What is Deliberate Discipleship?
Deliberate discipleship is about doing discipleship differently. It’s not “fast food Christianity” or “fast food formation,” and it’s not a form of entertainment.
Formation is not about speed. Discipleship is not about staying comfortable in doing things the way we’ve always done them.
Disciples of Jesus are not curriculum consumers, and our formation is not to be transactional, lecture-based, or information-driven.
Rather, as Paul says, our discipleship is the slow and deliberate PROCESS of waking up and learning to see our world, ourselves, and our neighbors through the mind of Christ. And this mind reveals to us that we belong to each other (Rm. 12:5). We are each other’s harvest.
Deliberate discipleship forms and shapes us through Christ’s teachings and the crucible of his new commandment to love others as he loved us…which is love as unconditional acceptance. We are each living and learning into the shape of Jesus’s life and teachings…together…and so, we are all a part of Living and Learning Communities.
What is a Living and Learning Community?
Living and Learning Communities are the ways that we practice coming alive together through our Jesus-shaped deliberate discipleship as we focus on meaning, belonging, and purpose in relationship with one another. Our discipleship, then, becomes fully integrated into all of our ways of knowing, being, and doing. It is not occasional or intermittent.
Faith is not a jacket we put on and take off at our own whim or desire. Faith is our expression of living that is grounded in our discipleship. It is an immersion and an integration of Jesus’s teachings into every aspect and practice of our lives.
Why do we focus on a process-oriented approach to discipleship-as-model?
Why should we choose process over program?
Because discipleship is always a process. It is not a project, a lecture, a program, or a curriculum. It does not have end dates, deadlines, or finish lines.
Discipleship is a model of how to journey through a lifelong process of Christian formation, and our process of discipleship should always be a model of how to be counter-cultural, transferable to any aspect of our lives, and adaptable.
What we mean by this is that our discipleship processes should be repeatable in all areas of our lives. They are not just confined to one “10 week study” or even to one topic, such as liturgy, prayer, or scripture.
In ALL that we do, in our speaking, thinking, and acting, we should practice as Christ teaches us to practice, and Jesus’s practices are processes, not programs.
Deliberate discipleship is cultivated within a Christian community and is built upon being with our peers and in inter-generational relationships founded on trust. It is a formative Jesus-shaped process directed towards habit formation and character formation. The goal is to practice a life of coming alive within the Body of Christ by following the teachings of Jesus, which is the Way of love.
Formation 