This week’s download, Transforming Nominal Christians, is designed to help you assess how well your church challenges and disciples attenders. The piece below gives another model for the idea of discipleship: re-parenting.
To seize upon one of our Lord’s favorite metaphors, the “fish” business these days is not as simple as it once seemed. The human fish now come out of outrageously polluted cultural waters, and they bring all the effects of their pollutedness with them. So how do you develop leaders–productive disciples of Jesus–from such a population?
The word re-parenting comes to mind. It suggests an effort at conversion, discipleship, and leadership development–a thorough renovation of one’s life in line with Paul’s strong words: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” Not just a nicer person, but a new creation. Re-birthed! And if re-birthed, then also re-parented.
Re-parenting is selective. You pick a specific group of people and tell them why you’ve picked them. You tell them that this is not a therapy group and that we are not going to be driven by problems, but rather by possibilities (“henceforth you will be fishing for men” is a biblical example).
Re-parenting is structured. My wife, Gail, and I tell our potential disciples: “Don’t get involved unless you’re willing to be with us in our home for three hours every Wednesday night for a year. Don’t get involved unless you’re committed to being there on time, prepared, and able to stay for the duration of the evening.” Once the standards are set, almost no one ever misses. We’ve learned that good people like to be pushed hard to higher standards.
Re-parenting is best done by a team. In our case, the team began with Gail and me. It provided everyone a chance to see a husband and wife working together week by week. Along the way we added to our team other couples (our age). They opened their lives to the younger people. How? By telling stories. By owning up to mistakes, aborted dreams, and the messiness of living. By disclosing the fruit of lessons learned, the principles that have proved their worth, the blessings of obedience and sacrifice.
Re-parenting gives people a vocabulary. We began by looking for ways to help them understand themselves and others. We found the Myers-Briggs Temperament structure a useful tool. It equips people to describe themselves and discover where they need to grow. Daniel Goleman’s books on “Emotional Intelligence” were extremely helpful. Into these categories of thought and observation we were able to pour Christian perspective.
Re-parenting teaches people how to think. The process accelerates as you have people read, analyze, and discuss with one another what they’re learning. Eventually, that means reading assigned books and articles on a regular basis. We found the world of biography essential here, biblical and extra-biblical. We put a great emphasis upon the discovery of character, and spent long hours discussing what we were all finding. We got each person to adopt a “hero” and learn everything possible about the character and spiritual orientation of that person. Then each learner taught the rest of us.
We taught them to talk with each other (the art of dialogue) and knew we had accomplished something when they started talking to each other and not directing their conversations toward us. And we knew something was happening when they started arriving at our home early and staying later and then standing outside under the street light (still talking) after we’d booted them out and gone to bed.
Re-parenting means working together. We did projects together–learning to serve one another, to give sacrificially, and to stretch oneself to do the inconvenient or the unselfish.
Re-parenting involves spiritual disciplines. We taught these disciplines and practiced them with one another. Learning to pray all over again; learning to value Scripture and put it to use; learning to hear God speak into life. We noticed that it took about three months of practice for our people to start volunteering to pray for one another and to support one another in the various issues they were facing during the rest of the week.
Re-parenting means modeling. I invited each member of our group in turn to spend the better part of a weekend with Gail and me–following us around, eavesdropping on our conversations, listening to us pray for people, and responding to their questions. I showed them how I constructed talks, planned meetings, and edited my daily calendar. I might not have been the brightest or the most organized person they’d ever encountered, but I was among the first to invite them into the private sector of my life as a leader.
Re-parenting means affirming–and rebuking. Only when there is clear candor can change happen.
Let me be clear in saying that my discipleship group is not interested in manufacturing stamped-out cookie-cutter clones of its leaders. This can’t happen if you are urging members to discover their uniqueness in temperament, spiritual gifting, and Christian character. And cloning won’t happen if you make sure that they’re being re-parented not by just one or two people, but by an entire spiritual “neighborhood.”
Re-parenting is not a program; it’s a way of ministry. I have slowly become convinced that one-on-one discipleship may be less effective than development in a group. Others have pointed out that, in the Gospels, Jesus is never seen working one-on-one with any of his disciples. Even the personal conversations with Simon Peter are carried out in the presence of other people. Such group discipling provides context to what the leader says and does.
Taken from Building a Culture of Discipleship
