There is No Discipleship Without Mission: A Response to Mike Breen

Mike Breen, an English author and clergyman, recently wrote a two-part article entitled: "Why the Missional Movement Will Fail." Despite the title, Breen doesn't really talk much about the missional church. He never articulates his understanding of it and doesn't site any leading author on the topic. It's really a piece about discipleship, and Breen argues that the missional church will fail because of the lack of a focus on discipleship. While Breen is correct about the importance of discipleship, what he misses is the fact that mission is the very catalyst of true, transformational discipleship.

In Part 1, he uses the analogy of a car to argue that "missional" is simply the wheel on a vehicle whose engine is discipleship.

A missional church or a missional community or a missional small group is the new car that everyone is talking about right now, but no matter how beautiful or shiny the vehicle, without an engine, it won’t go anywhere.

He argues that anything a church does that is "missional" will lead to nowhere without successful discipleship. "The reason the missional movement may fail is because most people/communities in the Western church are pretty bad at making disciples." He writes that discipleship must be front and center because, if you do mission without it, you're sending people out into a "war zone" unprepared. "When we don’t disciple people the way Jesus and the New Testament talked about, we are sending them out without armor, weapons or training."

In Part 2, after an apparent fury of responses, he attempts to clarify what he means by "discipleship." He says that it can be boiled down to the two words "character and competency." He writes, "A disciple is someone who, with increased intentionality and passing time, has a life and ministry that looks more and more like the life and ministry of Jesus."

But wasn't the life and ministry of Jesus all about mission? Here's Breen's problem: he clearly assumes that discipleship happens within the confines of the faith community; that transformation happens independent of and before mission. This is precisely the kind of thinking that the recent missional conversation has called into question. While Breen is correct that many churches have adopted an empty focus on the community that is devoid of a concern for making disciples, mission is one of the best vehicles we have for making disciples. Even if many churches have neglected the mandate of discipleship, the literature on the missional church has not. As Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile point out, the idea of "every believer growing as a disciple by engaging in mission" is one of the major themes that have emerged in the literature (The Missional Church in Perspective, 2011).

Breen's approach is this: we become better and more mature followers of Christ in our Christian cocoons, and then when we're thoroughly cooked, we can go out and engage the world. Church leaders thought this way for a long time. Only recently have we begun to realize that it just isn't true. Experience teaches us it's not true, research teaches us it's not true, and, most importantly, Jesus taught us it's not true.

Peter Rollins once wrote: "Theology is the aftermath of God." It is only after we experience God that we begin to understand God. If you think about it, this is just how humans function and learn. Take language as an example. As children, we use language long before we learn its rules and construction. When we finally do crack open the grammar book, we gain a whole new understanding of what we've been doing all along, but without first learning and using language experientially, the grammar book would be useless. We see and learn things first, and name them later. Take love: Do parents sit their infant down in their lap and philosophically explain what love is, or do they simply love the child and connect the dots by saying, "I love you"? As someone who grew up in church, I could have quoted you chapter and verse where the Bible said, "Do not judge," but it wasn't until a friend called me on a judgmental attitude, saying, "I didn't think Christians acted that way," and until I formed relationships with non-judgmental people that its truth was activated in my life.

Some of the staunchest supporters of slavery in the 19th century were well-oiled Sunday School graduates. We could go on and on about atrocities and evils committed by religious people throughout history who were not in any way lacking in biblical knowledge or training. Mike Breen and I would probably both agree that, in such cases, they weren't "true disciples." But the question is, what would have made them such? George Barna conducted an interesting study in which he tried to categorize Christ-like attitudes vs. Pharisaic attitudes and, based on a survey, found that a majority of Christians hold attitudes similar to that for which Jesus criticized the Pharisees in the Gospels. What is it that makes us more Christ-like? I've read many books and articles by people who talk about how they came to let go of their hatred or suspicion of a certain people group and became more loving and accepting Christians. What was it that transformed these people? Do you not think they had heard and read countless times the words, "Love thy neighbor?" It's not within our faith community that we learn to love our neighbor. As Jesus pointed out, that's too easy (Luke 6:32-33). Every time, whenever you read these stories, the catalyst of the transformation was a personal, real life encounter with someone of the hated group. And it is mission--our calling to engage the world--that is the doorway into these transformative encounters. There's a reason that people so often come home from an international mission trip inspired and on fire. What we often miss is the follow-up and opportunity to frame and direct that fire with good biblical theology. It's here that I find a point of agreement with Breen. We neglect discipleship. But what we're neglecting is the opportunity to take these life experiences and apply them to biblical stories and theological concepts. Discipleship is not the learning of these stories and concepts in isolation, but their application in and through the experience of the "war zone" that Breen speaks of. Faith is manifest in praxis, not knowledge. Transformative discipleship is an internship, not a class. To be fair, Breen seems to understand this to a point. In his 2011 book Building a Discipling Culture, Breen acknowledges that learning does not take place through classroom/book learning only. But when he talks about the need for things like "immersion," what he means is immersion in effective faith communities, not the world at large. He is right that the church is facing a discipleship crisis, but I would argue that this is true precisely because of incubation approaches to spiritual growth. It's immersion in the non-Christian world that the church is missing.

In fact, the incubator approach to discipleship actually makes us LESS equipped to engage the world. For example, recent studies have revealed that all of the apologetics training we try to pump into high school students before they graduate and go off to college has actually made it MORE likely that they will reject Christianity (at least the ready-made-answer version of it, because they go out and experience a world that is more complicated than the ready-made answers). Or I consider how many times I've watched people question their faith upon having a life crisis, having been told again and again in church that "God is in control." The crisis of faith would have never happened if not for this non-contextual theology.

(You might want to let that those last two sentences cook for a minute or two).

I'm not sure how we've missed it, but this is how Jesus operated. As we read about the calling of his disciples, their journeys all started with the simple phrase: "Follow me." (Matt 4:19, 8:22, 9:9, etc.). How much do you think they understood about who Jesus was? How well could they have explained justification vs. sanctification or explained all the spiritual disciplines? In fact, in so many of the biblical stories in which God calls someone, their main objection is that they are ill-equipped, and God more or less promises that he will give them on the job training (see, for example, Jeremiah 1:4-8). It was always throughout and after the concrete experience of Jesus that people came to understand Him, not before or independent of. It wasn't until post-resurrection that Jesus took his disciples and "opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures" (Luke 24:45). It wasn't until after walking, talking, and eating with Jesus that the men on the way to Emmaus recognized Jesus for who he was (Luke 24:30-31). Whether it was Nicodemus (John 3:2), the woman at the well (John 4:19), or the guard at the cross (Matthew 27:54), it was only after experiencing Jesus in real life that they were able to utter a theological affirmation.

It is the missional conversation that has brought us to realize we can most strongly experience this Jesus today on mission, outside our faith communities. Although the term “missional church” came into common usage just a few decades ago, the idea of Christ’s church being on mission is 2000 years old. David Bosch argues in his seminal work Transforming Mission that a “people on mission” was one of the primary self-understandings of the first century church; a revolutionary community based on the sense of mission demonstrated by Christ himself. R. Geoffrey Harris, in his book Mission in the Gospels, argues that the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and purpose can only be adequately understood if interpreted through the lens of mission. How else does one understand passages like Luke 10:1-9 where Jesus sends the 70/72 into the communities--totally unequiped and unprotected--as strangers who are to assimilate into the family life of their hosts? Jesus was often criticized by the religious elite for being out among the people and hanging with "the wrong crowd" (Luke 7:34). So if we are, as Breen says, to become like Christ, then one of the primary markers of that identity is to "go unto..." “Missional church”—no matter how the term has been used or understood, is in essence a return to the church’s origins and purpose. But the reason the church is missionary by its very nature is because it serves a God who is missionary in nature. Karl Barth was one of the first theologians to articulate mission as being first and foremost an activity of God. The term missio Dei (Latin for "mission of God") seems to have first been used by Karl Hartenstein in 1934 in a response to Barth. In the last half of the 20th century, the phrase began to see regular usage in theological works on mission. This understanding of God effectively made the church grapple with a disorienting shift in self-understanding. “In particular, we have begun to see that the church of Jesus Christ is not the purpose or goal of the gospel, but rather its instrument and witness," writes Darrell L. Guder in Missional Church.

God is on mission; we simply choose whether or not to join him. It is only mission--or a missional approach, if you will--that summons us out of our comfort zones, out of the social circles in which we are comfortable and can self-vindicate--to encounter the other. It is only in this encounter with the other that we have a real life encounter with the God on mission who is bigger than our community of faith. The reason Breen doesn't see this is because he is working from within another old model: the subject/object distinction of Christian mission.¹ Based on his language and conclusions, it is clear that for him--as with many Western Christians--the church is the subject of God's mission and the rest of the world is the object. In other words, we are the givers or doers of mission, and others are the recipients. It is seen as a one way street. But the missional conversation has brought a serious theological challenge to this. If God's mission reaches beyond the walls of the church, and if the Holy Spirit is like the wind that blows wherever it pleases (John 3:8), then anyone is potentially the subject OR object of God's mission. If the church were to embrace this, a whole new world would open up not just in the realm of discipleship but also evangelism. What a transformative difference it makes in the lives of everyone involved when we are willing to "serve with" rather than "do for." Author and community developer Wendy McCaig tells the story of a woman named Via who was one of many people to come to a soup line at a local church. As Via came up to the table, she asked if she could help serve. She "came around to the other side of the table." Thus began Via's transformation, because she was finally involved in the work of the church rather than being its 102nd hungry mouth to feed.

So, no Mr. Breen, the missional movement will not fail, because mission belongs to God. It is therefore not a movement, nor will it ever fail. And if discipleship is important to you, you don't want it to fail.

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1 Credit to Ron Carlson, Missional Church Strategist for American Baptist Churches, USA^↩

User Review or Salesman Pitch?

In the age of online buying and selling, the thing that any astute buyer wants to read is the "user reviews." There's nothing more honest and detailed than the observations and recommendations of the people who have actually bought the thing and are using it. Whether it's a product like a TV or a blender, or a service like landscaping or plumbing, every buyer wants to see the user review, and every seller fears it.

This is in contrast to a salesman's pitch. Nobody trusts the pitch. It's scripted, it's learned, and its motive is completely different. The sales pitch is meant to solicit a response from you that is favorable to the salesperson and who s/he works for. The sales pitch emphasizes the positives and the objective is to get you to buy. The salesperson may or may not use what's being sold him or herself. But the user review is completely different. It is candid, told from experience, and its objective is to simply give you accurate information. Before I take the leap and invest in something, I want to hear from others who already have.

It's the same way with religion. Which makes we wonder - why do so many of us Christians put forth a sales pitch rather than a user review?

Actually, many Christians, especially those of the Southern Baptist and independent evangelical variety, are being taught by their churches how to give salesman pitches rather than being encouraged to share a user review. Popular authors like Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Ravi Zacharias, and many others use book after book and seminar after seminar to teach Christians how to defend the Bible and argue for the truth of their beliefs. There is now even an Apologetics Study Bible whose reference notes are there to help prepare you for that frightful moment when a free-thinking person might ask obvious, down-to-earth questions about the Bible.

Here's my question: if you have to be taught to sell it, have you really used it? When you sit down to write a user review, the words just spill out. You don't even have to think about it. You've been using the product or service, you know what has worked and what hasn't, and nobody has to tell you what to say or how to say it because it's simply your own experience in your own words. But is this what we do when it comes to faith? There's a lot of talk in Christian circles about sharing your "testimony," which is what I'm getting at, but even the testimony has been co-opted by the salesman pitch. We're taught to give our "before Jesus vs. after Jesus" 30-second commercial.

Are we so unconvinced by the answer we claim to have that we have to be taught how to give it? Instead of being real and vulnerable and sharing from our own personal experience, we detach the conversation and talk about things like the Bible, the church, theological concepts, etc.

This is why we're sometimes surprised when we read about people wanting to follow Jesus only to have Jesus give them a response that could turn them off (Luke 9:23-24 and Luke 9:57-62). Didn't Jesus want followers? He's lacking in the marketing department here, isn't he? But he's not giving a salesman pitch, he's giving a user review. A user review is honest and authentic. "This could be hard." "You might have to sacrifice." "Make sure you really want it because it's a commitment." Or, as Donald Miller puts it:

I'm not convinced by a salesman's pitch that only gives me the positives. I want to hear an honest review by someone with first-hand knowledge, and I can accept some cons and down sides if the thing in question has made a positive difference in the person's life. User reviews are simple, flow freely from our experience, and can't be denied. For another great example from the Bible, see the story of the blind man in John 9. Notice that a simple, honest "user review" from the blind man freed him up from having to "own" something else or try to sell it. He originally made no definitive statements about God, Jesus, or theology (until the end) even though the religious leaders tried to bait him to do so. He simply shared what Jesus had done for him. Christians who are still a part of the institutional church are getting beat out in the user review department. All the good, honest user reviews out there are coming from those who left the church and had bad experiences. Those on the inside are sticking to salesman pitches that no one trusts.

You can't give a user review if you're not using what you're selling. I'm convinced we haven't personalized this stuff. Think about how Christians are taught to present the gospel: the "Romans Road" or the "4 Spiritual Laws" or some other way of talking about "salvation" in the abstract. But how has it transformed you? What is your story? You may know someone in our family or circle of friends who "got saved" and ended up becoming more obnoxious and arrogant than they ever were. What happened? They've merely been converted to a worldview, a belief system, instead of being broken, transformed, and renewed. This is what it means to be "born again" (John 3:3).

Believing in God helps us sleep at night; but actually meeting God can keep us up at night. Our beliefs help us feel we are right; but actually meeting God shows us how wrong we are and how incomplete our knowledge is (see Isaiah 6:1-8). Assent to a certain set of beliefs gains us acceptance into the church of our choice; but if God gets a hold of us and transforms us into people of love and forgiveness, we risk being called a "friend of sinners."

Earlier I mentioned the heavy emphasis on apologetics in some Christian circles. Ironically, these efforts hinder faith instead of helping it. For example, there's a lot of anxiety in the system about high school graduates going off to college and facing the challenge of "secularism" in the university. We're scared to death they'll lose or question their faith in college, so during youth group years, we teach them not to. Or, we at least give them ready-made responses to questions they might face. But by doing this, we shelter students from the very thing that will make their faith stronger and more personal: doubt and questioning. These efforts merely serve to prolong the amount of time that a young person's faith is borrowed. It must become their own, and the agent by which it does so is doubt and questioning.

Have you met the God you believe in? Has God messed up your life and diverted your path? Have your priorities, habits and behaviors changed because of what you say you believe? What is your user review?

Saintly Encounters (a parable)

One day, two Christian men approached God.

"We've read the Bible every day for our entire lives, and we know what it says." they said. "What could we do to gain more understanding?"

God said, "Continue on your way, and I will reveal to you men of faith to help you understand the scriptures."

The following day, as the men were walking downtown, they heard yelling. As they followed the sound, a rugged, elderly man came into view. He was holding an old, worn Bible in his hand and speaking emphatically. But the closer they got, the more they realized that he was barely understandable. His speech was unsophisticated and he stuttered frequently. Unlike other preachers of his kind they had encountered, this man appeared to have a following with him. But they all looked tired and frustrated. When the old man walked, the people walked with him, grumbling the whole way. Unable to get to the speaker, one of the two men approached a follower and asked, "Why do you stay with him?"

"We are stranded and have nowhere to go," the follower replied. "We used to live comfortably and never lacked food or water, but we foolishly chose to follow this man and now we are going to starve."

A discussion arose among some of the followers as to how they could go back. Desperate for the familiar, they began to sing a song of worship they had known since childhood. Hearing them, the old man turned, red in the face with fury. He threw down his old, worn Bible which tore apart into several pieces on the street. He began to shout even louder.

The two men quickly ran away, bewildered. They prayed to God and said, "What a dreadful sight! We are so glad most of your people are not like that. What should we do?"

God responded, "Continue on your way, and I will reveal to you men of faith to help you understand the scriptures."

The next day, the two friends were having coffee together, and a solo musician came to play there. The two men were very impressed with the man's music. As he sang, they were enraptured by his deeply passionate lyrics about God. Thinking this might be one of the "men of faith" that God had promised, they approached the musician after his performance and asked if they could visit with him.

"Sure!" the attractive, well-dressed young man replied. "I'll host you at my mansion."

Even more intrigued, the men follow the musician to his residence. It was clear as they pulled into his sprawling property that he was very wealthy and successful. But as soon as they came inside, they were overcome with a scene unlike any they had experienced. All over the walls were weapons, pictures of war, and maps that seemed to depict battle strategies for conquering neighboring countries. They also quickly noticed that the musician had quite a bit of female company in the mansion, some of them caring for children.

The men asked, "Who are all these women?"

The musician smiled and winked, and then left the room.

Stunned and without words, the men were whisked off into another part of the mansion and served a large meal by the musician's cooks and butlers. They ate sitting next to a window, looking at each other quizzically, trying to figure out what to do next. Near the end of their meal, they looked out to see the musician in the yard of a next door neighbor, trying to peak inside a fogged up window.

"What could he be doing?" they ask themselves. It wasn't more than a few minutes later that the men noticed the musician back inside, walking upstairs to a bedroom with another woman they hadn't seen yet.

Unable to take anymore, the men excused themselves and ran out of the house. They prayed to God and said, "What a dreadful sight! We are so glad most of your people are not like that. What should we do?"

God responded, "Continue on your way, and I will reveal to you men of faith to help you understand the scriptures."

The next day was Sunday. As they did every week, the men got dressed and walked with their families to their church. Everything was as it should be, until the men entered the church and heard a loud racket down the hall. As they turned a corner, they froze in place as they saw a lanky man who smelled and looked homeless knocking over tables where volunteers were taking orders for Sunday School curriculum and signing people up for church activities. No one knew what to do. The man seemed defenseless and had other people with him the likes of whom no one in this suburban church had ever seen: like the woman who was shockingly dressed, or the man with cuts all over him.

The pastor emerged from among the members and, using a tone the men had not heard from him before, said, "How dare you come into this holy place and carry on like this? What do you think you're doing?"

Without missing a beat, the homeless man - calm but firm - then launched into a tirade against the minister. He accused the pastor of hypocrisy and misguiding his people.

He then turned to the parishioners standing by and warned them to repent, accusing them of basing their faith on trivial matters and safe pursuits.

As the homeless man continued to talk and offend every good believer there, the two men were amazed by his knowledge of the scriptures, and how no one, not even the pastor, had an answer for him.

Furious and overwhelmed, the men ran out of the church and prayed to God once again:

"How can you allow such a man in our church? We are thankful that we are not like any of the dreadful people we've met in the last few days. We know what the Bible says and how wrong they are in their thinking and acting. But now, what about our request? We asked for a deeper understanding of the scriptures...when are you going to reveal these men of faith that you promised?"


"My dear friends," replied God, "you have met Moses, David, and Jesus, recognizing none of them. Go and learn the scriptures, for your journey has just begun."