Discipling or Disinfecting?

Read this this morning in Radical by David Platt. Puts words to some thoughts I’ve had lately (some longer than just lately). Also goes along with the vision my church back in the States has for 2013. It’s a little long but worth reading. Challenging.

“Making disciples by going, baptizing, and teaching people the Word of Christ and then enabling them to do the same thing in other people’s lives-this is the plan God has for each of us to impact nations for the glory of Christ.

      This plan seems so counterintuitive to our way of thinking. In a culture where bigger is always better and flashy is always more effective, Jesus beckons each of us to plainly, humbly, and quietly focus our lives on people. The reality is, you can’t share life like this with masses and multitudes. Jesus didn’t. He spent three years with twelve guys. If the Son of God thought it necessary to focus his life on a small group of men, we are fooling ourselves to think we can mass-produce disciples today. God’s design for taking the gospel to the world is a slow, intentional, simple process that involves every one of his people sacrificing every facet of their lives to multiply the life of Christ in others.

      I was in Cuba a few weeks ago, and this is exactly the picture I saw. In Cuba you will not observe large church buildings and flashy church advertisements. You will hardly notice the church at all…until you get to know the people. We visited one small, impoverishes Cuban church. This one church had planted sixty other churches. The next day we visited one of the churches they had planted. That church had planted twenty-five other churches. Cuban Christians are taking Jesus at his word and multiplying the church by making disciples. Nothing big and nothing extravagant. Just going, baptizing, and teaching, and in the process planting churches from coast to coast across that island nation.

      But we resist this plan, resorting to performances and programs that seem much more “successful.” In our Christian version of the American dream, our plan ends up disinfecting Christians from the world more than discipling Christians in the world. Let me explain the difference.

      Disinfecting Christians from the world involves isolating followers of Christ in a spiritual safe-deposit box called the church building and teaching them to be good. In this strategy, success in the church is defined by how big a building you have to house all the Christians, and the goal is to gather as many people as possible for a couple of hours each week in that place where we are isolated and insulated from the realities of the world around us. When someone asks, ‘Where is your church?’ we point them to a building or give them an address, and everything centers around what happens at that location.

      When we gather at the building, we learn to be good. Being good is defined by what we avoid in the world. We are holy because of what we don’t participate in (and at this point we may be the only organization in the world defining success by what we don’t do). We live decent lives in decent homes with decent jobs and decent families as decent citizens. We are decent church members with little more impact on the world than we had before we were saved. Though thousands may join us, ultimately we have turned a deaf ear to billions who haven’t even heard his name.

      Discipling is much different.

      Whereas disinfecting Christians involves isolating them and teaching them to be good, discipling Christians involves propelling Christians into the world to risk their lives for the sake of others. Now the world is our focus, and we gauge success in the church not on the hundreds or thousands whom we can get into our buildings but on the hundreds or thousands who are leaving our buildings to take on the world with the disciples they are making. In this case, we would never think that the disciple-making plan of Jesus could take place in one service a week at one location led by one or two teachers. Disciple making takes place multiple times every week in multiples locations by an army of men and women sharing, showing, and teaching the Word of Christ and together serving a world in need of Christ.

      All of a sudden, holiness is defined by what we do. We are now a community of faith taking Jesus at his word and following his plan, even when it does not make sense to the culture around us and even when it costs us.

      In the process we are realizing that we actually were intended to reach the world for the glory of Christ, and we are discovering that the purpose for which we were created is accessible to every one of us. Children and the elderly, students and workers, men and women all joined together in a body that is united with other followers of Christ around the world in a practical strategy to make disciples and impact nations for the glory of Christ. A community of Christians each multiplying the gospel by going, baptizing, and teaching in the contexts where they live every day. Is anything else, according to the Bible, even considered a church?”