Sunday School Is Not Discipleship Jesus had both his public ministry to the multitudes and his personal discipleship of his own disciples. His public teaching ministry looked much like Marge’s teaching method (the history teacher in the video above) and his day-to-day discipleship looked more like Tom’s (the guitar tutor from the same video). Today’s churches try to apply this the same idea of teaching large groups and tutoring smaller ones, of lecturing to the big group and listening to one another in small group. To accommodate large group lectures, churches usually build auditoriums. To accommodate programs with smaller gatherings such as Sunday School classes and Bible studies, they often add on classrooms. Yet neither of these approaches is an accurate reflection of the early church. As we’ll see in subsequent posts, Sunday sermons would have been a completely foreign idea to the early church. And even though Sunday School, Bible studies and other small group meetings have merit when it comes to passing along spiritual information, there are still no opportunities for application. For that, we still need old-fashioned discipleship. No matter how great your Sunday School teacher is, the classroom is disconnected from real life by design. Everything from the arrangement of the chairs to the installation of a whiteboard makes it a separate, artificial environment. By contrast, discipleship happens in real life, in our natural habitat. Disciples Are Specifically Chosen The Bible is full of examples of what true discipleship looks like: Jesus’ discipleship of his original twelve, Paul’s discipleship of Timothy, Titus and Silas and so on. Discipleship is about making a large investment in a small number of people rather than making a small investment in a large number of people. Discipleship is Mister Miyagi and Daniel, Obi-Wan and Luke, Morpheus and Neo. In fact, part of the true power of discipleship is that it is selective. Miyagi had one student: Daniel. Obi-Wan had one Padawan: Luke. Morpheus had spent his whole life looking for The One: Neo. Not to say a mentor must literally have only one student at a time; Jesus trained twelve apostles simultaneously. But he understood the significance of being selective, that saying “yes” to each of the twelve apostles meant saying “no” to a hundred other would-be apostles who had also followed him from the beginning, hoping to make it into the inner circle. That’s why he spent the whole night in prayer before selecting the twelve: “Jesus went up on a mountain to pray, and he prayed to God all night. At daybreak he called together all of his disciples and chose twelve of them to be apostles.” (Luke 6:12-13) Whether or not the selection process is this formal or not, the delineation between a mentor’s relationship with his students and his relationship with the rest of the world is clear: while the rest of the world may have limited access to a mentor’s life, the student has full access, a VIP backstage pass: “The disciples came to him and asked, ‘Why do you speak to the people in parables?’ He replied, ‘Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.” (Matthew 13:10-11) Since a mentor can’t fully invest himself in everyone, he must choose a specific someone. Living Rooms, Not Classrooms Unless a mentor is selective and makes his group of students somewhat exclusive, his time will become too divided and his efforts diluted. Why? Because the primary tool a mentor uses for transmitting his faith to his students is his own life; the more day-to-day life they live together, the more likely the students are to apprehend their teacher’s faith. Therefore he must be selective. Instead of investing little amounts of time into a large group of people, he will invest large amounts of time into a small group of people. Of course that also means he has a lot riding on these few students! He needs to ensure they really “get it”. That means he must open up his whole life to them, seize every opportunity, be fully available when those truly divine teaching moments present themselves. That’s why real discipleship happens in living rooms, not classrooms. The living room is unrehearsed, unscripted and chaotic; the Sunday School classroom is preplanned, scheduled and organized. The living room is for real life, unexpected events. The student gets to see his teacher react in the moment, to see who he really is, not just who he says is. The classroom is for theoretical discussions and secondhand stories about how we might handle a hypothetical situation or the way we think we remember handling a real one. In such a contrived and controlled setting, students must rely solely on their teacher’s own self-awareness rather than any firsthand insight into his actual life. And it’s the exact same thing for the rest us. Since a weekly discussion is not enough time to share our whole life with our classmates, we are forced to pick and choose what we share; we are required to self-edit whether we want to or not. That means, for today’s churchgoers who commute to a separate building to gather together with other believers, our fellow church members get a curated impression of our lives. It’s not because we’re trying to misrepresent ourselves. Even if we share intimate or embarrassing stories about ourselves in a genuine effort to be transparent, it’s still just a fraction of who we really are. It’s like sharing our Facebook profile when we’d like to share our entire biography. Sure, sitting in church classrooms gives us a chance to talk about our separate spiritual lives to another believer but it’s not discipleship, which would be living an entire shared spiritual life together. Can’t We Have It Both Ways? Once you start to think of discipleship this way, you soon realize the most tragic irony of all is when churches hold “discipleship classes”. Discipleship is taught through actual discipling, in the real world. Stepping away from the real world to sit in a classroom listening to a lesson on discipleship is like climbing out of the swimming pool to sit through lectures about swimming, somehow thinking we will swim faster if we just listen longer. But wait! Am I being unfair by contrasting Sunday School and other small group programs with discipleship? Who says these things are mutually exclusive? Why can’t we have Sunday morning services and sermons, Sunday School classes, Bible Studies, women’s and men’s breakfasts, youth group services, children’s church classes, etc. and also have the type of discipleship I described on the side, in addition to everything else? Well, my answer to that is a simple question: when did discipleship become the left-overs instead of the main course? Why is discipleship just one more program or an add-on to another program in today’s churches when it was the entire business of the original churches? When we tack on all these church programs and presentations, events and activities and then say, “Oh yeah, by the way, don’t forget: it’s all about discipleship!” I have to wonder if Jesus doesn’t want to say the same thing to us that he said to Martha: “But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made… ‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.” (Luke 10:40-42) And as we will see in our next post, the “one thing” Jesus wants us to be about is making disciples. Church Anarchist
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 14:49:03 +0000
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