An Educational History of Discipleship

Why do people cringe when we mention discipleship? Why don’t people feel like they can make disciples? In surveying a room, one would find that people have all kinds of ideas of what disciplemaking means, from evangelical conversion, to spiritual disciplines, to Catechism. Pretty much everybody has a different paradigm of what disicplemaking is, and reasons why they are not inclined to do it.

Thankfully, there is a new wave of impetus on discipleship in the church.  This resurgence has led many to grab the latest publication or classic favorite on the best discipleship methods and curricula. While these resources are helpful and provide a starting point, it is also important to reflect on the historical background and current cultural paradigms which implicitly undergird our concepts of discipleship. We need to better understand where we are and how we got here if we are to overcome what hinders our corporate fulfillment of the Great Commission.

Why is it so difficult for people to embrace being a disciplemaker? After all, it is the one task Jesus left in our hands. It is almost like we started out in Los Angeles looking to drive to New York. But suddenly,  as we look around, we realize we somehow ended up in Florida. We’ve lost our way and we didn’t even know it. To understand how we got off the map, we need to consider how discipleship has changed over time. We need to look at key wrong turns, or mission drifts, that incrementally took us off course.

"To understand how we got off the map, we need to consider how discipleship has changed over time. We need to look at key wrong turns, or mission drifts, that incrementally took us off course." ~ Jessie Cruickshank Click To Tweet

The Original Idea

First, let’s consider what the disciples would have thought Jesus meant when he told them to go into the world and make disciples. Jesus did not give instructions or leave a how-to manual, so they must have all been on the same page as to what ‘make disciples’ looked like. So what did Jesus have in mind when he said that? What did the disciples hear they were supposed to do in that Great Commission?

Neil Cole (and others) have written about how the New Testament church (Paul and the Apostles) thought about and made disciples. An in-depth examination of those early methods is beyond the scope of this writing other than to highlight that 1) it was done as a community or band of people, and all persons participated; 2) apprenticeship was the main method of learning; and 3) the purpose of discipleship was to increase one’s union with God in all aspects of life.

Professional Clergy Class

These foundational characteristics remained intact as part of the paradigm of disciplemaking up until around 300 AD when Constantine entered the storyline and made Christianity the state religion. Since priests in Rome were agents of the state, Constantine reappropriated the priests who served Roman gods to Christianity. They became a class of politicians called clergy.

Suddenly and catastrophically, the church abandoned the concept of all followers of Jesus having equal standing as disciplemakers and created the separation between clergy and laity. It was a significant turn off-route and mission drift. Because Constantine Professionalized It, disicplemaking became the clergy’s responsibility. They were to be educated and trained, and everyone else’s responsibility to follow them. This concept has seldom been challenged in the last 1700 years.  Instead, it has become the foundation on which most of Christendom as we know it has been built.

"The church abandoned the concept of all followers of Jesus having equal standing as disciplemakers… disciplemaking became the clergy's responsibility." ~ Jessie Cruickshank Click To Tweet

If one became interested in ministry, wanted to learn more about God or had an interest in the spiritual, they would leave and move to another city or country. There they would learn how to read and write, but they would be taken away and secluded from the rest of society in order to be trained. Apprenticeship as a means of education remained, but disciplemaking was an isolating experience rather than a community endeavor.

Yet because society was also mostly illiterate, there did remain an enchanted aspect to discipleship. Textual study was not as common as it is now in seminaries, so the isolated clergy candidates were discipled through stories and encounters with the spiritual realm. The world itself was enchanted, much more magical, much more mystical. It was full of angels, omens, relics, and supernatural encounters. After 300 AD, the discipleship that Jesus spoke of no longer existed.  Rather, isolated individuals were trained in a mystical profession.

Measuring God

About 1200 years after Constantine, in the 1500s and 1600s, the Age of Enlightenment and corresponding Protestant Reformation entered the story.  As social literacy began to increase, it was accompanied by an increasing value for translating the bible into the language of the people. Yet because of the clergy-laity split, the clergy wielded great power over how people read the bible. Christian sects began to form around doctrinal differences. Many people were killed for reading the same scriptures and coming to alternate conclusions. Massacres of different Christian sects were common and sectarian violence dominated the landscape for more than 200 years after Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

During the Age of Enlightenment, European society rediscovered the sciences. Using mathematics, like physics and calculus, educated people sought to understand the world by measuring it. For example, scholars determined how the heavens are made by analyzing the ways the stars were laid out and observing celestial bodies.

People believed that by measuring something they could know its quality. This included both God and faith.  In addition to astronomy, chemistry, and statistics, the Enlightenment also brought about a new science: Theology.

The Western world originally built schools, seminaries, and universities for people to study theology. Scholars developed systematic ways to interpret the Bible, called hermeneutics and exegesis. The study of theology came to include not just learning Latin, but Greek, Hebrew and eventually biblical culture. Belief became a truly academic pursuit. Clergy status became less of a calling and more of a vocation, like being a physicist.

Because of this, faith and discipleship lost its mystical quality. It lost its enchantment as the Enlightenment Rationalized It. Disciplemaking became cerebral, measured, and very western. It became about educating people in the book of the Bible and the Christian sciences. The unfortunate result was that the spiritual formation was edited out of the life of faith and development of clergy.

"Faith and discipleship lost its mystical quality. It lost its enchantment as the Enlightenment rationalized it. Disciplemaking became cerebral, measured, and very western." ~ Jessie Cruickshank Click To Tweet

Instead of embracing mystery and union with God, clergy sought knowledge about God by analyzing and defining. In the Enlightenment, the highest good was the ‘mind’s of men.’ Emotions were seen as the enemy of the mind, and therefore a great hindrance to the knowledge of God. Achievement for the mind was considered to be a dispassionate pursuit, devoid of emotion and all things associated with the feminine. Women, who had legitimate ministry roles under the Catholic church, were deemed unworthy and many were killed in the Protestants’ sectarian violence.

The Reformation also replaced apprenticeship and made the sermon the center of disciplemaking for the masses. There was little value for the discipleship for every person beyond simple ‘Christian Education.’ Since the Reformation Sermonized It, disciplemaking is now limited to identified male professionals, set apart from the community, who are well-educated, and can give a multi-hour sermon. In a short span of time, we took two significant turns off-route and mission drifts. These two drifts have lasted for about 400 years.

"Since the Reformation sermonized it, disciplemaking is now limited to identified male professionals, set apart from the community, who are well-educated…" ~ Jessie Cruickshank Click To Tweet

Factory-Produced Jesus

Then, something very interesting happened in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The pentecostal revivals broke out, including the Welsh Revivals and Azusa Street Revival. Because of the renewed passion for the Holy Spirit, emotive faith experiences become more commonplace as part of spiritual formation in what historians call a re-enchantment. In the revivalist era, there is a new found desire for every person to have an authentic encounter with God. Distinct from the previous era marked by engagement with a state church or social religion, people start seeking a personal relationship with Jesus.

At the same time, society was changing due to the Industrial Revolution, bringing with it the unprecedented idea of schooling for everyone. The reason for creating schools for everyone, for establishing public education, was explicitly to create a trained labor force.  The educational architects at the turn of the last century decided that society needed to shape every man into a quality worker.  A quality worker was defined based on mathematics and statistics of the ‘average man.’ Because they were working mostly in factories with the same machines or with the same components, people needed to be able to do the same job the same way. It didn’t really matter who an individual was, how tall they were or how long their arms were.

This resulted in an effort to ‘normalize’ or to make every person the same so they could work the factory jobs interchangeably. Everyone was trained in their skill set to a very detailed level of specificity.  For example, it should take 3 seconds to grab the milk, it should take 2 seconds to pour the milk in the vat, and it should take 1 second to discard the empty vessel over there. Labor skill sets were program-ized, and schools were specifically designed in the same manner as well.

Students, arranged by age, were ushered though classes like cars on a factory line. Each subject matter was written on their ‘blank slate’ until they were shaped into uniform, quality humans. By design, schooling worked to mitigate qualities of individuality. The goal of school was to create uniform persons who could fit into the workforce like identical cogs in a wheel.

"By design, schooling worked to mitigate qualities of individuality. The goal of school was to create uniform persons who could fit into the workforce like identical cogs in a wheel." ~ Jessie Cruickshank Click To Tweet

This was not just a philosophy for creating a labor force; it was a prevailing philosophy for how society worked best. Social architects, like Fredrick Taylor, believed in standardizing everything. Shaping everything around the average was the best way to make decisions, and every person should be treated the same so that the world would work more efficiently. It was society’s duty to help individuals be as average as possible. Any deviation from the average was a problem; was something that was mal-formed.  Today we have taken that concept so far that we diagnosed things outside of the ‘norm’ as a disease. The Physicians’ Desk Reference is a very large book because everything outside of a very narrow mathematical ‘normal’ is named, and often medicated.

It is not just medicine, schooling, or industry that still holds to this paradigm. We have adopted it in the church world for discipleship as well. But we sacralized our mass produced ‘widget-making’ by saying we want to help everyone be ‘like Jesus,’ rather than helping people become who Jesus created them to be. We non-consciously think about reaching a production quota by only discipling those who are easy to work with or come to us so that we ‘don’t waste our time’ on those who require a higher investment. Because the Industrial Revolution Systematized It, this factory paradigm underlies much of what we do in discipleship these days through progressive discipleship classes and ‘pipelines.’ But we are not done getting lost. There is still one more major mission drift for us to look at.

"We sacralized our mass produced widget-making by saying we want to help everyone be like Jesus, rather than helping people become who Jesus created them to be." ~ Jessie Cruickshank Click To Tweet

Discovering a Calling

As we entered into the 1920s, those who envisioned a “normed” society came under the influence of those who believed in the class system. The class system, or caste system, holds that some people are inherently better than others, whether due to gender, race, creed, or bloodline. In this global wave of exceptionalism, “average” became a status core correlated with “less than.” About this time, post WWI, the American military was analyzing their soldier sorting processes and decided that it needed to separate frontline soldiers from potential officers and military leaders. To answer this need, the IQ test was invented and used to rank people. Society had fully embraced sorting people along the ‘normal’ bell curve. Now they were actively and pervasively ranking people in comparison to one another and a eugenics movement swept the globe, including the United States.

No longer was normal or the average the ideal; everyone wanted to be above average. The ’ideal’ then becomes the thin part of the bell curve that says someone is at the top and better than everybody else.  This is literally why school grades were invented. The purpose of grades is to rank people. First, you normalize everybody along the bell curve, and then you rank them with grades to sort out the better ones from the lesser ones.

But how does this history of ranking people influence our current understanding and practice of discipleship? If you take the concept of the ideal person as being above average and layer in the clergy-laity split, the resulting conception is if a person is above average in articulating their beliefs, that person is called to ministry. Or one is called to ministry if they are above average in their spiritual encounter. Or one is probably called to ministry if they are above average in their passion for the gospel and sharing it with others.  Our philosophy of discipleship has and continues to follow right along with the current paradigm of social education. And since the current model of Evangelical ministry is about those who came through a widget-making discipleship pipeline and demonstrated themselves to be above average or about the achievements of an exceptional person who is able to inspire others in their individual faith achievements, we can say that the Evangelical Movement Individualized It.

What Florida Looks Like

It could be conceded that today we have the value of educating everybody in the Bible and every person having their own relationship with Jesus. But we still have an implicit, normalized bell curve of discipleship, and we still have the same process for everyone.  Schooling was designed with the explicit goal of creating uniform widgets out of people. Our philosophy or paradigm of standardized discipleship pathways has not grown beyond that. Our resulting widget is not a disciple in the rabbinical sense. Rather, a disciple is still defined by their education, just as it was in the Age of Enlightenment.

Our Industrial Revolution-inspired process of mass producing widget-disciples defines the current form of church. Churches are often designed and laid out the exact same way as a school, with a teacher up front with everybody sitting in their own happy, little, uniform rows. It is a layout intentionally designed to control behavior and create conformity. And it is how many churches have envisioned making disciples.

"Our Industrial Revolution-inspired process of mass producing widget-disciples defines the current form of church." ~ Jessie Cruickshank Click To Tweet

Over the last 30 years, things have gotten a little better.  We have become more creative and developed different paths and methods of discipleship. But we still hang onto the implicit goal of the uniform widget-disciple. We still do not see the individual God has been pursuing their whole life. We still do not see every person as being ‘called’, and our discipleship methods have not yet embraced the biblical mandate for everyone to be a disciplemaker.  We haven’t gotten there yet, but hopefully we can look back at our wrong turns and find our way from Florida and back to New York.

Finding New York

I believe that Jesus Simplified Discipleship for us. I have experienced the success that is possible in developing disciplemakers when we regain the original design of ordinary people, disciplemaking in community, through apprenticeship, for the purpose of increasing our union with God in every area of life. There are communities of believers that embrace this ancient method. Our neurobiology is designed to help us be successful in it. What lies before us is the repentance necessary to recognize where we are, turn around, and make our way back to what Jesus originally left in hands. It will require letting go off all the noise we have added. But perhaps a simpler, more instinctual way of embracing our call is exactly what Holy Spirit is leading us to in the era.