Roots of Discipleship and Apostleship

I hear friends, colleagues, church members and read scholars who bemoan the shrinking church of 21st century America. It is true, of course. Over the past fifty years, mainline denominations have lost more than half of their former membership numbers. Attendance and participation is diminishing. Dollars for ministry are becoming increasingly difficult to raise. The modern Church of Jesus Christ is in trouble.

I think that this is very good news for what will become the Church of Jesus Christ.

Somewhere along the course of its history, the Church became an organization that people joined in return for the social benefit that they would receive from membership. People joined because they were promised certain services in return for their membership and participation. Somehow, expectations about church members being served overpowered the basic call to ministry and service. Servanthood was eclipsed by member entitlements and member demands.

This development was far removed from the foundations of the Christian movement. As a departure from its Judaic origins, the way of Christ became a movement of equality, compassion and mercy, even in the face of traditional criticism, judgmentalism and exclusion. Jesus continually demanded that persons represent God's will by acts of grace and kindness, generosity and forgiveness. The way of Christ required that persons be both disciples (students who learn from a particular teacher) and apostles (those sent to represent the teachings of their mentor).

Participants in the way of Christ were disciples and apostles. They were servants. They embodied the faith in what they learned, said and did. Moreover, the acts of apostleship were necessarily public. Those who would be practitioners of the way of Christ must have stood with Christ on the side of those who struggle and suffer. Participation meant being equipped and prepared to minister and serve. The leaders often died in representing Christ's teachings. The faithful sacrificed everything in order to represent Christ.

Over the past decades, membership has come to mean being ministered to and served.

Culture has discerned the inherent hypocrisy of membership entitlement in the Church of Jesus Christ. It has called the Church-That-Has-Been selfish and self-serving. It has exposed the dark underbelly of the institutional necessities of the Church-as-corporation.

It is time in the Church of Jesus Christ that we return to the roots of discipleship and apostleship. If we are to faithfully represent Christ Jesus, then we have to become, once again, his faithful disciples and apostles. Each one of us. All of us. The Way of Christ needs to connect itself once again to the root of its very existence, to its core purpose and foundational values.

While the transition will be uncomfortable and difficult in the contemporary Church, to do so is vital for both the continued existence of the Church of Jesus Christ and the representation of Christ Jesus in, to and for our communities. It is time for us to recover a genuine sense of universal calling, to sit again at the feet of Jesus and learn from him what we are called to do in public acts of grace, mercy, forgiveness, kindness and generosity. We desperately need to shed our sense of entitlement in the Church and embrace once again our universal, global, regional, congregational, local and family servanthood.