Preface: This was written for my Nouthetic Counseling class when I was a student of Bible & Ministry and submitted February 1, 2000.
Discipleship Summary Report
A little background on the word ‘discipleship’ shows that as the teaching role one would be setting out to do is the act of making a disciple. A disciple is translated from the Greek word ‘Mathetes’, meaning learner or follower. The Gospels and the book of Acts are the only place that you actually find this word, as the balance of the New Testament is to people who already knew the topics at hand and were not “learners,” per se. I thought this would help my attempts, but it didn’t.
How do you start a discipleship process? Who do you know is the one to choose? How can I disciple someone when I don’t know enough about the Bible to talk to someone else about it? These are a few of the many questions that burdened me for weeks. Then, I thought, I cannot do any of this alone. I have to be able, ready and willing and God will “show” me who it is. Next, I thought, “Does God “show” me where I will get my next job without any effort on my part?” That’s when I realized that maybe I need to make myself available to my peers, so that they would know I could and would be there for them, because God already knew this, and I was not going to be in a discipleship role with God after all. I invited people over to my house, to church to lunch bible studies, and even down to short discussions in the hall in the hopes that I would trigger someone’s heart enough to want to make it more than it was. I couldn’t just tell someone, “I want to start a discipleship process with you,” or better yet, “Umm, for school I have to do this project …and I wanted you to be it.” I was convinced that this had to be “the work of God.” How do you make God make it work, though? That was my problem. It then came to me. I was dealing with people, not God. People are lazy, tempted by flesh with a huge influence from the Devil to go with that lust (whatever it may be), and that I was trying to pick out the “best” one to disciple. What the “best” meant I don’t know, but I was being picking with the people I was planting seeds with. “How could I be so blind after all the classes I have taken and people I have talked to!” My favorite quote by Theologian Charles Ryrie says it all, ”If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.” I bet God was rolling on the clouds up there in Heaven. How could I think I could pick and choose? This isn’t about making dinner, this is about God’s will.
Now, I thought I had it all together for sure this time. A few more invites to church and the like, with just as many let downs. I can say that I was planting seeds everywhere I went in the hopes of fulfilling my own need, not realizing what greater purpose I was fulfilling of spreading the word. I see now, in retrospect that God had me working for him in a very sneaky way, just as Jesus did with Judas. Whether or not he would have wanted it that way, it ended up being to his glory as I sparked up so many conversations and thoughts with people that I even became amazed at my evangelical abilities above all. I had to remember though, I shouldn’t be trying to “save” people, but rather build them up more than they already were in the Body. So, this made me pull back my attempts. If this project wasn’t the biggest roller coaster, I don’t know what was. I did have one night that I thought it was a shoe in. A friend of mine agreed to go out casually. I saw my opportunity to move in, which I did. She also took it in, but her boyfriend wasn’t too keen on the idea of having a “Christian” girlfriend. He shared his horror story with us all, and said he wouldn’t go with her to church. We discussed it, and she ended up siding with the boyfriend, obviously. Lust kicked in and beat me that time.
Regretfully, many epiphanies and a few months later, I still have not started any kind of discipleship. I am saddened by not having yet experienced this challenge, for both “the chosen” and myself I know it will happen one day when I least expect it, as God always works in mysterious ways. I feel I have failed the project at hand. I balance that out with the justification that the couple of months that I worked on this, I grew in ways that I probably wouldn’t have had I not done this. I have also come to realize that I cannot “make” something happen, it has to be the will of God. I learned not to doubt my abilities, or my knowledge about the Body of Christ. I came to the conclusion also, that Satan is always sitting right next to me ready to jump in at any moment. It is also very hard to keep on top of him when trying to succeed with the work of God. People live and die with lust and sin, generally. I was fighting human nature, that in most of the people I was talking to was very strong. Perseverance is a good lesson learned here also. I am not quite sure whether to take this experience (and lack thereof) as a loss or a gain, but I can only say that instead of discipling someone, I think I was secretly being discipled.
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© 2000 Shannon Yáñez
