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What is a disciple?
16/08/12 10:00
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Vineyard College’s Next Level on Discipleship which you can download in it’s entirety here
Answer: Disciple (mathetes in Greek) means a pupil of a teacher or an apprentice of a master craftsman. It has the connotation of a learner but also of a “doer”.
It could be large numbers, as in Luke’s description of the Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17), or those who followed Jesus in itinerant ministry. A disciple of Jesus was someone who adhered to His teachings and did them, and thus they were spoken of as those who imitated Jesus (John 8:31, 15:8). This could be quite openly, as with the apostles, but also secretly, as with Joseph of Arimathea (John 19:38).
This concept is further exemplified by the fact that early Christians in the book of Acts were called “followers of the Way”. In other words, they were known by their behaviour or way of life. In John they are described as those who “abide” in His Word, ie, live in adherence to His way of life, whereas in Acts they are described as those who believed upon him and confessed him.
The term disciple is not used in the epistles. Instead, we find, “brothers, sisters, believers, saints and church”. In the Gospels, the term is used both of those who stayed and worked at home and of those who gave up normal life, left home for some time and walked around with Jesus. There are, of course, large numbers of the former and fewer of the latter.
In the book of Acts, we find established churches of believers in towns and cities and fewer comparatively who are able or called to pursue an itinerant lifestyle. Of those who are itinerant, the most mobile appear to be single and the married are more inclined to settle somewhere during their travels. John, for instance, seems to have settled and lived in Ephesus for many years and Philip, despite his earlier adventures in Acts, settles and lives with his prophetic daughters in Hierapolis, a resort and medical town about a day’s walk inland from Ephesus.
We do not find the term disciple in the Old Testament, although the concept is implicit in the companies or schools of the prophets. Another example is the apprenticeship of Samuel to Eli. Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah also had underlings who represented them and sometimes, as with Elisha, replicated them. Joshua also succeeded Moses after serving a term of apprenticeship. In another sense, the image of the people of Israel being in covenant relationship with their God is an early pointer to the relationship we have with Him.
At its core, though, I think discipleship flows out of the kingship of Jesus. From the Garden of Eden, God reveals himself to His people as Creator, as the King of Israel, as the One and Only God before whom we should have no other Gods. In the Exodus, He is portrayed as overwhelmingly more powerful than the gods of Egypt. By the time of the Psalms, He is described as the Lord of heaven’s armies. The church is in one sense an inheritor of this relationship as the “New Israel”, the “Israel of God” (Gal 6:16) with Jesus Christ as its head. In Romans, we are saved if we believe in our heart that God has raised Jesus from the dead and confess Him as Lord. Confessing Christ as Lord is more than just repeating a formula and saying those words, it is making him the King, the Ruler of one’s life. Discipleship is based on this fact, Jesus is the King and we are not, and by virtue of His Kingship we are to submit to his rule and obey Him.
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Next Level:
Mark Brickell tells us why
18/07/12 11:00
Mark Brickell, principal of the Vineyard Training College and author of the Next Level articles, tells us the reason why we are producing the GROW material each month.
These resources are for all leaders of Vineyard churches - so pass them on! Get them here:
DOWNLOAD GROW 2012 RESOURCES HERE
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Making decisions as a leader
17/07/12 00:00
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Vineyard College’s Next Level on Leadership, which you can download in it’s entirety here
How does a leader get the guidance to make decisions? John Wimber used to say, “God sets the direction and we get to organise the camels.” He was referring to God calling Abraham to go to Canaan without giving him specific directions. In other words, take the general idea of what God has called you into for guidance and make decisions about the details based on your own judgment. Unfortunately, one of the down sides of hearing the voice of God is that sometimes we expect to hear Him for all decisions.
I have heard a lot of teaching on hearing the still small voice of God for all kinds of minor details, the underlying assumption being that God is hard to hear but if we could only get our act together we would hear Him properly and amazing things would happen.
I have now come to believe that God is quite capable of speaking to us very clearly if He wants to and when we find it hard to hear Him, nine times out of ten it is because he expects us to make our own decisions and grow up. Someone is going to respond to this with a story about when God did speak to them about all kinds of daily decisions and great good came of it. I think God does do that occasionally, often just after conversion or in a time in our lives when the kingdom is near. I have experienced this myself. After that, He expects us to live by faith and make decisions using our judgment while staying open to hear His voice. To continue trying to hear God’s voice in everything is a path that can lead to Gnosticism, deception and depression.
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Clashes and Intersections
11/06/12 11:00
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Vineyard College’s Next Level on Kingdom of God, which you can download in it’s entirety here
Kingdom theology is such a comfortable fit with the practice of praying for the sick. It has a theology of dying, and it accepts the reality of suffering and sickness while still seeking God for healing. It can accept poverty while asking God for resources; it understands that sometimes we will give in to temptation while still asking God to deliver us from it; that we can pray “Your Kingdom come” while knowing it has come, is coming and is yet to come.
Kingdom theology is a theology of conflict and war in the present. It sees healing and everything else in terms of a cosmic conflict between God and Satan. It is a clash of kingdoms and therefore where the two are intersecting is where most of the action will be.
Kingdom theology sees the history of the church as part of the ongoing conflict between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. Therefore it has been a story of continued advances and retreats, of battles won and lost.
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The Danger of Emphasis
24/05/12 10:00
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Vineyard College’s Next Level on Spiritual Gifts, which you can download in it’s entirety here
“In 1990, I visited Kansas City to attend a conference run by Mike Bickle and the Kansas City Prophets. On the way, a group of us met with John Wimber and he told us that since inviting that type of prophetic ministry into his church in Anaheim, conversions per year had fallen dramatically. In contrast, people were now driving hundreds of miles to get a word from the special prophet at a conference.
The danger of an emphasis on the “Five-Fold Ministry” is an unintended reversion to an Old Testament model where the Spirit rests mightily on a few and the majority do little. This is in direct contrast to the New Covenant prophecy of Joel, the priesthood of all believers and the ideal of “everyone being able to play”.”
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It's in the practice
07/05/12 11:00
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Vineyard College’s Next Level on Spiritual Gifts, which you can download in it’s entirety here
The only way to really learn about spiritual gifts is by practice and being there. There is little, in my opinion, that can really be learned by reading or developing a long, authoritative and systematic definition of each gift, even though people like myself hunger for that. It is noticeable that while the Bible refers a lot to spiritual gifts in both the Old and New Testaments, it also provides no systematic definitions of them. Instead it provides numerous stories in which God works with people through gifts in a great variety of ways. Furthermore, these stories defy our attempts to classify and define gifts except in the most generalised ways. But they do create a hunger for God to do the same things through us and those we know.
The variety of ways God works in these stories and Paul’s teaching also makes it hard to try and develop any method whereby we may do the same. Healing in the Bible, for instance, can occur by mixing mud and spit, by command for a person present or somewhere else, in public or in private, whether they seek it or not, by the laying on of hands, by handkerchief, by an angel stirring the water of a pool, by inadvertently touching the bones of a dead prophet, by getting in a river, by being breathed upon, with the help of faith, or in the presence of unbelief or even anger at it happening. It happens and doesn’t happen to the deserving and the undeserving, to those who persistently pray and cry out to God in desperation and those who do not. In short, God grants these gifts and we cannot box him into a method or a system.
All we can do is hunger, be there when it is happening, read the biblical stories, learn some general principles, take a risk and try while being willing to look like a fool if nothing happens and do this over and over again. We may feel full of the Holy Spirit, experience bolts of electricity coursing through us or absolutely nothing at all and wish we weren’t there.
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Contextualising the gospel to culture
26/04/12 09:00
This GROW 2012 excerpt is taken from Vineyard College’s Next Level on Vision, Values and Practice, which you can download in it’s entirety here
Why does the Vineyard talk in the language of values? Because John [Wimber] primarily wanted to build a church that people who he knew before he met Christ would want to go to. The church would have to feel like “home” to those sorts of people, it would have to taste, smell, sound, dress, talk and be like them without compromising the gospel. This is the task of every missionary–to contextualise the gospel to a culture, or to make the gospel “fit” the culture so it is not seen as “foreign”. Being trained in sociology and willing to use its language, John wanted to create a church that had many of the same values as the people he was trying to reach, a church that would express his own values as someone who came to Christ from a non-church background in his thirties.
The dangers of this approach are the same for any missionary who attempts this process. We can go so far that we become no different from those we are trying to reach and compromise the gospel – syncretism. In the other direction, shunning the culture, we can become such a sub-culture, so different from the prevailing cultural values, that we ourselves are a hindrance to conversion and can only grow by families having more children and transfer growth. The Amish are Christians, but how many new converts do they get?
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