Discipleship Article

The following is an excerpt of an article from Mike Breen about discipleship. I thought it was very good and wanted to pass it on to my friends who are Jesus Followers.

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If we want to know how Jesus discipled people and how the early church (including Paul) certainly seemed to disciple people, this is what we need to know: Discipleship requires imitation. This is the nitty gritty of what it means to be a learner.

Jesus asked his disciples to imitate His life. That was His process. It was how He passed on the "DNA."

Our lives don’t have to be perfect, or close to perfect, for us to begin multiplying the life we have in Jesus into others. But people desperately need a flesh-and-blood example to look at, watch, ask questions, receive teaching and apprentice themselves to. If they are struggling to read Scripture, it’s not enough to toss someone a book on reading the Bible or point them to a podcast.

We don’t simply tell people to pray; we teach them to pray as we pray. We don’t just instruct people to forgive; we show them what it looks like to forgive when we’ve been stabbed in the back. In the end, we need to be at a place of enough stability and maturity in our own spiritual lives that we are confident it would be a good thing if people did imitate us. This is the way of discipleship.