Advanced discipleship training serves the most underserved people in the church: people who reach a midway point in their maturity but don’t get to “the other side.” This problem is actually predictable, because, by trying to communicate to a congregation with a wide range of spiritual growth, there is a tendency for leaders to aim for the middle. So that’s where their people end up!
Being in the middle, however, can be dangerous—whether it’s being in the middle of the road during the rush of oncoming traffic, or being in the middle of a lake when suddenly a rising and raging storm appears. Jesus didn’t want his disciples stuck in the middle. His command was for them to go to “the other side.”
Getting to the other side isn’t even a goal in most churches. When it comes to “perfecting the saints,” no serious effort is given to identify the characteristics and competencies of a “perfected saint,” or to formulate a scripturally-consistent strategy that will promote these qualities. Absent this goal, the believer makes significantly less progress than what could have been the case. The applicable rule of thumb being: We tend not to accomplish the goals we never set.
The Need for Advanced Discipleship
Churches are clear about the beginning; they’re not as clear about the end. They focus on Alpha. They don’t focus on Omega. Churches can take believers to a midway point, perhaps, but they don’t take them to the other side. Instead, it is assumed, without examination, that if people hang around the church long enough, they’ll become perfected. The result of this approach is church members meandering in mediocrity, all because leaders didn’t recognize the need for advanced discipleship training.
In his work, “The Complete Book of Discipleship,” Bill Hull writes, “… it’s a huge mistake to think that we can simply learn the basics, flow into the general population and live off that.” Yet many churches have made this mistake. Commenting further, this discipleship leader declared, “The cause of Christ has paid a terrible price because of the mistaken concept that discipleship is only for beginners.”1 Too often, the care given to converts is soon withdrawn; and thereafter, they are on their own.
One hindering factor that keeps believers from “omega” truth is the quality of teaching the church offers. Churches do say something about selected pursuit-of-God dynamics—a blurb, a brief summary, a small nugget of truth—but omit way too much. There is more bud than bloom in these teachings, and therefore people receive only a pabulum portion of what was supposed to be meaty truth.
LCD (lowest common denominator) teaching may be popular, but it actually stunts people into carnality. What John MacArthur calls “birdbath preaching” can be so shallow it offers only a small puddle of truth—something stagnant, ever evaporating, and noticeably isolated from God’s rivers of living water! This preaching approach, ostensibly taken so no one is left out, remains the same year after year. The preacher goes no higher in year five than he did in year one. Even superb expositional preaching, however, has its limitations. Advanced discipleship has to be topical, and it has to be behavioral. Verse-by-verse, book-by-book preaching fails to draw together, with specificity and comprehension, what advanced discipleship training requires.
In order to set forth the holy habits of faith, the OMEGA Advanced Discipleship ministry is designed to compensate for these deficits by delving deeper. As A.W. Tozer put it, “You can live on froth and bubbles and little wisps of badly understood theology,”2 but there is a need for something more substantial. Instead of fill-in-the-blank discipleship, or a discipleship that does little more than identify major themes with bullet points and blurbs, a practical theology needs to be both thoroughly explained and profoundly experienced.
Second, the child of God has also been hindered by an LCD teaching that omits several pursuit-of-God dynamics entirely. The faithful become spiritually stuck, then, because of this one indefensible factor: LCD teaching presents only half a map! Taking to task this restricted itinerary, what may be called the longitude deficit in church teaching, Tozer wrote:
Something within the heart of normal man revolts against motion without progress. Yet this is precisely what we are offered in the vast majority of evangelical churches. Doctrinally these churches are moving around a tight and narrow circle. Their teachers tell them that this circle encompasses all the land of Beulah and warn them of the danger of looking for anything more.3
Learn more about advanced discipleship on page two . . .
1 Bill Hull, “The Complete Book of Discipleship,” (NAVPress, Colorado Springs, CO., 2006), p.38.
2 A.W. Tozer, “Attributes of God,” volume 2, (Camp Hill, PA, Christian Publications, 2001), p.165.
3 A.W. Tozer, “The Warfare of the Spirit,” (Camp Hill, PA., Christian Publications, 1993), p.70.
