We spoke to Cris Rogers – author, podcaster and Rector of All Hallows’, Bow – about the future of discipleship.
How has your own thinking about discipleship developed and changed?
I was a youth worker for 10 years before I moved into parish ministry. There are significant differences in the way we conduct discipleship among young people and adults that I think we can learn from.
Relational rather than organizational
The first key difference is the difference of a relational to an organizational approach.
Most of the youth work that youth workers do is relational. Rather than running courses, it’s spending time together in discipleship mode. Having done that for 10 years and then moving to parish ministry, I noticed that most of the ministry among adults was based around courses and not relationships. That’s partly to do with the fact that young people have a lot of time on their hands. They finish school early and come and hang out with the youth worker. We don’t really have that with adults. So, what I noticed was quite a difference in terms of expectation of discipleship between teenagers and adults.
Intentional rather than assumed
When we moved to East London in 2010, I wanted to ask: What does disciple-making look like in a parish setting? And one of the things I was really struck by is that as a youth worker, discipleship was something that was very intentional. Everything was going through the lens of ‘How is this going to help us make disciples?’ When I ended up in parish ministry, I noticed that discipleship was almost, ‘well, if they turn up enough they’ll pick it up.’ Unfortunately, they don’t. Discipleship cannot just be assumed.
Reproducible rather than static
The final thing as I read and observed is that things have to be reproducible. Whatever you do, whatever you run in your parish, if a lay member of your church can’t remember it and reproduce it, then it won’t go beyond one generation. Membership stops at one generation, whereas if it’s reproducible, then it goes beyond the one generation.
So how can we become more relational, intentional, and reproducible?
One of the things I became convinced about at All Hallows’ is that we needed to come up with a way of defining discipleship that anybody could remember and reproduce. Because the problem is…I speak all over the country in churches, on discipleship, and if you ask the congregation, what does it mean to be a disciple? I can guarantee there is no clarity. Nobody can give you a definition. Why are we surprised that we don’t know how to make disciples when there’s no agreed terms of reference?
So, we made a stab at it and said, it’s not going to be perfect, but this is how we’re going to define discipleship. And we defined it around the great Commission and the great Commandment. The great commandment says to love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength which we kind of distilled down to head, heart and hands, just for simplicity’s sake. It was sticky language that even children could remember. The great Commission says, Go and make disciples teaching them to obey. So, it’s not just about loving God, it’s about obeying God. So, the definition we came up with was: discipleship is loving and obeying God with your head, your heart, and your hands. And that’s so ‘sticky’ and easy to remember that our entire congregation, now, if I say, what’s a disciple? That is what they will say. Because we’ve defined it, and we have it up on the wall in the church building.
Having come up with a definition for discipleship we wanted to discover how well we, as individuals and a congregation, measured up to the definition and where there were gaps and room for growth. And we developed what we call the discipleship assessment tool, which is just 20 questions around head, heart and hands, diagnosing where your next area of growth as a disciple might be.
We began to see that this could be really useful for other churches and so, having received some funding, we consulted more widely than the Anglican church – with Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals – to hone the questions, develop a website and resources. The result was wearemakingdisciples.com.
The tool’s value is that it can give insights not just about an individual but about a whole congregation – and the different groups within a congregation – when results are gathered together. For example, I had thought my congregation were really prayerful, but actually, every single time a prayer question came up they were giving really poor answers. I knew that the young adults were very active around justice. but when it came to what was forming them theologically, it was more like friendships than the Bible!
We want every member of the church to grow in discipleship but the insights from the assessment tool show us that that how we take people on that journey will be different for different groups because their needs are different. Older people, younger people, men, women, single people, middle class, working class, single mums, single dads… We need different pathways for everybody to go on the journey of discipleship. Because one size does not fit all.
Last year I completed my doctorate, and a huge chunk of that study was exploring how you make working class disciples. Much of what’s been thought about around disciple making comes out of a middle-class culture, middle-class church. So, how do you make disciples of working-class people? A big theological piece in my doctorate was around the difference between the Greek and Aramaic words for disciple. The Greek word for disciple: mathetes is an academic, learner word. The Aramaic term, talmidim, is only ever translated outside of the Gospels as ‘apprentice’ and it’s always in relationship to a to a master carpenter, master builder, stonemason, so it’s very working-class language.
What I’m recognizing is that a working-class, relational, apprenticeship model of discipleship, with one or two people working with me on a project, thinking and reflecting on what we’re doing together, creates a more fruitful culture of discipleship than running a six-week study course. Discipleship is relational.
We often talk about three discipleship movements of staying with God, sharing the journey with others, and serving the world. What practices are helping you as a church to do that?
At All Hallows’ we have developed our own daily rhythm of prayer. We do it individually but we’re doing it together because we’re all following the same pattern. It gives us something to read, something to pray, and a way of just listening to God. It’s very easy, very memorable, and very reproducible. We call it our 3, 2, 1 (inspired by Dusty bin from the eighties!)
What you do is you spend three minutes reading a passage of the Bible, two minutes praying and one minute listening to God. And when you do that reading part, we ask one simple question: ‘How does my day change because I’ve read this?’
So, there’s an internal practice – head and heart engaged – but it’s all leading to the active, outgoing ‘hands’ part. The external practice. What am I going to do differently today?
Each day is a different topic – following the Diocesan 2030 vision – we pray for the environment, racial justice, children and young people, local businesses, our neighbourhood… We say to our congregation, we’re matching the diocese in praying for every Londoner to encounter the love of God in Christ.
The daily practice is on our website. People just download it onto their phone. And it’s also available as a little booklet that goes in your pocket or handbag. We had thousands printed so people can have them in various places around their house.
This got us through Covid. Our church grew in Covid because we had these practices in place.
Everything we do for disciple making, we’re asking the question, how reproducible is it, and how sticky is it? Because if a child can’t remember it, then you’re not really going to get an adult on our estate using it. Every Sunday we say, ‘Don’t forget to do your 321 this week’. We even created some stickers that go next to your plug socket in the kitchen. So, when you make a cup of tea, you can read for three minutes while the kettle boils, you can pray for 2 minutes while the tea bag brews, you can listen to the Lord for a minute before you add your milk. What is he saying to you for the day?
Finally, are you seeing any current trends in the UK church when it comes to discipleship and what do you find hopeful?
Through engagement with the Assessment Tool, I now have the data for 35,000 UK Christians. These are Christians across denominations – Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, Catholics. But these are the trends we are seeing in terms of people’s discipleship formation.
- Prayer has a very low priority. Over half of Christians who completed the assessment tool didn’t place prayer as a very high priority at all.
- Another big issue is around creation care. Creation care is part of the gospel. In Genesis three relationships are broken by sin, and in the death and resurrection of Christ three relationships are being restored by grace: God and us, us and each other; us and the earth. For Christian men over 40 in particular, creation care is simply not on their agenda.
- Bible engagement is very, very low, especially in young adults.
- Men are far more likely to share their faith than women. This one is interesting and perhaps surprising. I wonder if there’s just less men around the church, but the ones that are around are more confident with their faith. And when I look at my own parish, actually, some of the most confident evangelists are the working-class blokes.
- Across the board – all ages, men and women – Christians are not investing into others. This is seriously worrying. It doesn’t matter how strong the church seems today, when disciples are not making disciples, we are one generation away from complete collapse.
To give some hope and encouragement. I think, in terms of church trends it’s very clear that discipleship is increasingly high on the agenda. It’s not the case in every church, but disciple making, and churches working out how to go beyond the alpha course is a clear trend. Again, these are churches across denominations and traditions. Whatever their denomination or tradition, churches that are intentionally wanting to make disciples are growing. There is something happening there where people are deepening in their faith and they’re inviting others to church and inviting others into what the Church is doing. This is really exciting.
This has been my observation: that any church that is relational, intentional, and creating something that’s reproducible; where the congregation know what they are doing – it’s been made easy for them – they are making disciples, and they are growing. This is really hopeful and we should be encouraged!
