Recently I have been challenged to help the church be the church...to live out its mission and serve the world around them. The emphasis has been on service, but there is a crucial dimension I've missed and not emphasized as I should: the cost of discipleship.
The word Discipleship doesn't have the greatest connotations today, but it's a terrific word. To be a disciple of Christ is to learn from Him and be transformed. For one reason or another, we've gotten away from healthy transformation. We've emphasized some things over others, and what we've tended to de-emphasize is the understanding of the story of God, namely, the Scriptures.
Perhaps it is the move in our culture to allow the Scriptures to be taught to us by one person, namely on a Sunday morning. Perhaps it is not working hard enough to ask the hard questions in order to understand the Scriptures better. Whatever the case, understanding of the Scriptures is key to faith. When Jesus gives us the great commission in Matthew 28 he tells us to go and make disciples..."teaching them to obey everything I have given you." You cannot obey if you do not know what to obey, and you only know what to obey if you listen to the instruction and truth of the Scripture.
So my question is, how do we do this better in our culture? How do we do a better job at wrestling with the Scripture? How does the church do a better job at helping their people understand God's Story and their place in it? The Church being the Church is still very important to me, but the foundation of that is a deep understanding of the truth of God revealed in the Scriptures.
