Pilgrim Soldier

I’ve been giving a lot of thought towards what it means to be a disciple recently and how we should be modelling that within our lives. The examples of discipleship that I grew up with within the Church seems to be fundamentally flawed for many, one of the reasons why so many of my generation have left the Army and Christianity altogether. It’s also one of the issues at the centre of the Emerging Church debate!

This morning I opened my Google Reader to see an article on Missional Discipleship and was intrigued to read what the writer said. The article was good but his illustration of discipleship simply didn’t sit comfortably with me. This led me to make a comment which included the following:

… , my only concern with your model of horizontal/vertical discipleship is from an illustrative point of view. By having two axes of discipleship there is an obvious inherent danger.

For me the type of discipleship I saw as I grew up is more like this horizontal/vertical design. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the image, but lets look at what it could and has resulted in. Below is an image of how that model could be seen, and apologies to Martin if I’m misrepresenting his idea in anyway!

The danger of this understanding of discipleship is that by necessity we need to focus our attention on one or the other ‘lines’ at any given time. So if we put our attention on discipleship that is focussed on God, there is a danger that we move away from a community focus, and of course vice-versa. If we keep this up for too long then the distance between the two is almost too far for us to successfully bridge the gap between them.

This could be seen as one of the reasons for the conservative/liberal divide that we see too much of within Christianity. The problem of course is that both have elements of truth within them. The conservative element of the church has placed primary importance on God focussed discipleship. In many this has led to a personal piety that is detached from the world in which Christ has called us to be His disciples. Of course the liberal element have placed their attention predominantly on Community focussed discipleship, resulting in a strong emphasis on Jesus’ compassionate nature but casting aside the need for repentance from sin.

Another danger is that it can also result in a hypocritical type of Christianity in which we have a theoretical understanding of God focussed discipleship, but in fact have never actually embraced that in our own lives and interaction with others.

I think its time that we move toward a new model of discipleship. I said in my comment on Martin’s blog that I saw this as two inextricably linked strands and as I pondered this more I realised that God has given us the perfect model in nature.

It is of course the Double Helix of DNA. In this model the two strands of discipleship, God focussed and Community focussed, are not only intertwined along a common axis, but are also permanently linked together through bases¹. This means that as we move forward in either strand we are taken further along the other strand as well. As we learn more about our relationship with God we would also learn and experience more of our relationship with our fellow man, and as we increase our interaction with others our relationship with God would also grow.

I don’t pretend to believe that this idea is a perfect model of what discipleship is about, but am throwing it out there. It has probably already been written down better somewhere else, although if it has I haven’t seen it yet. I would however be interested in hearing what others think.