Discipleship and the Fundamentals of Christianity

Hebrews 6:1-8 (ESV)

“Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, and of instruction about washings (baptisms in NET), the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And this we will do if God permits. For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.”

There are many places to go with this. Looking at verse 1, I am reminded of the importance of the fundamentals in the perfecting of a craft. Good sports coaches and good athletes know that to be the best at a given sport, one must continually drill on the fundamentals before one can work on strategy. Football players run, block, tackle, pass, kick, and catch. Baseball players pitch, throw, catch, hit, and run. Each sport has its basics. This is also true of the arts. Musicians must know the mechanics of producing sounds from their instruments, tuning them, knowing how to finger the instruments, etc. Writers must have a grasp on grammar before they can move on to elements of style. Painters, sculptors, carpenters, tailors, bakers and cooks: all must have basic knowledge of their craft. In his “Everyone” commentary series, NT Wright uses the analogy of a primary school student learning his ABCs.

It’s the same with the Christian faith. Making disciples of Jesus involves some basics. According to the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, those things are:

• Repentance from dead works and faith toward God (or “getting saved” as we like to say in evangelical circles)
• Instruction about washings(baptisms)
• The laying on of hands
• The resurrection of the dead
• Eternal judgment

Here is a question for my fellow evangelicals. How many of you have the first point down, but haven’t been taught much about the others? That was my experience for quite some time. I first began to hear the gospel message in a campus Bible study in college. Over the course of a semester, we learned about Jesus. We learned the gospel message, that He is our only source of salvation and reconciliation with God. We learned the “sinners prayer.” We may have been told something about baptism being the first step of obedience. That was about it. The endgame - the goal - of the study was to identify those who might respond to the gospel message and to “get ‘em saved.” Beyond that, the only call to discipleship was a quick encouragement to find a good church. (To be fair, the program in question has gotten much better, and there is discipleship going on.)

How often is this the case, not just in evangelistic Bible studies, but in worldwide events? How many revivals, Promise Keeper events, and youth crusades fill arenas with souls, tell them the good news about Jesus (and whether or not they do that well is debatable), get them to sign a card that says they prayed a sinners prayer, then tell them to go to church with no real sense of the fundamentals of the faith or true discipleship? All these things are done in an attempt to obey Matthew 28:18-20 (ESV)

“And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

All to often, we look at this passage, the great commandment, as the call to evangelism. But evangelism is only the tip of the iceberg. The great commandment is a call to make disciples, not untaught converts. Somewhere along the line, we transformed the good news into “pray the sinners prayer, ask Jesus into your heart, and everything will be happy happy, joy joy.” To this I say, NO! What we need to announce to the world is that Jesus of Nazareth is Lord and Christ, the King of all creation, that he suffered death on a cross to make atonement once and for all for the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with the Father, that he rose from the dead by the power of God on the third day, and that he calls on all people everywhere to repent, that is, to turn away from their sins, their false belief, and their unbelief, and turn to Him in faith and believe that He is God’s chosen: the Christ. Jesus Christ is our salvation, and there is no other name under heaven by which we may be saved. This is evangelism, and it is the beginning of discipleship.

On this, I agree again with NT Wright. From the commentary:

“At this point, once more, many modern Christians will run their eyes in surprise. The are the … basics? The original early Christian ABC? Most of our congregations don’t know much about them! Many in our churches today couldn’t tell you why we baptize people, what precisely the resurrection is and why they should believe in it, let alone what ‘dead works’ are and why you should repent of them. If this is the alphabet of Christian education, I fear there are many churches, as well as individual Christians, that need to go back to primary school. It’s not, I think, that they’ve learned the alphabet long ago and forgotten it. No: the haven’t ever learned it in the first place. They are getting by on the spiritual equivalent of grunts and hand signals.”

I may be guilty of generalizing here, but I don’t think I’m the only one making this observation. Kyle over at Vindicated referenced a quote from “Dear Church: Letters from a Disillusioned Generation” where the writer notes the outcome of our tendency to give people the gospel and let them figure out the rest on their own. If this is all the farther we go, then many of us don’t know the full story of making disciples ourselves, which leads Kyle to ask:

“And of course, the real crisis is realized when we find the courage to ask the question, what if the people who are offering the spiel and doing the work of discipleship don’t know how to internalize and live the truth over the long haul?”

Good thought. Perhaps its time for many of our churches to stop offering parenting and finance classes and start teaching the basics of the Christian faith. Amen?