A well thought out post…

I was on twitter this morning. I usually check it most mornings, even when I don’t tweet something new. This morning, I saw a tweet from Leonard Sweet  (@lensweet) mentioning a colleague’s blog on discipleship. I’ve been doing a fair bit of thinking about discipleship in our church lately and how to cultivate a culture of missional discipleship. So Sweet’s tweet caught my attention. I clicked the link and was drawn in quite quickly. It’s honestly one of the more well thought out blog posts I’ve come across this year. Bryce Ashlin Mayo reflects quite profoundly on a post-industrial call to discipleship, exposing and critiquing the church’s insistence on efficiency in discipleship making. Playing off a brilliantly done Chipotle video on returning to sustainability, he invites his readers to consider what it might look like to pursue discipleship more organically. He even draws on the tendency toward uniformity over diversity through the greenhouse industry, recognize that the same potential for a “greenhouse disease” exists in the Christian church as much as it does in the agricultural industry.

I encourage you to take a look at Bryce’s blog post. For those of us involved with church leadership and asking questions about missional approaches to discipleship, there are some substantive thoughts in Bryce’s post that are well worth considering.  The questions become one’s of nurturing life long discipleship, not successful program participation. One of the clear implications this more organic approach has from my perspective is the need to be more deliberate with how the church engages its time resources – more time in each other’s homes and lives, pastors having less detailed job descriptions and more flexibility to walk alongside others and invite others to walk alongside them, more time in 3rd places with our neighbors. What implications do you see?