November 18, 2015
By Eddie Pipkin
Don’t you love going to Ikea? They have it all. You tour the showroom, plop on the furniture, hold things in your hands, see a completed vision for what a room is supposed to look like, then follow the maps to pick up everything you need and take it all home for a session of stylish and economical DIY triumph, made possible by those infamous easy-to-follow pictographs.
Developing a successful framework for discipleship is certainly more complicated than that (and begins with a foundational understanding that we don’t actually make disciples anyway—God does). But we are called as leaders to provide the framework, opportunities, and the educational resources to support what God is doing, and there is much we as the church can and should do to make the pathway to maturity as a disciple as navigable as possible.
It’s a process that leaders of the church have been working to refine for two thousand years, and there is so much material out there, so many good sources of ideas, that it’s hard to keep it all straight.
Since one of the cornerstone principles of the Membership to Discipleship book is that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” approach for individual congregations, I thought it would be a good idea to gather together in one place all of the very best thinking on discipleship. We offer a historical summary on the best approaches that organized Christianity has had to offer. (These include Jesus’ approach to nurturing disciples—the very place the term discipleship originated, Paul’s approach, the approach of the earliest Christians as the church was being formed, and, of course, John Wesley’s structured and highly successful “method” for nurturing and empowering followers of Christ.)
We mix in the very best current thinking about discipleship and how it can be adapted to the current culture of