Busting 3 Myths About Discipleship

In the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus makes a bold proclamation:

I want to suggest something crazy.

Every day, Jesus comes into your life, and he makes the same audacious claim: the time is now, the kingdom of God is here, and we are invited to repent and believe this good news.

I believe this is the operating system of Jesus’ ministry. It’s the foundation upon which he builds everything else.

And, in the process of Jesus walking into our circumstances and making this bold declaration, I want to make an even more audacious claim: he is discipling us.

To see this paradigm shift, I want to invite us to reflect (and maybe shift) three myths that I often hear in the body of Christ about discipleship.

1. Discipleship is not a class, course, book, or school.

Jesus says that the time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is now.

We often make the mistake that we need to learn something else to “get discipled.” Because of our Western bias for information, we often think that the magic key to discipleship is in some new sermon, book, podcast, or famous church with a ministry school.

But Mark 1 confronts us with an entirely different claim: the kingdom of God is here and now.

The kingdom of God is not in the next book, sermon, or ministry school; the kingdom of God has come to our real lives today. Paula D’Arcy is famous for saying that “God comes to you disguised as your life.”

I want to suggest that Jesus’ best discipleship curriculum comes not in the form of books, classes, podcasts, or schools, but in the form of what has been called by many kairos moments. (For this phrase, I am forever indebted to Mike Breen, 3DM, and Building a Discipling Culture).

The word kairos is the Greek word for “fullness of time” and is the word that Mark uses to describe Jesus’ arrival in Galilee. It is not a chronological moment on a clock or a calendar (chronos being the other Greek word for time), it’s a moment instead where time seems to stand still.

It’s the moment of encounter with God, the moment of our wedding day or the birth of our child, it’s the moment of crisis and trauma, it’s the moment where God speaks something to us through a sermon or worship, or it’s the moment where a verse jumps out to us as we’re reading our Bible.

And I believe Mark 1 teaches us that these are the moments where the kingdom of God breaks into our present.

These are the moments where Jesus wants to disciple us in how to live in the kingdom of God.

Jesus’ best discipleship content is our real life. 

We don’t need to take a new course, read a new book, or listen to a new sermon to get discipled — we simply have to look at our lives to see how the kingdom of God is already breaking in. (Of course, resources and schools are helpful, but they cannot be a substitute for letting Jesus disciple us in our real life.)

Is there a moment in the past week or two where God might have been trying to speak to you, but you didn’t stop to listen?

2. Discipleship is not a coffee shop meeting.

For many of us, we have been taught that discipleship is more like mentorship — it’s meeting with someone more mature than us in a coffee shop to receive wisdom and insight from their life.

As a local church pastor, one of the most common longings I hear from young adults in their 20s is a longing for someone to disciple them — for someone to sit down with them (usually in a coffee shop) to help them process their life and give them wisdom and insight.

The only problem is that Jesus never did one-on-one meetings with anybody. Contemporary pictures of “mentorship” are completely absent from his ministry. (Please note — I do not think that mentorship is bad, I just don’t think it’s discipleship!)

According to Mark 1, the context of discipleship is that it is good news.

To explain this, Jesus borrows from the Greco-Roman context of evangelism. When Cesar conquered a new territory, he would send an evangelist to proclaim the good news that Cesar was now King and Lord of this territory.

So, when Jesus comes announcing that the kingdom of God is here and that it’s good news, he is quite radically proclaiming that He is Lord and Cesar is not.

Jesus’ declaration that the kingdom of God is here is primarily a declaration of good news that he is the king.

The point I am making is this: discipleship is not a coffee shop meeting with a human mentor; discipleship is an encounter with the King.

The good news for anyone longing for a human to disciple them is that Jesus is actually already discipling any who chooses to listen to him! Any good disciple maker understands that their primary role is not to share their wisdom and expertise, it is to connect people to Jesus to encounter him and to see how he is already discipling them.

In any kairos moment, Jesus is revealing himself to us in some way. We’re encountering the King, and he is discipling us.

And, after introducing himself as King, Jesus then invites his disciples to enter into the orbit of his life, to share meals with him, and to join him in his mission. He builds a kingdom family that has continued for the past 2,000 years.

Any revelation about who Jesus is is naturally followed by a revelation about who we are, and what our role is in this kingdom family.

The good news is also that when we join a healthy local church or an incarnational kingdom community, we are joining a context in which discipleship is happening, whether or not there is intentional coffee shop mentorship or not. We’ve entered into the kingdom of God, a big extended family on mission that orbits around King Jesus. This is the context in which Jesus made disciples on earth and, I believe, the context in which he still makes disciples today.

Any discipleship that is not oriented around 1) seeing Jesus and hearing from him and 2) doing this in the context of a kingdom family on mission is simply not biblical discipleship. It might be good mentorship, good content, or a good experience, but it’s not kingdom discipleship.

For the past 2,000 years of church history, discipleship has primarily begun with an invitation to build a prayer life rooted and grounded in the spiritual practice of seeing Jesus. (I write more about this here.)

Similarly, discipleship in the history of the church has included an invitation to do this as a part of a local, contextual kingdom family, whether this was a monastery or a local parish.

What has a recent kairos moment revealed to you about who Jesus is, who you are, or what your role in the kingdom of God is?

3. Discipleship is not primarily about spiritual disciplines.

So, the kingdom of God is breaking into our real lives, and we are invited to encounter the King and join his big kingdom family.

What should our response be? According to Mark 1, the only appropriate response to this is repentance and belief.

Repentance has less to do with remorse over our sin (although that’s definitely a part of it) and more to do with the Greek idea of metanoia, which involves a whole-life reorientation and transformation of our thought patterns. The best biblical definition of repentance occurs in Romans 12:2, where Paul says that we ought to “be transformed by the renewing of your minds”( NRSVUE). Repentance is a reorientation of our entire inner world around the worldview of the kingdom of God.

Similarly, belief has less to do with mental ascent to certain doctrines and more to do with the Greek idea of pistis — an embodied, whole-life response to our repentance. Again, Paul tells us that the goal of repentance, the renewal of our minds, is “so that you may discern the will of God.” Belief is a reorientation of all our external patterns and behaviors around the priorities of the kingdom of God.

Thus, to repent and believe in the context of Mark 1 is to pledge our allegiance to Jesus as King, and to reorient our entire lives, inside and out, around the kingdom of God as it breaks into our present realities.

Thus, discipleship is not primarily about adopting new spiritual disciplines; it’s about following Jesus.

After processing what a kairos moment reveals about God, ourselves, or our role in the kingdom of God, have we responded? Have we reoriented our thought life and actions around the truth of the kingdom that the kairos moment is revealing?

I’d love to invite us to pray today:

• Begin to take a few deep breaths. Perhaps as you breathe in, pray “Come,” and as you breathe out, pray “Holy Spirit.”

• Have you had a recent “kairos moment”? Kairos moments can be either positive or negative, big or small, but the key theme is that they are shimmering invitations in our real life for the kingdom of God to break in.

• If you were to reflect a little more deeply on this moment, what are you learning about Jesus through this moment? How are you encountering the King? And, by extension, what are you learning about who you are, your identity, or the role God might be inviting you to play in the kingdom of God?

• What does repentance and belief look like in response to what God is speaking through this kairos moment? How is God inviting you to realign either your thinking or your behavior around the kingdom of God?

Best,
Ryan

P.S. We made a prayer journal! If you haven’t yet, we’d love to invite you to come alive and live in love with Jesus through a 30-day journey of growing in confidence in hearing God’s voice. Check it out at restlessheartsrestingplaces.com/store.