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.