wfn.org | Method for discipleship found in Luke, Acts, professor says

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

March 21, 2002	News media contact: Linda Green7(615)742-54707Nashville,
Tenn.     10-71B{123}

NOTE: This report may be used as a sidebar to UMNS story #121.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - Making disciples is like giving people an address
so they can find their way home, according to a seminary professor.

The Rev. Anthony Campbell, a professor of homiletics at United
Methodist-related Boston University School of Theology, was one of two
speakers providing theological messages during the March 13-17 meeting of
the churchwide Board of Discipleship. Peter Storey, former president of the
Methodist Church of South Africa and a former bishop of Johannesburg, also
spoke on the meaning of discipleship and discipleship making. He is
currently professor of Christian ministry at Duke University Divinity
School.

Campbell, a Baptist minister, told the board members that all they need to
know about discipleship can be found by reading Luke 9:51 through Acts 1 in
the Bible.

The Bible is about catechesis or teaching the church how to act like the
church, and the New Testament is the testimony of the church, he said. John
Wesley, the founder of Methodism, allowed people to share their own stories
at services, he said. "We have gotten away from testimony ... and if you
looked at the text of the Bible as teaching, it becomes clear how one does
discipling." It requires not only testimony but rehearsed testimony, he
said.

Testimony should be "portable," he said. "It must be fresh and renewed, and
revisited everyday." Jesus demonstrated that discipleship could occur
instantly, and he showed that discipleship requires bringing the message
down to the people. "The way to make disciples is to teach people how to
pray," Campbell said.  

Being the church also means serving people who are marginalized, he said.
The Bible, he said, is "God's minority report. It was written by people on
the edges and fringes of everything."  But, society has "deodorized,
sanitized and weeded the story and made it sound like it is not work," he
said. "God's minority report will offend some people.  Religion gets in
trouble when it dresses up in the emperor's clothes or vice versa; when all
of sudden we want to quoted by the president rather than be prophetic to the
president."

People have erred when attempting to clean up their story or history, he
said. They are afraid that if their weaknesses are revealed and the truth is
told, they will not make disciples. "Disciples are those who are willing to
risk themselves in making disciples of anything," he said. "Disciples are
made by sharing the story." He added that theology must be practical; people
want to hear about Jesus.

Earlier in the meeting, Bishop Kenneth Carder of the church's Mississippi
Area told about a church that was closing because it failed to reach out to
its own neighborhood, which was in transition.

"There is no reason for the Methodist Church to be closing churches in a sea
of people," Campbell said. "I wish there could be a moratorium on closing
churches. The decline in membership must be examined but not from the point
of view of closing the church. We must find the kind of leadership for that
church."

Storey discussed why the church makes disciples and what disciple-making
congregations look like.

Disciples are not made to save or grow the church, he said. "We won't make
disciples by trying to save the church," he said. He implored the United
Methodist Church and other traditions to stop reading membership numbers.
"Put them away for 10 years because we will not save the church if we are
doing it in order to grow our congregations."

Jesus, he said, makes disciples to join him "in God's world enterprise of
mending the entire universe. It is nothing less than that; not church
saving, not church growing, but world transforming is what disciples ought
to be about."

Making disciples is recruiting people into the "cosmic reign of God" and
equipping them for lives of service, Storey said.  It happens in communities
shaped by the gospel, immersed in the story of "God's long love affair with
humankind, mentored by God's son, Jesus, celebrating God's hospitality that
we call grace, nourished by God's generous manner and God's prevenient
mercy." Those types of communities make disciples, he said.

Disciple-making congregations of all types exist in the United Methodist
Church, he said. "We need to put away all of the books that tell us how to
grow churches and save the churches, and go and look for the disciple-making
churches and ask what God is doing."

Storey shared eight marks of a disciple-making church or congregation.
Majoring in hospitality is one of the hallmarks, he said. This hospitality
has nothing to do with ushers and greeters with trained smiles. It is about
a congregation that has determined not to be like the disciples who
constantly asked Jesus who is in and out, up or down.

The United Methodist Church today is much like the disciples because "it
still has its knickers in a knot about an issue of who is in and who is
out," he said. Although he never mentioned the issue of homosexuality
specifically, he referred to it by stating that the issue has dominated the
church's General Conferences, and those gatherings have been loaded with
pain and struggle.

In a conversation about the excesses of America and its crises of "too much
stuff, exclusion and violence," Storey said, "the world wants to say to
America to stop it. It is tired of watching you tear yourselves apart . . .
while the world is starving."

Christian fellowship is not easy, and it involves the powerful
transformation of some of the deepest taboos, prejudices, hurts and fears.
"When a congregation takes unity seriously, we realize that unity ... is
between people who are different."

Hospitality also involves engaging the poor, he said. "Only the poor can
rescue us from the life-threatening dangers of riches."

Other marks include:
7	Linking people to God.
7	Teaching people to think theologically, considering anything and
everything from a Christian perspective.
7	Preaching evangelistically and prophetically by not talking about
going to heaven but "by preaching about a God who came from heaven and
married this world for better or worse, for richer or poorer."
7	Preaching with a calling and an urgent goal.
7	Living lives of perpetual vulnerability.
7	Believing that God can make a difference.
7	Believing the church becomes a force for transformation when it
believes in the power equation that Jesus is Lord.

Said Storey: "Disciple-making congregations know that they have no mission
of their own because it is all God's."
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United Methodist News Service
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