Beyond The Walls:
Making Disciples of Jesus Christ
for the Transformation of the World

John I. Carney, Certified Layspeaker
First United Methodist Church
Shelbyville, Tennessee

Matthew 28.19-20 (NRSV)
19 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, 20and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Acts 14.21 (NRSV)
21 After they had proclaimed the good news to that city and had made many disciples, they returned to Lystra, then on to Iconium and Antioch.

Our conference theme is “Beyond The Walls: Making Disciples of Jesus Christ for the Transformation of the World.”

In the first of these Bible passages, Jesus is commanding his followers to make disciples. In the second, Paul and Barnabas are hard at work making disciples.

The phrase “making disciples” is a strange one. I understand that the Greek word which is translated “make disciples” is a verb, by itself, and yet we’ve translated it with an English phrase, a verb plus an object. And that English translation gives a strange connotation of forcing something on someone: “I’m going to make you a disciple, whether you like it or not.”

At times in history, “making disciples” has meant trying to force people to dress like Westerners or sing a certain kind of music. At times, people acting in the name of Christianity have tried to force a discipleship of sorts on others – to “make disciples” in the most literal, and least appropriate, sense of that term.

But today we’re often faced with just the opposite sense of that – a situation where the “making” part of “making disciples” has been ignored, but so has the “discipleship.”

We live in an age when people need to believe in something. The satirical Christian songwriter Terry Scott Taylor, who is part of a band called “The Swirling Eddies,” once wrote a song called “Outdoor Elvis,” which cleverly combined elements of the Bigfoot legend with those rumors which used to crop up from time to time that Elvis Presley was still alive. “Outdoor Elvis,” according to the song, lives in the woods. “You can pretty much tell that he’s lost weight by the depth of the footprints,” says the song.

For some people, the need to believe in something beyond reason – beyond our mundane existence — leads to Bigfoot, or aliens, or reincarnation, or some other phenomenon. But while people are hungry for meaning from the universe, many of them don’t want the universe to expect anything meaningful from them. If some aspect of religion gets in the way of possessions, or of popular culture, or of society’s changing mores and standards, it’s that belief which must be changed or discarded, rather than the other way around.

People are hungry to believe in something – but are they truly hungry to become disciples? Discipleship – true discipleship – involves some loss of self, some inclination to focus on the will of Christ and subject our own will to it. That’s not a popular concept in this age of individual, do-it-yourself religion.

That raises difficult questions for us as we struggle to preach the Gospel – the “Good News,” as it’s referred to in the passage from Acts. In order to effectively share the the story and message of Jesus Christ, we need to be able to reach out to this generation. We may need to toss away cultural assumptions that seem like they’re essential but which really aren’t. At the same time, we have to be on guard against watering down the good news simply for the sake of making it popular. We don’t make disciples by discarding the Gospel; we make disciples by holding fast to the Gospel and finding new ways to share it without compromise.

Some changes, some adaptations, are benign and even necessary if we are to continue to be relevant to a rapidly changing society. Paul found a way to speak to the people of Athens by relating his message to the monument in their city to an unknown God. A knowledge of modern culture is essential if we are to express the Gospel story in terms which modern culture can understand.

But we have to tread carefully, because there are also changes that dilute and distort the unchanging truth of the Christian message in order to make it more palatable. Watering down Jesus’ message may bring short-term interest, as many popular authors and television evangelists have discovered, but it fails to create true discipleship.

We live in an age when many traditional public institutions are coping with change – or, if they can’t cope with change, they are losing ground. I am, as you know, a layspeaker – but my “day job” is as a journalist with a small daily newspaper. Like United Methodism, journalism seeks to change the world by disseminating truth. But, like United Methodism, newspapers — the particular form of journalism in which I have worked for 23 years — have struggled with declining numbers, with allegations that we are no longer relevant. Like United Methodism, we are trying to save our institution in a way that doesn’t betray our souls – to try to find our way in this strange new world.

In the newspaper business, too many decisions come from the top down – from huge corporations that are as concerned with short-term profit as they are with the long-term mission of informing the public. In too many cases, newspapers have sacrificed their content and tried to appease the short-term concerns of stockholders by cutting staff, cutting costs, refusing to offend, in the belief that gimmicky new formats are the key to reaching out to a younger generation. That short-sighted approach may have hurt us in the newspaper business much more than we realize.

We, as United Methodists, cannot be drawn into that same false path. We cannot let our complacency blind us to the changes in our society. We have to go the extra mile and find creative ways to make ourselves accessible, and available, to people for whom religion is not a given, to people who may have serious misunderstandings about who we are and what we believe.

But we must make the right changes, for the right reasons. We will not make disciples by changing the message of Christ. We will not make disciples by pretending to be contemporary. We will make disciples by recognizing that what we believe is eternal. We can express the Gospel in contemporary ways. But it is the content of our belief, not the form, that holds the key to making disciples in our society.

Discipleship itself implies holding ourselves accountable to the standard of Christ. Discipleship is not easy. Discipleship is not popular. Discipleship is not something that can be conveyed in a single text message or posted to your Facebook page like your review of the “Indiana Jones” movie. Discipleship expresses itself in individual ways and in contemporary fashion, but the essence of discipleship runs counter to the design-your-own-faith approach that our society seems to crave – an approach to which many churches now pander.

So how do we reach out to a selfish world and win them to a selfless Gospel? I think much of that involves living our lives in a way that invites people to the Gospel in our hearts. We must go “beyond the walls,” as our conference theme expresses it, and reach out in love and compassion to those in need.

“Beyond the Walls” sounds like we’re leaving our fortress, our sanctuary, and going out into the world, and there is truth in that metaphor. But there is another metaphor that is just as important. I think the real key to discipleship is that we must drop the walls surrounding our own hearts. We must be willing to let people in, to listen to what they have to say, to give them credit and to hold ourselves accountable to them. And we do that by being authentic, and available, and involved.

Too often we’re more than willing to send money to UMCOR, or help people in ways that keep those people at arm’s length. But I believe we aren’t doing enough to involve ourselves in the lives of the people in our own communities. We tell ourselves that we have “open minds, open hearts, and open doors,” but those doors need to open both ways. We can’t just invite people in; we must pass through the doors on our way out into the world.

Newspapers have discovered that new forms of media, like blogs and message boards have given a voice to readers – and sometimes that makes us old-style journalists uncomfortable. But it is also teaching us to listen, and to be accountable to our readers.

We, too, as United Methodists, need to find ways to listen and to be accountable. And we cannot expect the world to beat a path to our door. We must reach people where they live.

When we drop the walls around our own hearts, we break down the walls around others’ hearts so that they can make the choice to respond to God’s prevenient grace. And that produces the kind of change in people’s hearts that can truly be called “making disciples.”

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