Making Disciples Interview with John Mark Comer

Choa Macomber welcome to making disciples your the posture of bridge town in Portland your massive Star Wars fan which I absolutely love and I am so pleased to have you oh by the way people watching this haven't read God as a name this is an excellent book so just to kind of make sure that people are aware that that's around a little shameless plug left me but I'd love to talk to you about apprenticeship and decide yeah if that's all right I heard you speak a little while ago a couple years ago about discipleship and I want to feed you some questions that let you run so if I ask the question what is discipleship and what is it not how would you answer that question well I think the first thing I would say is that when people hear that word discipleship it means different things to different people it's one of the words one of the reasons that I prefer the word apprenticeship but you know for some people discipleship means like one-on-one in-depth Bible study it's kind of a navigators model of discipleship you know that history for other people discipleship means mentorship you meet with older wiser following Jesus every Thursday morning for coffee and you go through a book or you just talk or do life together whatever for other people discipleship means leadership development so that's the kind of you know master plan of evangelism Jesus had 12 people that he poured into the 12 people and those 12 people all became later it's important to other people and Paul and Timothy and all three of those I think are fantastic things in-depth Bible study one-on-one mentorship and leadership development but when I say discipleship I don't really mean any of that although those might be subcategories I think those are all great things but we don't call those discipleship we call those in depth Bible study one-on-one mentorship and leadership development all of which are great all of which are in the New Testament all of which before but when we say discipleship or we prefer the language of apprenticeship just because for one disciple is a word that's rarely used outside of the church it's used basically for Christians and cult members you know the the Raj Nietzsche or whatever and - I think we import meanings into it that aren't actually from the New Testament that are radically disconnected from first century Jewish culture where a disciple realize that Jesus didn't make up disciples Jesus wasn't the only one who have disciples the Pharisees had disciples John the Baptist had disciples it wasn't even it didn't even start in Israel it started before in Greece with the Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates and Aristotle all had disciples or matha taste in Greek and I honestly think that the English word that is the best job of capturing what a decide what I'm at the taste is what a usually translated disciples is actually apprentice I think that's a desert a little bit better because it's this idea of like a student or learner but not a student in the sense of like a university student you go when you read a few books and you take a test at the end you move on it was more of like learning from a master you know to apprentice under a painter or a plumber or an electrician or a pastor or whatever your craft is where you would journey with a master to become like him and eventually do what he does yeah I like it where have we gone wrong with discipleship yeah because everything that you just talked about we would say yeah we see that in the gospel yes but we look at our church and go that's not what we've got yeah so where have we gone wrong I think we've lost a few things I think you know one in the West we've created this category where you can be a Christian but not a disciple of Jesus or an apprentice of Jesus all most of us look like a printer ship for Jesus is for the extra serious something you do post salvation it's almost you know I mean what the second blessing is to the Pentecostal tradition discipleship is to the wider Protestant tradition it's like this thing that happens after you quote get saved and that of course is a radical mistreating of Jesus in the Gospels you have this literary device from pretty much all four writers where you have the disciples of Jesus which is not just the twelve people get the the twelve and the disciples confused the twelve were the apostles Jesus had at least hundreds of apprentices if not more the twelve were it was kind of his leadership development thing but he had far more disciples or apprentices than the twelve and so you have this category of the disciples of Jesus and then you have the second category of the crowds and the crowds are all over the map you know some of them are Friends of Jesus others full-on enemies you have Pharisees that are in the crowd like working up a plan to kill him you know and all sorts of people in between and you just never know where they stand but I think in the church we've created this third category of Christian where you know I don't know what that means in your context in my contacts at least in the more conservative parts of America that just kind of means somebody who you know has a vague kind of belief in the chip who they have critics in God you know it goes to church once in a while and it's a semi moral person you know it's really really really the bar is set really low for that and it has more to do with what you believe you know so I think we need to get back to there are not two categories there's I'm sorry there's not three categories this - you know are you in the crowd or are you an apprentice of Jesus secondly I think you know in the Protestant Reformation which did so much good in the West but one of one of its I think false starts that to this day 500 years later we are still reeling from is I think it humble opinion here I think misread law and grace I think Luther and his followers misread law and grace and they read law as all things connected to self effort or what they would call work space righteousness any kind of effort on your part and grace they misread I think as unmerited favor like just God's you know unconditional love is not language used in survival but it's language used all the time in the church and obviously there's different theological persuasions that have different takes here but I think that law has to do with the Torah specifically with the commands of Torah that were you know you made you write in God's eyes if you were Jewish if you were circumcised you got the right ethnicity and you practice the right dietary laws and grace I think in the New Testament has to do not just with the unconditional love of God but I think it's more of a synonym for the Holy Spirit or I think the best definition of grace is the empowering presence of God it's God in you giving you the power and capacity to be what God made you to be and do what God made you to do that's really the only way the only definition that makes sense if you just do a word study of grace in the New Testament and fill in unconditional love or unmerited favor nine times ten it does not even make grammatical sense because I think but if you put in empowering presents that's a whole other thing so obviously to say you know we're saved not by you know self effort but instead by the unconditional love of God is very different to sin to say we're saved not by our Jewish ethnicity and the fact that we're circumcised and we don't eat pork but rather by the impressive empowering presence of God to enable us to be who he made us to be in doing that's a very different gospel you know or a very reading of it but I do think right or wrong I think there's this built-in paranoia to the Protestant tradition a high anxiety level of anything that smacks of self effort and we confuse effort and earning a Dallas Willard had this great line grace is not opposed to effort as opposed to earning and efforts actually a New Testament word I mean Peter says something that no Protestant would ever say today says make make it your effort to add to your life you know use a beautiful line and so effort is actually a good thing in the New Testament ironically good works is almost like a dirty word in the Protestant tradition and the New Testament good works are exactly that they're good yeah i muted so i think the problem is following Jesus is something you do and there's this long-running tradition of passivity in the Protestant Church where it's like it's not about what you do it's about what Christ has done for you it's not about self effort it's about you know just receive receive receive rather than what the church has historically said is it's a blend of you know in the language of the kind of the medieval church passive and active there are things that you do and things that you receive and things that you receive it's something to follow Jesus is to do something and so I think even some of our Protestant theology has really messed us up a bit and the whole point of apprenticeship is that Jesus says come see or sometimes translators come follow you then watch what Jesus is doing he shows you he what even introduces you know how do we go how we're gonna solve this boys and then he sends it off to do it and then we come back on the ethics of apprenticeship is very much partnering alongside Jesus watching him and then doing it with him and as I are gay that we've actually turned the church into a school for historians we learn about the historical Jesus oh yeah I know about the historical Jesus but we're not apprentices way of life right and I you know we've we've we've made Christianity an academic exercise rather than a life lived yes long sigh and it's the issue there is you know we forget that Jesus was a rabbi as well as a messiah and Savior of the world and it's not that he's not the Savior he's not less than that he's more than that yeah yeah we've lost Jesus the teacher and the liberal conservative divide the Liberals kind of got Jesus the teacher and the Conservatives kind of got Jesus the Savior was just a tragic kind of you know the divorce breakup kind of thing and I think we've lost sight of that I mean Jesus constantly talked about the way and I think we forgot that the way of Jesus which was the earliest name for the church yeah before it was even called the church it was called the way I think we've lost sight that the way is just that it is a way of life it's not just a set of ideas that we believe in our head that we call Bible or theology or history or academia and it's not just a list of do's and don'ts for our mind in our body that we call ethics it is that but it's more than that it's a lifestyle and apprenticeship to Jesus is about not just learning the Bible and theology and learning to believe what Jesus believes it is that but it's also about learning how to live how Jesus lives and not just morally how he lives but you know practically how he lives these practices that the church is called spiritual disciplines that are all based on the life and teachings of Jesus Prayer Sabbath and life and community and simplicity and silence and solitude and celebration and eating and drinking and these are practices that are all based on the life of Jesus sort of follow Jesus is to take on his yoke to take on his way of life and to apprentice under him in learning how to do it so it is academic Jesus was a teacher but it's not just academic you have to move out of the classroom into day-to-day life then if you come across this but Rowan Williams yelled Archbishop of Canterbury wrap a book called being disciples think and in Easter's discipleship to Jesus's apprenticeship to use in the same way that a fisherman sits at a lake watching the lake for two days and in certainly a Kingfisher after two days comes and grabs a fish up the water and flies away and watching and waiting in the in that one moment you see something that changes everything I mean apprentices of Jesus is to watch Jesus for days and end to read scripture for days an end for that one little moment where you certainly see something you've never seen before and it all kind of falls into place and I love the idea of being an apprentice it being a produce is walking with Jesus so closely that in that one moment he'll say something you don't expect he'll do something you don't expect and everything changes yeah we don't want the spiritual discipline of sitting and waiting we want it today we want it now yes you know dallas willard beautifully talks about the spiritual disciplines as being that the space that we create to sit and watch jesus yes and what we've done is we've made discipleship about learning the historical jesus without the sitting are waiting and watching for the eggs that you know it may take weeks and there's something you see something you've never seen before you got all make sense and one of things i love to just push and think about is that very often the evangelical church discipleship is the activity of the doing the catholic church has the spiritual disciplines which are the sitting with the waiting the meditating and reading on scriptures are fasting and actually neither in themselves a discipleship it's only when the two comes together that you have real biblical discipleship yes and it's and it's all of that you know it's the Catholic and the evangelical all together that that's where you find robust biblical design yeah and that's one of the best things I think happening in the church right now with globalization and the digital age is this beautiful kind of hybridization bringing these disparate streams of the church back together again now that we have couple open access through the internet to all sorts of other leaders and other traditions are there resources you know yeah I mean when we talk about apprenticeship we we kind of our language for it is we say it's a life organized around three goals goal one is to be with Jesus yeah or Jesus called abiding or prayer or Catholic others called contemplation just this baseline of life with God goal to is to become like Jesus so you want to call it spiritual formation or transformation whatever formation where you want to use where we're changed from the inside out and we take on the inner heart posture of Jesus which then leaks out in our mind and our body and our relationship and think and then go three is to do what he did like that's the goal of an apprentice right parenthesis or plumber your goal isn't just to know all about plumbing it's eventually to be able to plumb a house so if you apprentice under Jesus your goal is to be able to do all the stuff that he was on about preaching the gospel and healing the sick and prophesying and doing justice and living out the kingdom of God and of course a better way to say do what he did is because we're not all first century single Jewish rabbis is you know to do what he would do if he were me so if he was female if he was a stay-at-home parent if he was accountant if he was a pastor of an Anglican Church if he was an artist you know how would he live if he were me and you know what because we're none of us are all Jesus we're just the body we just are one part of it but those three goals would be with Jesus become like Jesus do what he did that's kind of how we frame it and I find that whatever language put it people put around it you basically see those three categories so some people might call it intimacy with God or prayer and you know character and mission or whatever they call it or they might say you know with God and you know for the world like people have different language around it but basically you see those three categories pop up over and over and over and for some people there's a fourth category of community we just kind of put that as the context in which all three happen you know but yeah I just could not agree more that baseline to your kingfish kingfishers analogy that baseline is abiding it's just like with Jesus and trying to do and to live that way especially in the day of age of the smartphone and the internet busyness and if you have children takes spiritual disciplines you know takes practices just like any relationship my wife and I were raising three kids in the city will work in if we want to have any kind of a relationship we have to build practices into our day and our week and our year that creates space for us just to be together be present to each other connect with each other talk to each other that's our weekly date night it's our morning touch point it's our annual vacation it's anniversary and it's not legalistic we're not enough earning her love by taking her to brunch tomorrow morning it's that tomorrow is my day off and every every you know week on my day off we go we were the same brunch place we have that we have a meal together you know and it's not it's motivated by love to create space for relationship otherwise just we just turn into like you know roommates slash business partners that are just trying to get stuff done you know and it's a that's fun for a marriage and it's no fun if that's your discipleship to Jesus okay last question then before I let you go someone in my church it finds themself a hideous energy of being a crowd member or a disciple and apprentice apprentice and they actually the reality is I'm in the crowd I've never transitioned to being a disciple and yes the answers mark I pick up your cross and follow me if you want to be my disciple yes but what would you say to somebody they say they want to move from one to the other but what do i do how do I make that move what yes shift how would you respond to that what I think there has to be a moment of decision so I think in the New Testament pattern that moment is baptism so if you have never been baptized I think that is step one you're baptized into discipleship know Jesus if that's already a part of your religious upbringing or your religious tradition or as a childhood or whatever then I think you need to curate some kind of a moment of decision that is public and open facing you where you go on record and then I think step one is you join a community you know I mean whatever that looks like and that doesn't necessarily just mean you go to church on Sunday you know it's depending on the church but you need to join a community of apprentices of Jesus even though that community is six people that have dinner every saying I join a community ideally with some older wiser people farther down the way who can mentor you in the way of Jesus and get you started and then you just slowly but surely begin to reorganize your life around be with Jesus become like Jesus do what he did begin with some of the practices of Jesus that set your life up with the war God it might be as simple as in the morning take a little time to pray and begin reading scripture you know I mean and then you work up to Sabbath and church and community and simplicity but you begin to order your life around these practices of Jesus in community with the number one goal you start with is just alright how do I become aware of how do I be with Jesus how to become aware of God and connect to God as much as possible all from the moment I wake up I mean literally just begin by waking up in the morning before you get out of bed before you do anything just give thanks and commit your day to God and then just begin to organize your life to where you try to stay in that pocket all through the day all through the week and every let everything else kind of flow out of that place of life excellent thank you so much I thank you for giving us some of your time it's great bless you and hopefully we'll catch up again soon thank you so much

Channel: Cris Rogers - Making Disciples

Views: 1,457

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: John Mark Comer, Cris Rogers, Apprenticeship, disciplehsip, Jesus

Id: VLiKbqhXNOs

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018