*Editor’s Note: Is Jesus-style disciple making the core mission of the church today—or was it meant to be a pre-Pentecost paradigm? Does contemporary disciple making work? Or does it leave behind crucial areas of spiritual formation? Recently, New Testament theologian Dr. John Whittaker entered a dialogue with Dr. Kyle Strobel of Talbot School of Theology and the Institute for Spiritual Formation. Strobel argues that discipleship is the wrong paradigm for the church today. In interacting with Strobel, Whittaker offers a helpful perspective as both a theologian and disciple making practitioner. He explains what Strobel gets right and wrong about discipleship.
Kyle Strobel is a theologian at Biola University focused on spiritual theology, and he is the head of the Institute of Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology. He’s also a teaching elder at his church. He, along with John Coe, has written what I consider to be one of the best books on prayer titled Where Prayer Becomes Real, as well as several other very helpful books (if you’re a church leader in any capacity, you should check out The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb).
Earlier this year via his Substack, he sent out a blog titled “Why Discipleship Doesn’t Work”, which pointed to the release of a mini-course on his Substack on “Reimagining Discipleship.” In it, Kyle questioned the entire discipleship framework that has been re-emphasized for the last 30+ years and is central to the ministry of RENEW.org.
“Kyle questioned the entire discipleship framework that has been re-emphasized for the last 30+ years and is central to the ministry of RENEW.org.”
Kyle’s major contention is that the framework of disciple making and discipleship itself is a pre-Pentecost approach to following Jesus, it’s not found in the New Testament after Jesus’ ascension, and it is thus not a paradigm the church is meant to follow. Two of his main concerns have to do with 1) how the idea of being a disciple and discipleship are often disconnected from church and life in the church and 2) how the discipleship framework is often so individualized as a result.
I resonated with a lot of what Kyle had to say but also found several times where I think he overstates his case. Kyle and I actually recorded a conversation about this that is available on each of our podcasts.
In this article, I explore several things I think Kyle gets right and a couple things I think he gets wrong about discipleship.
What Kyle Gets Right (or, what I appreciate about Kyle’s critique of the discipleship framework)
1. We need to be wary of moralism and Pelagianism.
All models or approaches to spiritual growth, whether that’s a discipleship framework or something else, must guard against this.
We can too easily slip into pulling ourselves up by our own moral bootstraps, and that is not at all what becoming Christlike is. The example Kyle uses is the false idea that adding a handful of spiritual practices to our life is how we will make ourselves like Jesus. Any configuration that centralizes our effort and our ability to put on Christ must be rejected. As Paul asks the Galatians rhetorically, “Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3, NASB).
Our transformation into Christlikeness is first and finally a work that God does in us through His Spirit. It’s through our union with Christ that we bear good fruit (John 15:1-11). It’s through the Spirit that we put to death the deeds of the body (Romans 8:11-13). As Kyle regularly points out, our growth individually and collectively as the church is a “growth which is from God” (Colossians 2:19, NASB).
“Our transformation into Christlikeness is first and finally a work that God does in us through His Spirit.”
2. We need a robust spiritual theology.
Kyle is correct that the proper remedy for moralism is spiritual theology. He’s also correct that our pragmatism quickly balks at this.
I was once discussing upcoming plans with the director of a retreat I’d been asked to speak at. He said he wanted me to focus on what the Bible teaches about spiritual growth. I replied, “So you want me to develop a practical theology of spiritual growth?”
His immediate response was, “I don’t want you to get into all that theology stuff…”
Sadly, this anti-theology notion has infected much of our church life, including the discipleship conversation. And I get it…there has been some (a lot?!) of theology done in less than helpful ways. But without a clear, robust, and practical theology of how a person goes from outside of Christ to mature in Christ, our pragmatic discipleship models will continue to be shallow, less-than-biblical, and ultimately ineffective.
“This anti-theology notion has infected much of our church life, including the discipleship conversation.”
We need spiritual theology. We need a deep yet practical theology of grace, regeneration, and sanctification, so that people know it’s safe to be completely honest with God and that it’s possible to become the kind of human God created us to be. We need to help people learn how to walk with the Spirit so that by the Sprit they can put to death the deeds of the body and the Spirit can cultivate His character in them (Romans 8:11-12; Galatians 5:16-24).
My experience has been similar to Kyle’s that most Christians and even a good number of pastors don’t have a clear grasp of most of this.
3. We need to guard against simplistic formulas for discipleship.
Most churches think in terms of a “discipleship program”—a class they offer twice a year or a small group study they use or maybe, if they’re really serious, a one-on-one program. And they typically measure success by how many people came.
And I suspect it’s this kind of thing that Kyle is thinking of when he says discipleship doesn’t work.
It’s not that such programs don’t bear any fruit, but there’s a whole lot more to becoming like Jesus than going through a discipleship program. Humans are much more complex, sin and brokenness run a whole lot deeper, and putting on Christ is messier than formulaic and simplistic discipleship programs can actually deal with.
4. We need to be cautious about misusing rabbinic writings.
Some of the more popular explorations of discipleship in Jesus’ day rely heavily on the Talmud and rabbinic writings from a hundred or more years after the time of Jesus. They also come from the time after the temple was destroyed. Because of this, they reflect a very different situation and way of operating than that of the New Testament.
Kyle points out that these sources are often used in historically inaccurate ways that add way more detail to the broader Jewish approach to discipleship than we have in the first century. This is a helpful caution, though I think most scholars would acknowledge there is a historically responsible way to use these sources.
Having said that, I also think Kyle swings the pendulum too far the other way by saying that all the word “disciple” meant in Jesus’ day was “student” and that it didn’t have all the meaning that’s been given to it today, meaning that’s been imported from later rabbinic writings. Jesus Himself assumes a particular model of discipleship when He says, “A student [mathētēs, disciple] is not above the teacher; but everyone, when he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40, NASB). This describes how discipleship worked in the Jewish world of the first century and is the basic pattern for what it means to be a disciple in Jesus’ (and His apostles’) thinking.
“Jesus Himself assumes a particular model of discipleship when he says, ‘A student is not above the teacher; but everyone, when he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher.'”
So, again, there’s a lot that I appreciate about Kyle’s critique of modern approaches to discipleship. In a lot of ways, we understand things in a very similar way.
Nevertheless, I think he overstates his case when he says that disciple/discipleship is not the New Testament framework and that it doesn’t work.
Where Kyle and I Disagree
I see two big flaws in Kyle’s rejection of discipleship as a framework for spiritual growth, one biblical and one practical.
1. Biblically, the discipleship framework is used throughout the New Testament, including Paul’s ministry and letters, to describe the mission of the church.
Biblically, I think Kyle errs in asserting that the framework of disciple/discipleship is absent from the church of the New Testament, including Paul’s letters, and thus not the proper framework for the church today.
Matthew 28:19-20 is the commission given to disciple the nations. While it’s true these are the words of Jesus before his ascension and Pentecost, they are written by Matthew after those events. In other words, Matthew included those words in his Gospel for the church as the commission given by Jesus to them. Matthew wrote his Gospel sometime in the decades after Pentecost, and it seems to me that one reason he included the words about discipling the nations was to explain the events of the previous three or four decades: what the church had been doing since Jesus’ ascension and why they had been doing it. They had been making disciples because Jesus had instructed them to do so.
One of Kyle’s major arguments against using the discipleship framework is that such a framework is not found after the book of Acts. The word “disciple” is found throughout the book of Acts as the way the church referred to themselves, but it’s not in the letters of Paul or any of the other letters of the New Testament. Therefore, Kyle contends, it ceased to be the paradigm the early church used.
“Matthew included those words in his Gospel for the church as the commission given by Jesus to them.”
But I think there’s a fundamental chronological error with this argument. Most of the letters of Paul and perhaps some of the other letters of the NT were written during the time period recorded in the book of Acts in which one of the main ways they refer to themselves is as “disciples.” This indicates they thought of themselves as disciples and understood their mission as making disciples. Even Paul’s ministry is described as making disciples:
“And after they had preached the gospel to that city and had made a good number of disciples, they returned to Lystra, to Iconium, and to Antioch, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith.” (Acts 14:21-22b, NASB, emphasis added)
This means that, contrary to Kyle’s claim, when Paul’s letters were written, the church was still using the framework of disciple to refer to who they were and what they were about. The book of Acts, including Paul’s ministry as recorded in it, is an account of the early church doing exactly what Jesus commanded in Matthew 28:19-20: going and making disciples.
So, what about Kyle’s contention that the entire framework of disciple/discipleship is absent from Paul’s letters? Kyle is correct that the word “disciple” itself is not found in Paul’s letters although the word “disciple” is used as a part of Paul’s ministry in the book of Acts, as we just noted. Even though Paul does not use the word “disciple” in his letters, he does use a word from the same word family to describe what he’s doing in his ministry. Not only that, but he regularly envisions his relationship with his churches according the paradigm of discipleship.
“When Paul’s letters were written, the church was still using the framework of disciple to refer to who they were and what they were about.”
The word manthanō, “to learn,” is used throughout Paul’s letters and it derives from the same root as the word translated “disciple” in the New Testament. That means a word directly related to “disciple” is used by Paul to characterize what he’s doing in his ministry. For example, Paul writes to the Ephesians, “You did not learn Christ in that way” (Ephesians 4:20, NASB). Or he writes to the Romans, “Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who create dissensions and obstacles contrary to the teaching that you learned” (Romans 16:17, NASB).
This language derives from the framework of discipleship, using a word from the same family as mathētēs, disciple. In fact, one of the premier word study resources for the Bible, the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, includes manthanō in its article on “disciple” and says, “It implies acceptance of Christ himself, rejection of the old existence and beginning the new life of discipleship in him.”
Also, Paul often explicitly envisions his relationship with the people in the churches he started after the pattern of discipleship, calling them to imitate himself. This embodies exactly the way a Jewish teacher of the day would’ve thought about his relationship with his students/disciples. Recall how Jesus describes the relationship between a teacher and a disciple in the Jewish world of the time: “A disciple is not greater than his teacher, but everyone when fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40, NASB). This is the essential nature of discipleship, and it’s what Jesus and his apostles envisioned when Jesus instructed them to disciple the nations. And this is exactly how Paul envisioned his relationship with the people in the churches he writes to.
“Paul often explicitly envisions his relationship with the people in the churches he started after the pattern of discipleship, calling them to imitate himself.”
Consider these examples:
- 1 Corinthians 11:1, NASB – “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.”
- Philippians 4:9, NASB – “As for the things you have learned [manthanō] and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”
- 2 Thessalonians 3:7-9, NASB – “For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example, because we did not act in an undisciplined way among you…but in order to offer ourselves as a role model for you, so that you would follow our example.”
This theme of imitating Paul is all over his letters, and it is the pattern and paradigm of discipleship. As their teacher, Paul is offering not merely information but a concrete example of what it looks like to follow Jesus so that by becoming like their teacher, Paul, they can become like their Lord, Jesus.
So, I’d contend that in his letters, Paul is doing discipleship and simply assumes the discipleship pattern Jesus described in Luke 6:40. In fact, we can actually learn a lot about how to do discipleship by paying attention to what Paul does in his letters.
So, there is a biblical framework of disciple/discipleship throughout the New Testament that we should follow in the church today.
2. Practically, biblical discipleship does work.
In his mini-course, Kyle operated on the assumption that discipleship doesn’t work in the church, even going so far as to assert that the reason it doesn’t work is that it’s not the proper framework according to the New Testament. But contrary to his experience, I’d say biblical discipleship does work.
When I say that biblical discipleship works, I’m not saying it works perfectly. Or that it works easily. Discipleship is always messy, and we must be honest about that. But biblical discipleship can and does bear the fruit of changed lives within whom Christ is being formed.
I understand Kyle’s concern that clear frameworks can become formulaic and simplistic, or worse, moralistic. But whatever language we use to describe spiritual growth, there needs to be some sort of framework, and a clear one is better than a confusing one.
Also, I’ve included the adjective “biblical” here because shallow and simplistic approaches rarely work. Programmatic or formulaic approaches usually fizzle out with time and produce minimal fruit.
But…
That doesn’t mean biblical discipleship doesn’t work.
The issue is not that biblical discipleship has been tried and proven ineffective. It’s that too often cheap substitutes have been employed which bear little lasting fruit.
Such cheap substitutes often amount to tacking a discipleship program as one more thing onto a full church calendar or adding a few spiritual disciplines onto your life, expecting that’s the silver bullet to bring about Christlikeness in your life.
“The issue is not that biblical discipleship has been tried and proven ineffective. It’s that too often cheap substitutes have been employed which bear little lasting fruit.”
So, I do agree with Kyle that for discipleship to be effective, it needs to be biblical, and one of the things that means is that discipleship must entail a robust but practical theology of spiritual growth. Just as Kyle advocates, it should entail a rich understanding of grace. It also needs to emphasize union with Christ as the very center of our spiritual life, a union made possible by God in giving Himself to us through the Spirit. Kyle is right that too often these truths are neglected or minimized in many discipleship approaches within the church.
Not only that, but biblical discipleship needs to be practiced in the context of a healthy ecclesiology which embodies the “one anothers” of the New Testament. This is another of Kyle’s key concerns that is spot on, namely, that too often discipleship today is a largely individual endeavor not deeply connected to the life of the church. That is the proper environment for all of us to grow together into Christ who is the head of the body.
This kind of practical theology and rich ecclesiology is an essential part of a biblical framework of discipleship. Within that context, carrying out our individual and corporate lives as disciples of Jesus who by the Spirit are learning the way of Jesus and becoming like Him “works.” Biblical discipleship clarifies the goal and charts a path so that people can actually arrange their lives to be with Jesus through His Spirit in order to become like Jesus from the inside out. Without a clear goal and path, substantial Christlikeness is rarely formed.
For more from John, see johnwhittaker.net and the Listener’s Commentary
