Now consider a different image. Imagine that this fish is removed from the ocean and from its school and is thrown in someone’s backyard. People take turns spraying the fish with a water hose every 15 minutes. They also sprinkle salt on its body.
That’s an apt picture of modern discipleship.
Discipleship has been separated from the Christian’s native habitat (ekklesia), and it’s become a highly individualistic event. An individual discipler “disciples” an individual disciplee to become a better individual disciple.
And we have not so learned Jesus Christ.
Christianity has and always will be a collective, corporate life and pursuit.
The issue, therefore, is not discipleship. The issue is restoring the ekklesia as God intended it to be, for the ekklesia is the Christian’s native habitat. And out of it flows everything else.
How Did the Twelve Make Disciples?
The fish metaphor brings us face-to-face with a question that’s rarely asked today: How did the apostles who received the original commission of Jesus to “make disciples of all nations” carry out this commission?
If you read the New Testament chronologically from Acts to Revelation, there’s only one answer you can come up with. They did so by planting ekklesias all over the known world.
I invite anyone to challenge me on that point.
Converts were made and sustained into full-pledged followers of the Messiah, naturally and organically, simply by being part of the local ekklesia in their city. For them, the ekklesia was the environment for spiritual training. It was, as T. Austin-Sparks put it, “the school of Christ.”
The Twelve knew ekklesia themselves. They lived in an embryonic expression of it in Galilee with Jesus Himself. For 3 ½ years, the Twelve and some women lived in community with one another where Jesus was both the center and the head of their lives together.
When a Christian lives in a living expression of the Body of Christ today, he or she is being discipled just by being part of that expression. Just as a saltwater fish grows, is nurtured, and is sustained simply by living in the ocean and swimming with its school.
Ekklesia, therefore, is the birth right of every child of God. By living in it, God’s people naturally absorb Christ. This is because in an authentic ekklesia, the life of Jesus Christ is constantly flowing, being shared, expressed, revealed, and imparted by and to the members. To wit, the Christian is “discipled” by Christ and into Christ through the community of the believers when it is functioning as it should.
I don’t say this theoretically. I’ve watched it happen countless times over the last 23 years in healthy ekklesias.
Those who are called to plant ekklesias today, therefore, carry out the so-called “Great Commission.” They make disciples (converts) and establish them into communities where the Holy Spirit does the work of transformation (what many are calling “discipleship” today).
We Don’t Know Our History
Another observation I make is that people who are jazzed about discipleship (usually males in their mid-to-late 20s and early 30s – their leaders being in their 40s and 50s), seem to have no knowledge of the history of modern discipleship, where it came from, and why it even exists.
The story harkens back to John Nelson Darby’s teachings in the early 19th century. Darby used the art of proof-texting the New Testament to separate conversion from following Jesus.
