The Failure to Make Disciples

Thoughts from The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard                                   October 30, 2018

While the title refers to a ‘conspiracy’ by God to subtly overcome evil with good, the message that came through most to me had to do with addressing the question of why the church has been so ineffective in making disciples. The book opens stating the basic problem and his conclusion that both the theological left and right in the church preach a partial gospel that is disconnected from personal integrity and personal character, which are foundational for personal holiness and discipleship. They are fundamentally disconnected from leading people to Christ-likeness. He proposes that the theological left promotes a gospel of commitment to fixing societal/structural sin without really dealing with personal guilt and sin, while the theological right promotes a gospel that is primarily forensic and deals with personal guilt without addressing society. Both of them focus on a salvation that lies somewhere in the future (at death for the forensic gospel, when social justice is achieved for the social gospel) and are what Willard calls ‘gospels of sin management’ rather than of new life.  Neither one really requires a personal, daily walk with Christ; while things like prayer may ‘work’ for some, it isn’t really necessary if you are saved from your guilt on the one hand or aligned with the current politically correct social causes on the other. He comments on this matter that “prayer is not needed either to go to heaven when you die or to be committed to the cause of liberation.”  The result in our time is a Christianity that has little to do with the kind of person you are.  He issues a challenge: would the gospel that I preach cause people to want to become full time students of Jesus? I think he makes good points about this and I have also been concerned about the failure of disciple making in the institutional church. If discipleship happens it is not a result of the programs and culture of the institutional church.

One of my life-long disappointments in the local church has been the near total absence of anything that looks like a serious effort to make disciples. Having been very involved in CRU while in college with their small groups approach to building disciples, I was hoping to find some sort of discipleship in the church that is more aimed at families rather than students. Students have very flexible time schedules so I knew it would be much different after marriage and entering the workforce, but it was very disappointing to find that no such thing exists in local churches. I have lived in Wisconsin, Chicago, Dayton, Memphis, Atlanta, and western Massachusetts and have never found any organized plan to make disciples anywhere.

The CRU approach can be summarized in the 3 words Win, Build, and Send. The CRU approach to evangelism incorporates it as part of discipleship as small groups train their members to do ongoing witnessing. It seems to me that local churches focus on Win (evangelism) but more as events with preaching than by personal witness. Churches tend to have a patchwork of various programs on the other 2 matters. Willard’s book doesn’t really say very much about the Win part or the Send (multiplication of disciplers) part, focusing the Build disciples part. His focus is on being an apprentice to Jesus such that we actually live the new life in Christ and develop habits that overcome our natural, fleshly reactions to life. In that regard he focuses less on what we do and more on the kind of person we are. Most other discipleship definitions seem to be mostly aimed at what we do. 

He also goes on to outline some obstacles to making disciples that are inherent in our current ‘gospels’ in addition to the incompleteness of these 2 that confine the impact of the kingdom of God to some undetermined time in the future. One of these obstacles is our view of God as either far away from us as a result of our view of the cosmos being vast with God out there somewhere beyond space and time, or else an opposite view of God being inside us but not really active in the world around us. Both of these cause us to think of God and His kingdom as being in a location that is not very important in our physical life here and now. He spends time addressing the nature of the cosmos as being within God’s kingdom and God being available everywhere, along with how our limited view of the reality of both matter and spirit limits our openness and willingness to living in the kingdom now.

Another obstacle is our view of Jesus; we often view Him as holy but not actually smart or having great ability; we think of Him as wise but never think of Him as having humor or laughing; we think of Him as having eliminated obedience as important by providing the solution to our sin and guilt but do not see Him as demonstrating what it looks like for obedience to the Law to be our natural and automatic response when we have life in the kingdom. The result is we don’t seek to grow in obedience and holiness; as Willard points out, though, “Trust in Christ is inseparable from the fulfilling the Law” and “Law is not the source of righteousness but it is the course of righteousness”. In misunderstanding Jesus we also misunderstand His teaching, and he uses the Sermon on the Mount to walk through that.

The partial gospels do not require prayer and our misunderstandings inhibit prayer. He encourages praying for what we are concerned about since “prayer simply dies from efforts to pray for ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us.” This actual connection with God then leads to a discussion of what building disciples might look like.

Like Piper, he points out that delighting in God is the real goal of discipleship. He finds that getting to that requires some discipline, however, with ‘disciple’ and ‘discipline’ sharing the same root. Delighting in God, desiring God, loving that which is lovely and virtuous; these are all part of the goal and should involve both body and spirit since we are made as unified body/spirit creations. The gospel taught to disciples must be the gospel that reveals the God who can be loved with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, which is to say with both our spirit and our body.  This includes delighting in God’s creation, both of the cosmos and of ourselves. Loving father and mother as in the 10 Commandments requires being thankful that God created us as part of His creation, for example. He sees discipleship as a course of apprenticeship to Jesus that is intended to create habits of body and spirit that break our bondage to natural, fleshly responses to life.  This disciplines us so that our body becomes a spiritual asset.  He recommends 4 basic disciplines in this course: 2 of Abstinence (Solitude and Silence) and 2 of Activity (Study and Worship/Service).

I agree with much of what he has to say, and I think his concern about the need for discipleship is exactly on target. I think it would be good to expand the core disciplines to a few more that go back to the Torah: Sabbath, giving/tithe, and the Levitical constraints on sex. All of these involve key areas where body and spirit connect in important ways.  He mentions Sabbath briefly, and it may be that Sabbath and giving can be included in the Worship aspect, but our current age and the sexual revolution cries out for a specific response to the sexual dysfunction that has also become an obstacle to discipleship in our time. The regular practice of abstinence called for in Leviticus 15 is a stark contrast to the current culture and teaches very directly that regular abstinence and self-control are required disciplines for the body if the body is to be a power for good. Sexuality has become a defining issue of our time and it will need to be better addressed in the church as a result; I think the church has failed in regard to adequate teaching on marriage and sexuality just as we have failed in discipleship (of which marriage and family is an important part).  But you can’t cover everything in one book so overall I appreciated this book a great deal!