Faithful Witness

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

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