PULL UP A CHAIR: Stories on Discipleship

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the fourth week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

Tommy White is the Lead Campus Minister for Impact Campus Ministries in Salt Lake City, UT. He works with students at the University of Utah, Westminster, Salt Lake Community College, and others. One of his favorite things is working with the Utes basketball team as chaplain. Tommy has had a great time building on his efforts in discipleship; since that was our topic from last week's post, I asked him to share some stories for our Pull Up a Chair series. 

Entering this last semester, I was praying for any opportunities to help a male student in pursuing God in a more personal way. I didn’t want to throw it our there for the masses, nor did I want to manipulate a student into saying “yes” when he maybe didn’t really want to. Sometime in September, within the same week, two guys showed interest in going deeper and so I challenged them with a vision for just that. A couple weeks later, another student wanted to take his relationship with Jesus to a deeper level.

The first student, Errol, is a junior at the University of Utah. I met him two years ago and have spent many coffees and lunches since then talking about spiritual things. He was a ballet major, then switched to a metallurgy major. He’s super smart and very scientific (as is his girlfriend). While a very deep thinker, there was a lot of room for him to grow in spending “alone time” pursuing God. We’ve met on campus and at a coffee shop twice a week for almost two months. (I also see him two or three other times a week, so we are super connected.)

As I did with the other two guys, at the outset, I explained

1. there are many tools for pursuing God.
2. this isn’t about being good enough, but about learning to love God intentionally.
3. I am going to model for you some different ways to connect with God.
4. this is about a personal relationship, so in all we do individually, we want to make it a conversation with God, not about God.
5. this modeling might feel weird at first, but that’s how we learn, by someone showing us how to do something.
6. God is Spirit, so we need to train ourselves to connect with Him “in spirit,” which is hard to do.

With Errol, I’ve modeled for him (by sitting next to him or walking with him) how to journal your thoughts, intercessory prayer, Scripture memory, Scripture typing, solitude, and personal worship. I’ve in no way mastered these, nor am I consistent, but I am pursuing God and moving forward, and I believe my disciple sees that.

Luke, the second disciple, is a senior at Westminster College. We meet on Wednesday afternoons. His schedule is intense and overly full already, so we didn’t try to add anymore to his plate for the time being. One seemed hard enough for Luke. (I also guarded my day off, which played into why we had a hard time making a second day work. This semester, I think we should make a better effort at getting a second day down.) We met inside the cafeteria as well as outside in the courtyard. With Luke, we get sidetracked sometimes and talk about relationships or some other important topic that is on his mind. This discipleship relationship is more flexible, though we cover most of the same disciplines as with Errol.

Tyson, the last guy, is an electronic music student at a local engineering school. I meet with Tyson on Mondays at 6 am. Our time started out more rushed, so we talked about that and tried to make more time. We met some in the afternoons, but it seemed our time wasn’t as consistent. With Tyson, we covered most of the same disciplines.

With each of these guys, my intention was to pursue God through modeling disciplines. As you read above, it didn’t always happen that way. This next semester, I will be more vigilant in sticking to the plan. There are plenty of other times we meet and can talk there. I want to focus on why we’re meeting for these one-on-one-times.

We had a final pizza get together in mid-December where the guys discovered who the other two are. It was one of the best times I’ve had. We talked about our memory verses, what we appreciated about the format, and what we learned. By far, the most common feedback from those three guys was that typing made the difference. Whether it was prayer, journal thoughts, or typing the Word of God, all three said typing made it so personal and helped clarify their thoughts and organize what was floating around in their heads. I was really pumped that they were that impacted! Each of them also tried to strengthen their own personal times throughout the week.

One distraction, at times, was noise or activity around our meeting together. Sometimes it didn’t seem to make a difference, but other times, other people’s conversations got in the way. That’s something to consider for the future.

Finally, this adventure showed me that I have a long way to go in being consistent in my pursuit.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Discipleship

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the third week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

For Impact Campus Ministries, we are trying to grow in the concept of “starting with the why.” It’s a concept that comes from an old TED Talk by Simon Sinek. For us, we think the compelling reason for doing campus ministry is a foundational belief that if you impact the university, you impact the world. While we don’t think Jesus envisioned the American university campus specifically when he uttered the Great Commission, we do believe the idea of making disciples was one of Jesus’s “whys.”

Taking this idea, we believe that making disciples who make disciples is our purpose on the college campus. This isn’t ground-breaking rhetoric in the church world. It seems that everyone in the last twenty years has shifted towards an emphasis in disciple-making. Discipleship has become a buzzword in ministry. We use it so much that at times it seems to be nothing at all. This reality raises a question: When we talk about discipleship, what exactly are we talking about, and what do we mean?

This is certainly not a quest to find the “correct” definition of discipleship. Not only would that be an effort in futility, it would dishonor so many of the good things that happen in all kinds of ministry contexts. There are a lot of semantics at play in the conversation of discipleship. A lot of things have changed in the last 2,000 years; words take on new or expanded meanings.

When we sat down to define the term discipleship as a staff a couple years ago, the conversation ended up being rooted in a more historical understanding of what discipleship was to the people in Jesus’s day. In their day, being a talmid (Hebrew for “disciple”) was a level of the rabbinic process that very few people attained. Those who progressed to that part of Jewish education would be selected to “follow a rabbi” as his student, pupil, and apprentice. You would follow a rabbi and listen to his every word, but you would also mimic his every move. The goal was to “know what the rabbi knows, in order to do what the rabbi does [for the reasons the rabbi does them], in order to be just like the rabbi in his walk with God.” I wrote about these ideas a few years ago and unpacked a story where the principles are seen applied in a two-part post (here and here).

At the end of the day, we wanted our ideas on discipleship to be driven by our best understanding of what Jesus understood and meant when he said discipleship. And while our context is not the same today as it was so long ago, we still believe we can base the process on some of the same big ideas. On that day, we decided to say a disciple is someone who is submitted to Jesus and becoming like Him.

But how does one become like Jesus? To these ends, we wanted to define discipleship in a way that would mirror the ideas driving Jesus’s ministry. We defined it as follows:

Discipleship is imitating a mentor who imitates Jesus.

This means we need to be entering into intentional relationships where this can happen. For many of us, discipleship is often the equivalent to a one-hour coffee meeting on Thursday mornings. We realized that we would have to expand our understanding of what discipleship is. A one-hour coffee involves very little meaningful mentorship — and hardly any mimicry or imitation. If this was really going to happen, it would require a few things.

First and foremost, it would require that I imitate Jesus (and possibly even imitate my own mentors who are imitating Jesus). Second, it would mean “living life together” (just like the disciples and Jesus!) and not simply creating ministry programs; this focus would require significantly more time and resources to be done correctly. Finally, this is not something that comes easily; we have to pursue these efforts with a different kind of intentionality.

Thankfully, ICM had already been fertilizing great soil for this growth. For years, ICM believed we exist to pursue, model, and teach intimacy with God. Isn’t this a formula (and I use that term very, very loosely) for the kind of imitation we were discussing? It would seem that we weren't really breaking new ground at all, but simply expanding our awareness of how far our mission truly goes.

A DAY IN THE LIFE: Administration

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (in the second week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

Administration. It’s probably not the most inspiring part of my job, and maybe it’s an odd choice for where to start for this series. But honestly, if you were to ask me what I do every day, I feel like my (slightly cynical) response would be, “I answer emails and create agendas — all day.”

That’s certainly not accurate, but it can feel like it. The never-ending tide of responsibilities that come from managing a national non-profit with over 20 staff can be overwhelming. What I do love is that all of this administration fuels such awesome work; the long-term benefits from our investments are worth the administrative slog and all of the meetings.

A large part of my job in the administrative department is casting vision and guiding the organization down the path God has for us. This means I am the one who is tasked with creating many (but not all) of the agendas for those behind-the-scenes leadership discussions. I spend on average 4–6 hours a week on agenda creation and another 3–4 hours a week in the meetings themselves. Quick math tells you that this portion of my job alone accounts for almost a quarter of my work week.

Like anyone else, I have those typical administrative tasks: answering email and submitting expense reports. I also have seasonal demands like budgets, annual reports, and staff conferences; each of these seasonal events has their own set of administrative responsibilities. None of this touches the basic ministry administration of working with my students: planning our activities, promoting for attendance, scheduling and communicating the plans, deadlines, and involvement needed.

I have often heard people comment about how everyone wants the finished product, but nobody wants to do what it takes to get there. Well, administration is certainly a big part of the finished product of campus ministry. Without it, we would never Impact the U. Impact the World.

Embedded below is a video diary I made of some of the administrative tasks I have (and the physical context for where all the magic happens).

Top 12 of CiHD: #12

For a summary of what I’m hoping to accomplish in this blog series (the first week of every month of 2018), I recommend reviewing my explanation here.

As we begin our look at the Top 12 Blog Posts of Covered in His Dust, we’re going to begin as any good countdown does — at the bottom! Let’s start with my twelfth-most-viewed blog post. It happens to be “The Redemption Cycle,” a post I published on December 26, 2013. It discusses the big ideas undergirding the book of Judges, and I contest the idea that the cycle represented there should be described as a “sin cycle.” You can read the post here.

In this series, as we look at each post, I want to ask three questions: why, what, and what else? Why do I think this post got so many views; why were others drawn to this post? What do I hope people found when they got here; what do I hope they heard? Finally, what else have I learned about this; what else would I say about these ideas?

WHY THIS POST?

To be honest, one of the things you are going to get every time we do this is a very cynical and objective look at why people hit this post. The truth of the matter is that most of these page views are coming from web searches from people’s favorite search engines. Chances are good that many of these views came from people who were doing an image search for “cycle in Judges” and happened to click on the image that is linked to my blog.

In a similar fashion, I think many page views came from a Google search that had to do with “cycle” and “book of Judges.” As people were looking more into this idea, they were looking for additional material. Particularly on Google searches, my Google-based blog host is one of the first hits, and away we go. So let’s work with this idea: the people who ran across my blog were studying the book of Judges and the idea that there is an ongoing cycle within the literature.

WHAT DO I HOPE THEY FOUND?

I hope they found an idea that challenged the assumptions they were being handed from other sources. By saying this, I’m not suggesting that I hope they heard the right answer in a debate against what they had been taught. I simply mean to say that I hope they encountered an even bigger idea and that it made them think critically about the implications of the theology that serves as the foundation to our biblical interpretation — let alone our doctrine.

When I was handed a worldview that focused on the sinfulness and depravity of man, I found myself stuck in a theology that wasn’t compelling and didn’t inspire me to take up the mission and partner with God. Instead, I found a lot of despair and hopelessness for humanity. The idea that God simply “puts up with us” and with a roll of His eyes He forgives us — yet again — was portrayed quite clearly.

There are many things I can applaud in what I was taught. The fact that Bible teachers were able to show me a literary tool being employed in Judges was fantastic. At that stage of my learning, I hadn’t been exposed to many literary tools; but being handed such a clear and noticeable example launched the beginning of a very critical journey in learning the skills necessary to examine the Text. It was all of the doctrinal assumption that I hope people found critiqued when they got here.

WHAT ELSE WOULD I SAY?

This post really expresses things quite thoroughly and I can’t think of much I would add. I would say I have learned how much scholarship (progressive textual critics, in large part) sees the book of Judges as a parallel record of history to the book of Joshua. What they mean when they say such things is that a redactor later pulled these two stories together and made them read sequentially, but they probably preexisted as different takes on the same period of history. On the one hand, you have the book of Joshua, which tells the story of obedience (for the most part) and God’s help in absolute conquest. However, another historical perspective tells the story of disobedience and God’s incredible patience. These serve as two sides of the historical narrative. For some of us, this may be a bridge too far, but I have been learning much about these theories and find them informative in my ability to think critically about the Text and wrestle with authorial intent.

I would also be remiss to exit this post without recommending Make Your Mark, a book written by a fellow teacher and friend of mine, Brad Gray. While the book focuses on the story of Samson, I find its contents to be helpful as I wrestle with the implications of the stories found in the book of Judges.