Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Evangelisation and Discipleship within God’s Global Mission

By Glenn Smith

In any discussion on evangelisation and discipleship, someone usually comments, “In our congregation, we are pretty good at sharing our faith but not very effective at discipleship.” My experience in urban mission, particularly in the large city/regions of the francophone world, has convinced me of one thing. If we do not get discipleship right, we probably will have a deficient understanding and practice of evangelisation. Dallas Willard states it very clearly:

The reason for the recent abrupt emergence of the terminology (of spiritual formation) into religious life is, I believe, a growing suspicion or realization that we have not done well with the reality and the need. We have counted on preaching, teaching and knowledge or information to form faith in the hearer, and have counted on faith to form the inner life and outward behaviour of the Christian. But, for whatever reason, this strategy has not turned out well. The result is that we have multitudes of professing Christians who well may be ready to die, but obviously are not ready to live, and can hardly get along with themselves, much less with others.¹

In this article, I would like to explore why the renewed interest in discipleship, now sometimes called Christian spirituality, just might be “the doctor’s best medicine” for missiology² and the Church’s engagement in God’s global mission. We will begin by wrestling with the biblical notions on discipleship and then examine how Matthew’s Gospel can point us forward in evangelisation: that the whole Church seeks to take the whole gospel to the whole world.

Some Biblical Notions
In broaching this subject we need to define certain key notions.

Spirituality is the process of developing and experiencing a deep relationship with God. It also deals with how Christians live their faith in the world. Spirituality cannot be divorced from the struggle for justice and care for the poor and the oppressed. The interest of Christians in the subject is not new, although there has been a renewed awareness of the subject in the past several years.

Curiously, the word spirituality in theological dictionaries is relatively recent, but the meaning of the term should not be separated from previous expressions, such as holiness, godliness, walking with God or discipleship. All of these ideas emphasize a formal commitment to being alive and being very connected with God through a deepening relationship with Jesus Christ. It implies a life of personal obedience to the word of God through the power of the Holy Spirit. We can say that spirituality is our self-transcendent capacity as human beings to participate in God’s creative and redemptive activity.

Being a follower or disciple of Jesus Christ in the New Testament means living fully in the world in union with Jesus Christ and his people and growing in conformity to his person. We could say that it is a grateful and heartfelt yes to God expressed both in act and attitude—the follower of Jesus lives in obedience and imitation of Jesus Christ and walks in the disciplined and maturing pattern of love for God by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is a process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others.³

Spiritual formation focuses our attention on the dynamics of how the Holy Spirit works in us to conform us to the image of God in Jesus Christ in every area of life. We pursue spiritual formation because of God’s love for us and the consequences of evil in the world since the Fall. It is the Trinitarian work of the Godhead to stimulate followers of Jesus in their individual lives and in the local community of faith to participate in God’s project for human history through the ways and means revealed in scripture. But spiritual formation is also about those spiritual exercises that the follower of Jesus pursues under the guidance of the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Spirit so as to more readily receive God’s transforming grace.

Glenn Smith is senior associate for urban mission for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization and is executive director of Christian Direction in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He is a professor of urban theology and missiology at the Institut de théologie pour la Francophonie at the Université de Montréal and at the Université chrétienne du Nord d’Haïti. He is also professor of urban missiology at Bakke Graduate University in Seattle, Washington, USA.