Ron Clarke explains how the Church of Scotland is currently creating and deepening discipleship.

JESUS said: “Follow me.” This is it; the crystal clear and incredibly life-giving expression of what we are about, as individuals, and as the church in Scotland.

This provides the focus for all that we do and all that we are, as we seek to ‘be’ church in our community. Those who attended the 2019 General Assembly will have been reminded of this. Whilst proposals for developing the Church of Scotland were approved, the clear call was that we refocus and reshape around the two-part call of discipleship: to follow Christ and to enable others to follow Christ.

But what are we really talking about? How might we describe what discipleship is all about? The General Assembly agreed this defi nition in 2018: Discipleship is a God-ward transformation which takes place when individuals and communities intentionally, sacrifi cially and consistently live every aspect of their daily life in commitment to following Jesus Christ. It is a lifelong, wholelife reorientation which will have challenging implications for our self-identity, our belonging within community, our belief systems and our daily behaviour.

A shorter pithier expression, from Micah 6:8 (NRSV) would be: What the Lord requires of us is to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God.

The Mission and Discipleship Council has already been reshaping its work over the last couple of years to meet the need for this renewed focus on discipleship. We have done this by engaging with recent initiatives surfacing in other denominations that have also recognised this need; by reviewing current research about congregational life; and by ensuring that we have been doing all of this from a position of prayer.

Three initiatives being developed to resource and inspire congregations to create and deepen discipleship offer some examples and some insight into the work already taking place.

Many of us have got out of the habit of talking about our journey of faith. That’s true, whether it’s about sharing life experiences in times of normal conversation with fellow believers, or when considering how we might intentionally develop our walk with Christ.

Hongsuk Um, development worker, with the Mission and Discipleship Council, explains: “The Council recognised that there was a need to stimulate discussions, at all levels of church life, about discipleship. We’ve already produced two well-received conversation starters, ‘Conversations in Worship’, and ‘Conversations in Prayer’. We recognised the potential for developing something similar: ‘Conversations in Discipleship’. Following a process of piloting, copies were sent to each kirk session in August 2019. We look forward to hearing how discipleship conversations unfold!”

Conversations in discipleship, beginning from a place of openness and a wish to walk closer with Christ, are likely to stimulate a hunger for more, but how can that hunger be fed? Hannah Sanderson, also a Mission and Discipleship Council development worker, has developed resources that introduce six ‘Characteristics of Discipleship’, the first of which we aim to launch in the last quarter of 2019. Outlining the work, Hannah says:

“The Church of Scotland is committed to creating and deepening cultures of discipleship across the kirk. However, for us to continue a kirk-wide conversation on discipleship we need to find some common ground in our vocabulary, and that is what these resources seek to provide. Although going some way towards defining terms, the aim has been not to do that in a limiting way. The resources have a lot of questions through them, for people to consider what it all means in their own context.”

These are:

• Faith as a journey of discovery

How we listen to and learn from God as we seek to grow closer to God

• Understanding who we are

Living life in all its fullness through understanding how God sees us and how

God wants to use us

• Whole Life Worship

How we worship God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind, both in times of worship and beyond

• Prayer

How our journey of faith is shaped by listening to and conversing with God

• Being a servant

How we go about loving our neighbour, inside and outside our Church community

• Discipling one another

How we shape others’, and our own, faith journeys through, for example, sharing our faith and being intentional about discipleship.

In developing these resources we have considered significant pieces of research in the area of discipleship. These state that churches need a new approach to discipleship that is shaped by these qualities: relational (a whole-life approach to discipleship that recognises the importance of face-to-face engagement in individual or group settings); intentional (a church-wide culture of discipleship that shapes all that a church does or is); organic (shaped by local context rather than being systematised or predominantly programmatic); and spiritually transformative (engagement goes beyond the gathering of knowledge, to a process of life transformation). The resources will seek to account for the fact that people grow as disciples via different pathways (group activities, experiences as an individual, through engagement in church worship, and through engagement in community and/or social justice activity) and that we inhabit varied contexts that affect our growth (intergenerational activity within the congregation; age-group and generational faith formation in a variety of physical and online places; what occurs in the home environment; engaging with those who are spiritual but not religious and unaffiliated; and within the online and digitally enabled context).

“The Church has always recognised that it is the responsibility of every individual to work and reflect on how they follow Christ.

The Church has always recognised that it is the responsibility of every individual to work and reflect on how they follow Christ. However, the experience of those involved in the Church of Scotland’s Path of Renewal initiative, which has been developing discipleship in congregations, is that it’s not just the minister who needs to be equipped to lead if lasting change is to be seen. The Church of England, reflecting on lessons learnt in developing discipleship, identified two aspects that needed attention: a lack of confidence among laity in the area of developing discipleship; and a church culture that is overly dependent on the clergy to take things forward. For our congregations to be characterised as ones that are creating and deepening discipleship, we need to equip individuals to take a particular role in helping to develop such a culture. To support this, we will be delivering ‘Encourager training’ (presently planned to be available from autumn 2020). Hannah says: “Participants will experience first-hand a discipling process and will be equipped to start building or developing a culture of discipleship in their church community.” We like the word encourager, which we have used, which reflects on the part Barnabas played in the early Church. We look forward to hearing from kirk sessions about those, elders or otherwise, who they believe would be well suited to undergoing the encourager training.

As we equip and support congregations to be communities creating and deepening discipleship and effectively direct their energies towards the two-part call of discipleship – to follow Christ and to enable others to follow Christ – the church in Scotland will be going a long way to being what God would like it to be. We look forward to joining you all in that adventure!

Ron Clarke leads the Congregational Learning Team of the Mission and Discipleship Council of the Church of Scotland.