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Discipleship and Christianity

An excerpt from my newest book Community Based Discipleship: Discipleship has normally been thought of as an exclusively Christian word that is used to define what devout believers are expected to believe and do. This approach to discipleship has done a lot of good for millions and millions of people over the long centuries of Church history, but we should not assume that faithfully following one’s inherited or preferred version of Christianity is always the functional equivalent of being a disciple of Jesus. If we are not careful, our discipleship can be inappropriately molded by a longstanding Christian environment that has reduced discipleship from a transformative relationship with God in the person of Jesus into a manageable lifestyle that everyone understands and follows. We must also begin to wrestle with the jarringly counter-intuitive fact that people around the corner and around the world understand and use the words Christian or Christianity to convey a wide variet...
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Introduction to Community Based Discipleship

This is the first blog entry from my new book Community-Based Discipleship. I will begin with an excerpt from the Introduction in which I briefly relate how I assessed using the word discipleship to describe how I had grown to understand my relationship with Jesus Christ and his with me. “As the ideas within this book germinated in my mind and began to take some sort of shape as themes and chapters, I found that I needed to think about the utility of the word discipleship to describe the way in which I had begun to conceive of learning from Jesus. As many Christians know, discipleship is a very loaded term. Much of my early experience of discipleship was at the feet of church leaders who weaponized it into the WMD of their own version of fundamentalist Christianity. It was an approach to discipleship that tended toward anti-intellectualism and a philosophy of leadership that created (or attracted) narcissistic demagogues who espoused a Pharisaical interpretation of holiness and p...
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The Last of the Mohicans

Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day Lewis is one of my favorite movies. It is an epic tale of romance, desperate danger and hopeful courage. It also has a good soundtrack. It works for me on just about every level. It is also a fantastic story about cross cultural mission There is war on the forntier. Britain and France are fighting for control of North America. Native American tribes are taking sides in the conflict. Britain is demanding that the colonists from Great Britain muster militias to serve alongside the British regular army. Tumult and murder are everywhere. A veritable whirlwind of chaos and violence is howling through everyone's life. A Mohican man and his two sons, one of them a white man raised by his Mohican family, rescue 2 daughters of a British colonel and their British escort from certain death. The Mohicans finally promise to take them to the local British fort. On the way, they stop at a colonists friend's  homestead and discover that they are all...
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Disconnect

I have just read John’s prophecies to the 7 churches which were in various cities in Turkey during the first century. These were city wide churches and probably included more than 1 congregation. The prophecy to each church was clearly connected to the city where the church was located which means that these churches were incarnated into the larger world around them rather than being extracted from the culture. These prophecies were to be given to the angels of these churches. Angels in this case probably means messenger sent by the churches to see John. So, a delegation arrives on Patmos where John is exiled, and in response to what they say, John hears from God what he is to give to the messengers who then relay that to the churches they represent. The first thing Jesus reveals to John is a powerful visual image of his reign as Lord and King of these churches. John is summoned into the presence of the King and hears his decrees about each church. It is clear why Jesus remin...
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Righteous

One night, several years ago, when we lived in Belleville, I woke up at 3 am. I was wide awake, so I got out of bed so I wouldn’t disturb Melanie. I went downstairs and read Leviticus. By the way, Leviticus is not the protagonist in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is the third book of the Pentateuch in the Bible; 3 am, reading Leviticus. Draw your own conclusions from that. It quickly became clear that God had an agenda. As I read the descriptions of law and sacrifice and atonement, the Holy Spirit revealed the fulfillment of all of this by Jesus. “Read this”, God said, “as if it has been fulfilled.”  But the Holy Spirit did not stop there. Jesus did this through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that same Spirit dwells in me, empowering me to receive the life of Christ within me. This means that Leviticus is fulfilled by me because Jesus is in me. This means I am righteous. But the Holy Spirit didn’t stop there. The Spirit reveals this about Jesus to people all over the world. ...
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MIssional or Missions

This post is from my friend, Frank Daugherity. I liked it so much I posted it here. It is serious ( you know me, Mr. Happy Go Lucky! ) and important. I hope it speaks to you. If you want to explore this further, see more of Franks writing about mission and missions at http://daugherity.com/frankly. Has it come to a contest between "missions" and “missionality” in our churches today? What has happened to "missions" (traditional cross-cultural evangelistic and church-planting ministry) since the "missional" emphasis has really began to gain traction? Is it dying out? I was a cross-cultural missionary for 21 years (8 in Japan, 13 in greater NYC among Japanese expats), and contemporaneously a missions pastor in a large church in northern NJ for 8 years, so I know the older traditional picture pretty well. My oversight responsibilities included liaison with 66 missionary families. When I was asked to give my perspective on what's going on now...
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Missional 101 from Tim Keller

This is part of a piece written by Tim Keller, a pastor in New York City whom I learn from. I have cut out part of his larger article, but all of it is really good. I'll send it to you if you want to read it.  The Need for a 'Missional' Church by TIM KELLER June 2001. In the West for nearly 1,000 years, the relationship of (Anglo-European) Christian churches to the broader culture was a relationship known as "Christendom." The institutions of society "Christianized" people, and stigmatized non-Christian belief and behavior. Though people were "Christianized" by the culture, they were not regenerated or converted with the Gospel. The church's job was then to challenge persons into a vital, living relation with Christ. The decline of Christendom has accelerated greatly since the end of WWII. The British missionary Lesslie Newbigin went to India around 1950. There he was involved with a church living 'in mission' in a very...
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