Following Jesus

Almost immediately after my assignment as resident bishop here in Western North Carolina, I was handed a copy of our three-fold purpose statement and logo: “Follow Jesus, Make Disciples, Transform the World.” I have been referring to it as the Carolina Revised Version of our denominational mission statement. After living with it for almost eight years, those three phrases continue to inspire and challenge me. They have also been a guiding force behind decisions we have made about organizational structure, how we focus our energy and where we invest our resources.

As I look back over almost forty-eight years of ministry in The United Methodist Church I realize that I spent far too much time “making members” as opposed to “making disciples.” Whether in teaching membership classes or filling slots on the various committees of a church I invested time and energy creating a club instead of encouraging people to grow in their commitment to follow Jesus. Especially in these last eight years, I have been working to make a fundamental shift in my own life and in our life together across Western North Carolina.

Following Jesus radically changes who we are (our identity) and how we order our lives (our behavior). It alters our perspectives and attitudes. It opens us to becoming the “new creation” that the Apostle Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. In faithfully following Jesus we become witnesses to the amazing love and redeeming grace of God so that others experience this new life, new direction, and new way of being through Christ Jesus. The first step, I believe, in making disciples is to follow Jesus. This is our evangelistic task: showing, telling, modeling, and practicing our faith.

This has led us to be engaged in a paradigm shift in our structure and the reason we exist as an organization. Our goal has been to increase the number of healthy, vital churches fully engaged in God’s mission in the world which includes at its heart this evangelistic assignment. In order to do that we have flipped the emphasis from a top-down mentality to a grass-roots mission. Two pieces of that shift have been, first, the creation of what we have called “missional networks” where local churches partner together to make a difference for Christ in their community and neighborhood. Second, we are building a team of Church Vitality Strategists deployed across the conference to provide resources, support, and guidance for churches to follow Jesus and make disciples.

Along the way we have been learning and adapting as we move forward. One significant lesson has been to realize that all of us, regardless of size or geographic location of a church, must develop disciple-making systems. To that end, we are redesigning two conference-level positions and creating a Director of Vital Discipleship who will work with the superintendents, the vitality strategists, and local churches to design and implement healthy, holy ways of making, growing, equipping and sending disciples through every local church.

Over the last six months I have intentionally been reading and reflecting on a number of books about discipleship. Let me recommend for your reading and perhaps some small group study these books that I have recently read (or re-read). The Mystic Way of Evangelism by Elaine Heath; The Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor by Scott Jones; Becoming a Disciple by Adolf Hansen; and, finally, two books by N. T. Wright: Simply Good News and Following Jesus.