Another Way to Think About Discipleship and the Christian Life

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

One of the things I hear very often from pastors of growing churches is the complaint that "we see lots of people making decisions, but it is incredibly difficult to move people on toward discipleship." I think one of the reasons we struggle with this decision-making versus discipleship conflict is that we have been hampered by the categories that we employ.

Paul Hiebert is a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary School of World Missions. He pointed out that people around the world categorize things in very different ways. In the West we tend to look at life in terms of bounded sets. An apple is always an apple. Apples may be MacIntosh, Jonathan, Winesap, or Delicious. They may be green, yellow, red or some combination of these. But everyone knows that an apple is an apple. An apple is never a potato.

In the West, whenever we look at life, we tend to see clear boundaries. An object is either in or out of a particular category. Of course, the Bible uses bounded set language on many occasions. Paul speaks about people being in Christ and outside of Christ (Ephesians 2:13). The apostle John makes it clear that there are boundaries to the Christian life: "We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death" (John 3:14).

Bounded Set

But Hiebert points out another way of defining things. Rather than drawing a boundary between one category and another, one could define things in terms of centered set theory. In a centered set, the issue is not being in or out of a category (as if everything is static and unchanging). Rather, in a centered set we define things by movement - a person or object is either moving toward or away from the center. In a centered set one recognizes not only movement, but the possibility of a change in direction.

So rather than asking, "Are you healthy today?" as if health were an unchanging static category, centered sets help us to understand that a person is either moving toward or away from health. We further recognize that a person who is moving away from health by smoking or eating fatty foods can turn around. In Christianity, the critical question in terms of a centered set is not whether you have crossed the line and are in or out, but rather where are you right now in relationship to the center, namely Christ? Are you facing Christ or is your back turned to Christ? Are you moving away from Christ or toward Christ? Rather than merely asking ourselves, "Did I pray the sinner's prayer twenty years ago?" most Christians would be far better off asking, "Who is my Lord today? Today am I moving away from Christ or toward Christ?"

Christians in the past understood centered set thinking through their familiarity with John Bunyan's classic The Pilgrim's Progress. In Bunyan's story the Christian life is seen as a journey toward (or away from) the Celestial City (heaven). I believe it would be an enormous boon to Christian discipleship here at the Vineyard if we could regain journey language and centered set language as we think about what it means to be a real Christian.

Jesus often used centered set language. He saw that the Pharisees, though they were near to God, had the wrong direction in their lives and were moving away from God. On the other hand, the tax collectors and prostitutes, who were far away from God, were moving toward him.

Over the years, I have watched many "long-time" Christians, who have been in the church for twenty or thirty years, smugly judge and condemn those who have not stepped over the boundary line by praying the sinner's prayer. The question needs to be asked, how do you know that the person outside is not moving toward Christ? How do you know that you, who are inside, have not spent the last decade moving away from him?

Here's what I would like to propose:

1. Let us as a church stop using the exclusive category of "in" or "out" when thinking about the Christian life. This is a biblical category, but it does not exhaust the discussion about the Christian life any more than conceiving of salvation in legal terms (as opposed to family terms like adoption by our Father in heaven) exhausts the richness of the meaning of salvation.

2. Why not read The Pilgrim's Progress? There is an updated version of The Pilgrim's Progress put out by Paraklete Press, that we have available in our bookstore. For the more ambitious, there is a wonderful version of the original The Pilgrim's Progress published by Penguin Classics. We also have that in our bookstore. I don't know of any book other than perhaps Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, that has more impacted me in the last couple of years than Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.

   Perhaps you might consider using this book in your small groups for discussion and teaching over the course of a month or so. Group members could read a few chapters before each meeting.

3. Centered set thinking would be an enormous encouragement not only to your discipleship, but to evangelism. Recently a young woman came to our church from a background of deep involvement in witchcraft. She had all of the dress and bearing of a person who was really far out there. One of the staff said to me, "Rich, the first time I interacted with her I thought she was so far out that she could never be reached. But then I remembered that the issue is not how far or near someone is, but what direction they are headed. I thought that she was here at church making contact with another Christian. It was obvious to me that God was, therefore, at work in her life drawing her near to Christ. My many interactions with her became a lot more fun as I discovered new ways that the Holy Spirit was drawing this practitioner of witchcraft towards the Lord.

Moving Toward the Center,
Rich