Evangelistic Discipleship

I’ve heard the com­plaint many times that the church does not engage in dis­ci­ple­ship, or at least does not dis­ci­ple as it should. Hope­fully (well, usu­ally) the dis­cus­sions turn to what I think is most impor­tant ini­tial ques­tion: what do we mean by dis­ci­ple­ship? As I said in my pre­vi­ous post, it has been sug­gested that by dis­ci­ple­ship we should include evan­ge­lis­tic and wit­ness­ing out­reaches. That is, dis­ci­ple­ship should also include con­ver­sion as well as any sub­se­quent teach­ing. Our next ques­tion con­sid­ers what we mean by dis­ci­ple. Turn­ing to the Merriam-Webster dic­tio­nary: Merriam-Webster defines a dis­ci­ple as one who, “accepts and assists in spread­ing the doc­trines of another: as b : a con­vinced adher­ent of a…

Discipleship: What do we Mean?

I’ve heard many Chris­tians raise con­cern or oth­er­wise com­plain about the (lack of) dis­ci­ple­ship in the church. What I often find con­fus­ing is the dif­fer­ent mean­ings of the word ‘dis­ci­ple­ship’ that peo­ple use. One exam­ple I heard recently is from a pas­tor who has defined dis­ci­ple­ship so as to include wit­ness­ing and evan­ge­lis­tic out­reaches towards those who have not accepted Jesus. This def­i­n­i­tion holds that a Chris­t­ian can dis­ci­ple a non-Christian in the teach­ings and ways of Jesus. There is an appeal made to the call­ing and col­lec­tion of the dis­ci­ples as an exam­ple of this and the idea seems to either be rejected out­right (as I think it should be) or mildly accepted by…

The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology

…Is a book I would really like to buy. Yet it’s very expen­sive, why? Oh well! I’ll either wait for some­one to send me a copy, or there’s always Christmas.

Answers, not quite, increasingly superficial

A cou­ple of days ago Brian McLaren was asked the fol­low­ing ques­tion on his blog, “… third, that you believe (based on some of your lat­est com­ments) that the god wor­shipped by Mus­lims is the same God that Chris­tians wor­ship. Are these assump­tions true?” In typ­i­cal fash­ion, McLaren has pro­vided non-answers in the form of fur­ther ques­tions. Those ques­tions and the point they are try­ing to get across, how­ever, are extremely super­fi­cial, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the posi­tion McLaren is in (at least as I under­stand what McLaren is say­ing). On your ques­tion about the God wor­shipped by Chris­tians and Mus­lims, here’s what I would say: 1. Do all Chris­tians hold exactly the same con­cept of God when…