Discipleship in the Reformed World

When I was a Southern Baptist pastor, all I heard about was discipleship. It was their "thing," almost to a fault. When I moved into the Reformed world, I never heard anything about discipleship. Perhaps my experience is an anomaly but gauging from some conversations I’ve had with a variety of people in the Reformed community, I doubt it. At the very least, it merits a little investigation and assessment.

For example, is your church intentional about discipling its members, especially the new converts, the less mature, or those who are new to the Reformed faith? Is your church patient with the development and growth of those more difficult or trying? Is your church active in training up men in the way Paul prescribed to Timothy: "What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also" (2 Tim. 2:2)? Are the women intentionally “teaching the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed” (Tit. 2:3-5)? Maybe you could answer yes, but I know for myself, there is serious room for improvement.

To help address such an issue, I have compiled a list of eight generic mentoring or discipling questions you can use when meeting with Christians 1-1 or in a small group. These questions assume that the person you are discipling professes Christ and understands the gospel at least at an elementary level. If not, you should start there. These questions can be asked weekly, bi-weekly, or however often you meet. They are not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to serve as a guide. 

1. Are you reading your Bible? What are you learning? Is there anything you don’t understand? (Get him on a Bible reading plan for accountability & consistency.)

2. How's your prayer life? Has God answered any of your prayers this week? Recently?

3. Where is God showing you sin in your life? Where do you need to grow? What are some temptations you’re facing? What part of your old life do you feel is hardest to leave behind? What do you want to see changed? Let's pray for this right now.

4. Where has your walk with Christ been evident this week? For example, where have you seen victory over sin? Faith in the midst of trials?

5. Have you shared the gospel with anyone this week? Who are some people in your life you’d like to see saved? What are some ways to see this happen?

6. What's the most challenging thing in your life this week? Recently? Let's pray about it right now.

7. How are your relationships with others going? At work, in the home, on social media, in the community?

8. Where do you see yourself in 6 months? 12 months? 5 years? What are your spiritual, family, & material goals? How can you get there?

The Reformed church has many obvious strengths. We prize robust theology, confessions, and historic Christianity. We are committed to church discipline and the regulative principle of worship. We deeply care about how we approach and think about God. These are all to be commended.

But we should also be willing to acknowledge our weaknesses and to seek to correct and address them. One of these areas of weakness is discipleship, especially when it comes to those who are new to the faith or less cultured and refined in their mannerisms or bearings. We often don’t know what to do with people who have never heard of John Calvin or is currently on his third marriage. Why is being bad at discipleship such a problem? Because of the state of our society. Nowadays, it is very rare for people to grow up in a stable home and to receive a decent education. It is even rarer for people to have exemplary role models or to have even a rudimentary understanding of the Bible. Most everyone in our culture has significant emotional, familial, financial, and even physical baggage. By and large, this baggage is still there even after a person gets converted and comes into the church. If the Reformed church is not willing to work with new and less stable converts, teach them, and walk alongside them, the future of the Reformed church looks very bleak indeed. Pentecostals and charismatic churches, for all their faults, are much better at this than we are, and hence they are filled with “unwashed” people, the kind that Jesus typically ministered to.

Think of it another way. Instead of snubbing such folks, what if Reformed churches committed to meeting with them regularly, walking through the Bible together and helping them apply it to their specific situations? What if we committed to a systematic program of discipleship and mentoring where sins are confessed, prayers are made, and rebuke and encouragement takes place alongside Bible reading and fellowship? Wouldn’t such a practice aid in the development of new converts? Wouldn’t it help recapture the spirit and practice of apostolic Christianity? This doesn’t mean we should put up with sin, compromise on the gospel, or neglect biblical church discipline when appropriate. It also doesn’t mean that the people we seek to disciple will be on board with any of it, nor does it guarantee they will be open and transparent about sin and their need for growth. But it does mean we should invest more heavily and intentionally in discipleship.

Discipleship isn’t complicated. It simply means helping other Christians to live out the Christian life. Its emphasis is on action or praxis. It is intentionally walking alongside of another brother or sister as they run the Christian race. What makes discipleship difficult is that it is often messy, slow, emotionally and spiritually demanding, and more often than not, thankless. But this is no surprise. Anything worth pursuing in the Christian life is exactly that—difficult.

Pastors and teachers are not the only ones called to disciple others. All of us as Christians should be engaged in such a practice. We can’t expect that everyone who comes into the church will know John Calvin or believe in the regulative principle of worship. We can’t expect everyone who is converted to have everything in their life put together and well-ordered. We must know how to walk with such persons in their faith. We must put in the time and energy to help them grow. May the Lord help Reformed churches everywhere see the importance of intentional discipleship in the lives of our congregants.

Lastly, it doesn’t do to put all the weight and responsibility of this on the ministers and elders in your church. Yes, their leadership in this area can go a long way towards fostering an environment of discipleship, but it is also much more basic than that. Even if you are not a minister or leader in the church, you can pick up the phone and call that guy at church who is not as experienced as you in the Bible or when it comes to living out the Christian life. You can offer to meet with him to pray and fellowship over the Bible. Or maybe he is more experienced than you and you’d like to see if he’d be interested in helping you grow in certain areas. The point is, it doesn’t matter who you are, you can reach out to someone in your church to encourage and meet up with on a regular basis for the purpose of confessing sin, praying, and reading the Bible together. And if the first person you ask doesn’t have the time, no big deal, pray for God’s wisdom and ask someone else.

So who are you discipling? Who are you thinking about calling to see if they’d like to pray and study the Bible together? Who can you encourage in their Christian walk? The point is, it starts with you. If you’re proactive about discipling people, it will likely catch on, and the people you are discipling will in turn begin to look for someone to disciple, and so on, until the whole church is doing it.