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