Discipleship: My Story

As I mentioned in my last post, it's important for us to disciple others. You can use the terms discipler, mentor, coach or teacher if you would prefer. I like the term spiritual father because that's the term used in 1 John 2, as I wrote before.

I came to a real turning point in my life when I was 21 years old regarding this responsibility. I've told this story to people many times but apparently I haven't written about it specifically in my blog yet, which I find odd. So here is my story.

I've been a Christian most of my life and I developed various close friendships over the course of my teenage years in Wawa. I developed a couple of close friendships during my first few years in London as well. At the age of 21, I came to the realization that I was never really a good friend. I mean, I hung out a lot with my friends and we would chat about a lot of things, but where was the depth of relationship? If we were all Christians, why was God mentioned so little outside of church? Why didn't we challenge each other more in a spiritual lives?

Around that time, I was in a cell group that my dad had and I led the worship songs each week. Through that experience, I came to realize that I was the one settling for shallow friendships. I could look back on my life and I could look around at my current surroundings and see the clear need to discipleship and yet I did nothing.

I wasn't pointing fingers at anybody but me, but this wasn't a guilt trip. Over the course of several months God gave me a completely new perspective concerning discipleship. I used to see worship ministry as my only key ministry and then I realized that it was actually two-fold: worship ministry and discipleship. (If you studied Purpose Driven Life then the list gets a bit bigger. Heh.)

So while I had come to see the lack of depth in my own relationships and the need for discipleship with my own friends, I still had to figure out what to do about it. Right around that time, God clearly instructed me to leave LGT (much to my surprise) and I ended up joining Faith Congregational Christian Church. I decided to start a cell group of my own, under the tutelage of my dad, and in the beginning I had young guys from four different churches that started coming. They were all my friends already but now I decided to build something deeper with them.

I ran that group for about two and a half years. Sometimes it was a straight-up Bible study, sometimes it was a discussion while we were at Kelsey's, sometimes it was helping somebody move. We had people come and go, and one who actually left Christianity eventually. I was hardly a perfect leader but I felt like I had jumped into the deep end and it was great to finally swim.

My main regret is that the guys in my own group really didn't catch hold of my own vision for discipleship. I had intended for each guy to start discipling on their own and to develop their own groups but that didn't really happen at all. There were some other lessons that I had to learn during these years, but I'll leave those to future blog posts.

In the end, I still seek opportunities to disciple people whenever I get the chance. I'll write more about this aspect as well in another blog post.