Discipleship: A Working Definition
Essay #2 in the series
In the first essay I wrote on understanding discipleship in a climate emergency, I presented a summary of the more popular definitions of Christian discipleship that exist, particularly online. (Didn’t read the essay yet? You can check it out HERE). What I discovered is that when you Google the word ‘discipleship’ you end up with a predominantly conservative evangelical understanding of what Christian discipleship is and how it is to be lived out. The same holds when you go to Amazon and look up books on the topic. I offered this summary:
“Discipleship, in conservative Christian thought, is considered to be a journey of spiritual growth that is characterized as intentionally seeking to be more like Jesus, making a lifelong commitment to follow God known (only) through Jesus and, most importantly, seeking to ‘make’ or ‘grow’ other disciples. The key function of discipleship is to help ‘unbelievers become believers,’ and work together to ‘overcome the pressures and trials’ of life.”
This is an understanding of discipleship that is not only problematic for its religious exclusivity and emphasis on the need to grow more Christian disciples, it fails to pay much if any attention to action for the sake of others in the world. In my search on Google and Amazon, I found very little commentary regarding discipleship being lived out through Jesus’ call to care for the poor and marginalized, to love our neighbour as ourselves, or to give up our belongings for the sake of the Gospel.
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Discipleship is, however, far more nuanced than what Google and Amazon would have one believe.
In the course of writing my Ph.D. dissertation, and then later as I worked with the ideas in my teaching and ministry, I have discovered that the meaning of discipleship is much simpler and more complex than often believed. This is good news because for more people of faith to take effective climate action in this time of crisis, we need to have an understanding of discipleship that can help encourage, challenge and inspire people of faith to act in ways that they may not have thought they were capable of doing!
Here is an incredibly simple definition of discipleship that simply works:
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