Pilgrim Soldier

I’ve now finished reading Disciples and Citizens, but it ends up putting many questions in my mind. Here are some of the questions I’m asking off the back of the final two chapters.

How can we allow the Spirit to work through us as individuals and church communities to herald God’s future and create hope that His future is possible?

Is it possible that the demise in church attendance is because the ‘future-made-present’ isn’t manifest within our communities and consequently the future doesn’t look attractive, even to people of faith?

If our evangelistic efforts concentrating on trying to scare people into heaven by the use of a ‘negative’ future and fail to show them a tangible example of God’s future in the present, are we being faithful to the Gospel?

The book is great and I would recommend it to anyone, especially if you’re in the UK. However, it doesn’t give a set of easy answers as to how to be a disciple in the 21st Century, it simply sets out why real discipleship is so essential for the future. We need a discipleship that is grounded in heaven but expressed in the world. Discipleship that isn’t corrupted by the world, but instead transforms it into localised expressions of the kingdom of heaven.