumstances. Context in learning and development is important. Learning is initially situated in particular contexts. Learning and discipleship involve an implicit interaction between what is learned – knowledge – and the context in which learning occurs — the situation or circumstance. Interaction among learners, learning processes, and the situation in which learning takes place is dialectical. Religious disciplines, the appropriation of knowledge-in-activity, make it possible to extend knowledge beyond the initial learning environment.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to follow Jesus, to be his disciple, without accepting, embracing, and embodying disciplines for Christian formation. Situated learning activities:, disciplines, are contexts for taking up the heart and habits of Jesus. In the gospel according toMatthew, Jesus taught about the disciplines of almsgiving, prayer, and fasting (Matthew 6:1–18). The contemporary spiritual teacher Richard Foster (1978) in Celebration of Discipline, presents twelve disciplines organized in three categories, “Inward Disciplines,” “Outward Disciplines,” and “Corporate Disciplines.”
In his writings, Henri J. M. Nouwen groups many of Foster’s practices under three broad categories of discipline for providing spiritual direction to followers of Christ. They are: (1) the discipline of the Heart; (2) the discipline of the Book; and (3) the discipline of the Church or Community of Faith.7 The aim of these practices is to create space for God’s presence within our lives and relationships. Disciplines of religious faith are means by which we acquire the skill and habit of binding our lives to the legacy of Jesus. Such practices help to overcome the distance between what we hear proclaimed and our situational application of that message.
Preacher as Coach for Encouraging Discipline for Discipleship
What implications might these insights have for preaching? Craig Brian Larson compares the work of coaches and preachers in an article, “What Great Coaches and Preachers Know.”8 Larson suggests that preaching, like coaching, is about training, which here I equate with discipline. For effective development of disciples it is important to “develop the fundamentals.” Preaching that attends to the practice of disciplines for the making of disciples requires framing sermons positively to point out “what is right,” and where signs of faithful witness exist. At other times, preaching for developing Christ’s followers recognizes those occasions when attention must be given to the negatives. The preacher must identify what is wrong, when, where, and from what disciples are to cease and desist.9
Two suggestions are offered for mediating, encouraging, and facilitating the use of disciplines for discipleship through preaching. First, preaching demonstrates the value of mindfulness through the use of “thick descriptions” in the delivery of the message. Sociologists describe “thick description” in terms of “capturing the meanings and experiences that have occurred … (Thick description) reports meanings, intentions, history, biography, and relevant relational, interactional, and situational processes in a rich, dense, detailed manner.”10 In some preaching circles this is referred to as “painting the picture.” Thick description saturates the mind with details that enrich, encode, and clothe the mind with images, signs, and symbols that later serve as references in other, foreign, or dissimilar settings.
Mindfulness is a spiritual discipline. The use of thick descriptions in preaching displays to hearers the importance of attending to the details. We say “the devil is in the details.” So, too, is God! Jesus regularly admonished the disciples to “watch,” “stay alert,” and “be aware.” Attention is a critical discipline of revelatory faith as disciples seek to perceive the presence and actions of God.
Second, preaching that affirms the importance of disciplines for discipleship, promotes followers to be creative and imaginative in their responses to the gospel. Discipleship and the disciplines that form and inform it cannot be a uniformed or homogeneous process if either is to generate authentic responses to a loving and creative Creator. Responding to the proclamation of the good news requires followers of Jesus to cultivate a religious imagination as a discipline for discipleship. Imagination is the human capacity to cross boundaries, and to transcend time and space.
Cultivating a religious imagination is a strong example of how knowledge-in-activity has the ability to appropriate insights and understandings across contexts. Nurturing a religious imagination permits learners to transport the heroes and heroines, signs, symbols, and stories of the faith from the worship center to the fields of witness and service. Negatively framing this discipline might warn hearers against judgments that limit what a faithful expression of discipleship “ought” be. Positively, the preacher encourages acts of witness that have yet to be imagined.
Preaching that communicates the need for Christians to return discipline to our discipleship in response to the gospel recognizes the value of both praise and admonishment as instruments of discipline for enriching our life with God and enhancing our relationship with our leader, Jesus Christ guided by the Spirit.
Notes
1. Culpepper, R. Alan “The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” The New Interpreter’s Bible. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 3–4.
2. Ibid.
3. Lane, William L. The New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Gospel of Mark (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1974), 306.
4. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, The Cost of Discipleship. (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1959), 47.
5. Ibid. 47–48.
6. Lave, Jean, “Introduction,” in Understanding Practice. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, Editors, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996) 3–32
7. Nouwen, Henri J. M. Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith. (San Francisco: Harper, 2006).
8.Larson, Craig Brian, “What Great Coaches–And Preachers –Know: How to use positive and negative elements with purpose.” The Art & Craft of Biblical Preaching, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 255–259.
9. Ibid., p. 256.
10. Denzin, Norman K., Interpretive Interactionism. (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, Inc., 1989), 144.
