Leadership Journal

The challenge for today's church is how to make whole disciples out of broken people.

Some people's brokenness is obvious. Abuse or abandonment has left scars. With others, beautiful exteriors have been carefully crafted to hide what no one really wants to see anyway. Sometimes only their eyes betray them. Or the unsteadiness in the voice, or the almost unnoticeable trembling of the hands.

That was Sarah's case. Who would guess this young wife with two children had just had a lesbian affair? Sarah's infidelity masked a deeper internal fragmentation. How could her husband Michael have known that his emotional inaccessibility would lead to this kind of alienation? Though he loved Sarah deeply, his own background made the prospect of intimacy something he feared almost more than abandonment.

Their marriage was fragile, their future uncertain.

Can you make disciples of such people?

The road was difficult, but now, 10 years later, Michael and Sarah have a strong marriage and a ministry to others. The ingredient critical to this story is the role of the local church.

Discipleship is rapidly taking on new textures in today's post-modern context. The modern church saw discipleship primarily as doctrinal training. A mature Christian was someone who knew his Bible. Good citizenship was expected of everyone. This was not an unreasonable paradigm, but it was a dangerous one.

Before post-modernism, the church enjoyed the positive influence of a culture shaped by the Christian faith. Life change became a lost art because most people appeared "together."

As the society around us declined, so did the emotional health, relationships, morality, and overall well-being of everyone—inside and outside the church. We became functionally powerless to help those whose lives are crashing, devastated by the power of sin.

Restoring broken lives requires conviction, commitment, and community. Unfortunately, even when the church wants to help, often it assumes it doesn't have the power to heal. We profess that Jesus changes lives, but with broken people we tend to rely on psychotherapy. We'll entrust Jesus with the small stuff, but we refer out the really big problems to Freud.

How do we begin to reclaim the power of making fully functioning disciples out of seriously flawed people?

It begins with a culture of expectancy. When my son Aaron was three, he became a follower of Jesus Christ. This was new for me, since I came to Christ as an adult. Nothing shocked me more than his first bedtime prayer at the age of four. I always prayed for him, and now it was his turn to express his requests to God.

"Jesus, make me a leader of men. I know I'm too little now, but move me into leadership." I was in shock! Moments later my wife Kim reminded me that this is what he is around all the time.

Ethos, environment, culture—this is key to holistic life change.

For the last 20 years, those most committed to discipleship overwhelmingly moved toward intense "one on one" relationships. ...