November 12, 2015
By Eddie Pipkin
I have a friend named Shari who hates to throw things out. She is environmentally attuned, composts and conserves, recycles and repurposes. The folks at her church wait to throw things into the dumpster until she’s out of town. That’s because she has been known to climb into the dumpster and rescue them. Perfectly good items that could still be perfectly useful if reimagined and repurposed. An abandoned pulpit which could be deconstructed, the wood reconfigured into something beautiful. Old metal light fixtures that could be recycled—melted down and reborn as something new.
This gift to see in something worn out and abandoned something potentially new and wonderful is a gift of the Spirit. It is the heart of stewardship. It an illustration of the transformative power of God at work.
So it is with our understanding of discipleship and our traditional model of Christian Education. These familiar ideas are ripe for a reimagining, and that’s exactly what we do in our new book, Membership to Discipleship: Growing Mature Disciples Who Make Disciples.
We look beyond the culturally stale, standard models of raising up disciples and instead work from the actual flesh-and-blood faith journeys of followers of Christ to understand the phases of their growth and what has equipped them along the way to make that growth possible. The faith journey into deeper discipleship can be described as occurring in distinctive phases of searching, exploring, beginning, growing, and, finally, maturing (phases that parallel those of na