Read an Excerpt
Brave New Discipleship
Cultivating Scripture-Driven Christians in a Culture-Driven World
By Max Anders Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2015 Max Anders
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-3067-4
CHAPTER 1
Central Passage: "All these men [from the tribe of Issachar] understood the signs of the times ..." (1 Chron. 12:32 NLT).
Discipleship in the Twenty-First Century Presents Unprecedented Challenges
The pervasiveness of electronic communication presents a multipronged challenge to the cultivation of a vital inner life, creating new demands for discipleship.
I am deeply concerned that the church seems to be losing ground in producing mature followers of Christ. I do not see our discipleship process in the early part of the twenty-first century as being very effective. It is not that there is anything inherently wrong with traditional discipleship methodology, but that time has moved on, and I am not sure the church has moved adequately with it when it comes to discipleship.
I fear that the typical education and discipleship approach used in the United States today is doomed because it does not match up with the characteristics of newer generations. It is not that typical material and approaches are useless. Fortunately, there will always be those who are willing and able to adapt themselves to the more traditional methods and materials. But when it comes to reaching a broad spectrum and large number of typical Christians today, I fear that the methods and materials of the past will prove ineffective for the future.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the church in America today is the shallowization of the church. For the last couple of decades many of us have read the statistics produced by the Barna Group and other polling groups that show the attitudes, values, and behavior of Christians not being statistically significantly different from non-Christians. Christians are supposed to be different from the world, but as a category, we are not—or at best there may be a five- or ten-year lag. Research indicates that not only are we losing our distinctive lifestyle, but we are also beginning to lose our distinctive beliefs on which a distinctive lifestyle is built. Pastors of some of the nation's largest churches describe their congregations as "a mile wide and an inch deep."
This would be a significant problem even if the historically Christian culture in the United States were remaining constant. But that is not the case. It is collapsing like a burned-out barn, which means that Christians are collapsing with it, making it spiritually catastrophic.
Christian author Dallas Willard has written that Christians are shallow, not in spite of what the church is doing, but precisely because of what the church is doing. He applied the well-known business maxim to the church: "the system you have in place is perfectly designed to produce the results you are getting." If we want different results, he contends we must use a different system.
Believe me, this is not a criticism. I have struggled for decades to analyze and decipher what is happening to the church and what to do about it. But in this context, it is time to ask ourselves, In our age of rapid and massive change, is our discipleship system producing disciples who know the Bible well—who have mastered the Bible so well that the Bible masters them?
Is our discipleship system producing disciples whose character reflects Christ—who are holy toward God and loving toward others, whose lives are separated from sin, dedicated to biblical pursuits, and committed to eternal reality?
Is our discipleship system producing disciples who have dedicated their resources of time, talent, and treasure to the service of others, helping extend the kingdom of light into the kingdom of darkness around us?
There are many extraordinary examples of people who do just that. But evidence suggests that on the whole, the church is dramatically falling short on discipleship. As I speak with people about this subject, there seems to be a pervasive sense among church observers that we are categorically failing at this central responsibility.
The reasons are complex. But one reason is that it may be generally more difficult to live the Christian life in the twenty-first century than at any other time in history. This is, in part, because of the pervasiveness and power of electronic communication. From music in elevators to television monitors and touch screens in taxis to smart phones, tablets, computers, electronic games, smart watches, and televisions that often go on first thing in the morning and stay on until the last thing at night, our minds are awash in input from electronic media. And because we become what we behold, we are dramatically impacted by the pervasive presence of electronic media.
This creates two serious problems. First, it gives the mind no downtime, no solitude, no time for reflection, planning, evaluating, or thinking. The result is that it is very difficult to conceive of higher things, to rise above where we are at the moment. We get trapped in the present with little hope for the future because we give no thought to it.
Second, the input that we receive is often godless. By godless, two things are meant. On the one hand, it may be an affront to the moral standards of God. The input may include violence, hatred, greed, and sexual immorality. On the other hand, even if the input is not an obvious affront to God, media typically represents life and values that do not include God or accurately reflect Him. So, even if a given program on television is not morally reprehensible, it still tends to teach us to think and live without God because an accurate and authentic relationship with God is virtually never modeled. All we ever learn by example is how to live without Him.
In addition, electronic media impacts the mind more than other forms of spoken or written communication. Have you ever tried to read a book while the television is on? You usually wind up watching television. Electronic media takes over the mind. That is why it is so powerful.
Therefore, because (1) electronic media keeps us from thinking about the higher things of life, (2) much of its input is godless, and (3) it has a greater power over the mind than other forms of spoken or written communication, the typical mind in Western culture is held captive by electronic media. As a result, the mind is held captive to secular values and thinking. Unfortunately, this is true of the Christian mind as well as the non-Christian mind.
In a dramatic instance of the impact of electronic media, I was presenting workshops at a discipleship conference in England a number of years ago. Delegates were there from all over the world. In one of my workshops, there was a delegation from central Africa, and after the session was over, we sat around talking about discipleship issues. This delegation said that their mission was to try to reach the rural villages in central Africa with the gospel before the village got electricity because before a village got electricity, their interest in spiritual things was very high. After a village got electricity, however, their interest in spiritual things dried up almost overnight because electricity brought not only lightbulbs and refrigeration but also television, movies, music, and the Internet. These things captured the minds of the villagers and made them almost impervious to the gospel. Like trying to save people from a coming tsunami, this delegation was trying to save rural central Africans from the coming tsunami of electrification.
Such is the power of electronic media in the twenty-first century.
While this instance provides a compelling example of the power of electronic media, its influence on our nation has been less obvious than electrification in central Africa but just as impacting, and it is a reality to which we must respond.
The goal of discipleship—giving someone the assistance needed to be conformed into the character image of Christ—will never change, but the methodology will and must. This Brave New World into which we are entering requires a Brave New Discipleship strategy if the church is not to be neutralized by a mind-meld with modern culture from overexposure to electronic media. Christians must either pull away from modern culture and isolate themselves from electronic media (which is not likely to happen), or they must find ways of offsetting the pervasiveness and power of electronic media as well as ways to use the same technology that is drawing people away from Christ to draw them to Christ. This is a massive and difficult challenge, not easily met. But it can and must be done.
Review for Memory (consult pages 3–5 for verification)
1. It may be generally more d_________________________________ to live the Christian life in the twenty-first century than at any other time in history. (Page 3)
2. One reason is the p_____________________________ and p____________________________ of electronic communication. (Page 3)
3. This creates two serious problems. First, it gives the mind no d_____________________________, no solitude, no time for refl ection, planning, evaluating, or thinking. Second, the input we get is often g____________________. (Pages 3–4)
4. The g__________________ of discipleship will never change ... giving people the assistance needed to be conformed into the character image of Christ ... but the m________________________________ will and must. (Page 5)
Review for Understanding
In your own words, state the challenge that the church faces concerning discipleship today.
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
Review for Application
Reflecting on the experience of the delegation from central Africa (pages 4–5), what have you personally observed or experienced regarding the harmful effects of electronic media in the Christian life?
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________
CHAPTER 2
Central Passage: "Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things" (Phil. 4:8).
We Become What We Behold
We automatically become like what we put into our minds and what we allow our minds to dwell on. Therefore, we must strategically guard our minds.
When it comes to being a fully devoted follower of Christ, would you like to be more than you are? Boy, I would. I long to be more than I am. I would like to know more. I long to be stronger spiritually. I long to be kinder, more patient, less influenced by negative emotions, more helpful to other people, more self- disciplined, more trusting and readily-obedient to all God asks of me, and to have greater vision and effectiveness in ministry. We should never stop wanting to be more like Christ.
This is important because we will never help others become fully devoted followers of Christ unless we are fully devoted followers of Christ ourselves, and we will never be fully devoted followers of Christ ourselves until we have mastered the challenge of personal growth in the spiritually toxic twenty-first century.
We set the high-water mark for our ministries. There are a few people who may go beyond us spiritually, almost no matter how poorly we disciple. And there are a few who will go nowhere spiritually, almost no matter how well we disciple. But the vast majority in between is the benchmark for our ministry. For the most part, they will be influenced by us but will not go beyond us. Therefore, if we want others to rain, we must have a cloudburst. If we want them to burn, we must combust. So, when it comes to pondering the effectiveness of discipleship in the twenty-first century, the first place we must look is in the mirror.
The Challenge of Modern Culture
Being the model we should be is not a simple task, however. Becoming spiritually mature has never been a quick or easy process. And it is made even more difficult in our age by the culture we live in. Our culture, which for hundreds of years was dominated by biblical values, has in the last fifty years been severely compromised by secular values. The magnitude and speed of the compromise has been fueled by the pervasiveness and toxic quality of much electronic communication, especially in recent years.
Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for President Reagan and now a best-selling author, news analyst, and commentator, writes in her book Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness:
We are the inheritors of a coarsened society. My generation cooperated happily in the coarsening, of course, in the sixties and seventies ... and now we're stuck with it. The coarsened nation is what we're left with to bring up our children. A coarse place is by definition anti-child because it is anti-innocence.
Parents today go to great lengths to protect their children from the environment that they helped create. However, there are not enough good parents to go around any more, not enough good parents to take up the slack. There is only the "coarsened society" that is making things worse.
The old culture may have been a little naïve, but in those early days of television, there were game shows, Saturday morning cartoons, nature shows on PBS, old movies, art and language lessons, and soap operas. Not very imaginative or sophisticated, but as Noonan points out, "That is better than today when the Geto Boys on channel 25 rap about killing women, having sex with their dead bodies, and cutting off their breasts."
Ms. Noonan goes on to write,
Really, you have to ... know that this stuff is harmful, that it damages the young, the unsteady, the unfinished. You have to not care about anyone to sing these words and put this song on TV for money. You have to be a pig....
Hollywood knows it encourages and discourages points of view, habits, and social tendencies. And deep in their guilty little hearts, filmmakers know they encourage violence in men and boys and sexual acting out in everyone else. It's what they do for a living.
After shocking and violating everyone on one level so that they get used to it, Hollywood has to come up with even more violence, perversion, and sex to hold a jaded audience's attention. How destructive that is to the individual soul! How destructive it is to the collective soul of our nation!
So, this is the world in which we now live. It has been deeply corrupted from what it once was, and the corruption is largely initiated in the entertainment industry and disseminated primarily through electronic media. And this coarsened culture has its automatic effect on us, whether we want it to or not. No one falls in a vat of ink without turning a little blue.
The Promise of Scripture
Even though modern culture makes committed Christian behavior a significant challenge, God has not left us without offsetting spiritual resources. Scripture says, "No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it" (1 Cor. 10:13).
God has not allowed us to blunder into a situation that Christ is not sufficient for. He has not left us to fend for ourselves. God has, in order to offset this historic challenge, provided historic counterbalancing resources so that if a Christian walks wisely in this world, it is still possible to live an authentic Christian life of peace and power. But if we do not avail ourselves of resources God has made available to us, we can be swept like a cork down the stream of life.
Because electronic media is such a powerful influence on the Christian life, we cannot deal with being balanced in an unbalanced world without addressing it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Brave New Discipleship by Max Anders. Copyright © 2015 Max Anders. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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