Education has changed.
People who grew up on Sesame Street and Blues Clues and now entertain
themselves with YouTube videos resist sitting in neat rows listening to someone
talk. Schools have adapted. Education has become more interactive and
utilizes multiple forms of media simultaneously—sound, movement, images, and
words together. Lecturing and orderly
outlines don’t resonate with younger folks much anymore. The church could learn something from this as
we attempt to disciple people.
M. Rex Weber (The Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past,
Reframing the Future of the Church) writes about “Impartational
Discipleship” where the church takes on the dynamic of a family in which the
more experienced (normally parents and grandparents) impart to the less
experienced (normally the children) what they have learned from their journey. This
means that we disciple people in the same way we raise our children. We do not weekly sit our children down, give
them a lecture on moral development, safety, and good hygiene and then send
them out for the week. Rather we walk
with them through their lives helping them draw lessons from their successes
and failures. We listen to what is
happening in them and around them and then help them sort out their decisions
and weigh competing values.
Impartational discipleship is like that.
David Kinnaman wrote that disciples are handmade one at a time; they cannot
be mass produced. Growing in faith and
obedience is not a classroom exercise; it is a lab project. The church provides the graduate students who
supervise the experience. Note that those
supervising are students themselves, still learning and growing. Those teaching others demonstrate what faith looks like.
This makes discipleship an interactive enterprise rather than a passing
on of information. Another way of
putting it is, we hang out together and make sense of what is happening in our
lives and sort out what faithfulness might look like in our situation.
Does this sound innovative or ring of something you have read
of someplace else? I’ll give you a few
hints. Paul wrote: “Indeed, in Christ Jesus I became your father
through the Gospel. I appeal to you then, be imitators of me [1 Cor. 4:15-16]”
and “To Timothy my true son in the faith [1 Tim. 1:2].” And what about the three years Jesus spent
with his disciples, helping them draw instructive lessons at the growth edges
of their lives? His preference was to
ask probing questions rather than to lecture. He demonstrated daily what
obedience and love and justice looked like.
The disciples were to take note and do the same. Jesus was the master practitioner of
impartational discipleship. Life was the
lab, and his follower were his students.
Yes, what is old is new again. It was there all the time.
Blessings,
Jim
Executive Minister-American Baptist Churches of
New York State
