When it comes to discipleship, there is no shortage of courses or things that people are quick to tell you are definitely needed for this group or that group. Don’t mishear me, sometimes those courses or suggested things are helpful. They may well be worth using. But it also pays to remember that, throughout its history, the church has managed just fine without them, which suggests – helpful as they may be – they probably aren’t vital.
In truth, the church has had a fairly solid, long-standing, reasonably successful discipleship programme. For the most part, that revolved around Sunday. It is the main gathering of the Sunday meetings of the church that has been the church’s long-term discipleship strategy. That is where the bible has been read, preached, sung, prayed and made visible in the ordinances. It is where the training of God’s people has primarily taken place.
When it comes to talk of discipleship, people often quickly gloss over this. Of course we will do stuff on Sunday but we want to talk about discipleship. As if what happens on Sunday isn’t discipleship. As if it isn’t the God-given primary means of discipleship. Not only should we not overlook what happens each Sunday, we should really be building our discipleship programmes around it.
The principal means of growth for God’s people is the corporate gathering of God’s people. It is in the word preached, the songs sung, the prayers prayed, the communion shared and the service enacted as the church comes together. This is God’s discipleship programme and we gloss over it, looking for better courses and whatnot, far too quickly.
Does that mean we ought not to do anything else? No, I don’t think so. But I do think it means you want whatever you do in the week to reinforce what you do together as a gathered church on a Sunday. So when we meet in community groups midweek – something the bible doesn’t demand but we think is a helpful thing to do – we look again at the passage we preached on Sunday. When I meet up with people in the week, I asked them about how they got on with the sermon on Sunday and what they got out of the midweek groups that further discussed the passage. I want to encourage people to be encouraged by the corporate gathering and to learn to take what is done in the corporate gathering and to think on it further and apply it more throughout the week.
If Sunday is the primary focus, the rest of what we do feeds off it. When we meet up, we are doing discipleship. We are modelling to people how, in this setting apart from Sunday, we think about whatever is before us biblically. We model how we act with our families. We model how we engage in our work. We model how we think about whatever happens to be going on as we are sat together. But this all feeds off what we do on a Sunday when we specifically and corporately come together under the word and to respond to it.
I don’t think there are any special discipleship magic tricks. I certainly don’t think we should dismiss so readily what we do on a Sunday. Instead, our primary discipleship tools are those that God-ordained to happen together in community on the Lord’s Day. All that happens thereafter is simply a matter of making the time to be with people and letting them see how the stuff we do together on a Sunday impacts us, and likewise ought to be impacting them, throughout the week and into the rest of our lives.