Urban Leadership Foundation
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Paved with Good Intentions
INADEQUATE CONCEPTS OF DISCIPLESHIP
Reference: Grigg, V. (2004). Companion to the Poor. GA, USA: Authentic Media in partnership with World Vision.
The process of multiplying disciples began with Jesus. It was central to all he did. In his final prayer before he was taken to the cross, he told his Father, “I have accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do.”
He then reiterated these accomplishments. They were chiseled into the lives of twelve men: “I have given them thy words . . . they have believed . . . I am praying for them . . . I have guarded them . . . for their sake I consecrate myself . . .” (John 17:4–19).
Jesus commanded his disciples, “You go now, and make disciples.” The passion for a lifestyle of disciple making was his passion.
In New Zealand, I grew up with a close-knit band of men and women who shared a demanding dream. We had a drive and zeal for one thing: to make disciples and bring the world to the knowledge of our Lord. We were confident of our plan, sure of our steps, fully committed to our methodology.
But in order to prepare me to reach the poor, God decided to shatter that dream, that passion, that zeal. He then restored them all, reshaped according to his model of discipleship. He did it very simply through a destitute woman.
“Brod, pahingi?"
She came to me after I had spent several hours of prayer in a beautiful Catholic chapel.
I went there often. It was one place where I could be reasonably alone from the ever-probing, demanding, laughing eyes of Manila’s crowds.
The walls were open, looking out onto green grass and great old trees—a pleasant sight in a city of dust and concrete.
The hours of quiet had left me feeling religious, holy, and together again, ready for another week of action. I walked beneath the restful trees towards the bus stop.
“Brod . . . .brod!"
I felt the voice, rather than heard it.
“Brod, brod!” I looked behind me and a shudder ran through me, though my body betrayed nothing. Never had I seen such an ugly face. I felt ashamed at my response. She came hesitatingly to me and I waited for her request. There must be a request.
“Brod, brod, pahingi twenty pesos!” (Brother, brother, please give me twenty pesos!).
She spoke softly and urgently, but uncertainly and with shame, unlike the professional, brazen beggars. Her face was pockmarked all over. Not the usual beautiful honey brown, but the color of a pink powder puff, covered in protrusions and hollows. The child on her hip was obviously very sick.
A wild light in her eyes indicated desperation had overtaken shame and she said more insistently, “Brod, pahingi, fifty pesos.”
She reached out to grasp my arm. Inwardly, I cowed back. But I knew that Jesus would not have pulled away.
“Bakit, mare? Ang bang problema?” (Why mother, what’s your problem?) I asked, knowing as I asked that the humiliation she would suffer in answering would require me to give.
Her child was about be hospitalized, she explained. She herself was nearing death. She was afraid to die while he was there. I thought of the one hundred pesos in my wallet.
Suddenly her boldness overcame all her reserve.
“Brod, pahingi one hundred pesos!” With a fleeting thought of lunch and my bus fare, I gave her the one hundred pesos.
She left as softly and as quickly as she had come, embarrassed and murmuring, “God bless you.”
Shattered Disciple
I walked on, outwardly looking as I had before I had met her. But inside, a battle was going on. I had spent years of my life teaching a “spiritual” concept of discipleship. Suddenly, that concept came face-to-face with a poor woman, a child, and her haunting pleas. I had given total commitment to a demanding dream. Now this dream was inadequate—only half good, a half-truth. I had been zealous for my cause, but my cause itself had been imperfect.
I felt shattered; unable to cope. I saw the half-faces, like Picasso’s half-masks, reaching out to me across Manila like nightmares. I was filled with horror as I realized that I had been betrayed—that I had betrayed myself and in doing so had betrayed others.
We had taught boldly and been taught thoroughly that discipleship was individualistic and “spiritual”—that our responsibility was to teach, to preach and to disciple (i.e., to impart truths about prayer, the Bible, devotional life and the Holy Spirit and to “save souls”). We had commended non-involvement in the great social issues of our time. In answer to the cries of the pockmarked poor, we had turned our backs, asking, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
That question reverberated in the depths of my soul as I hurried, dazed, from appointment to appointment. I saw a mother sleeping in the street in her little mobile cart, a man with putrid, festering sores begging for help, another wasted with the yellow color of a destroyed liver. Over and over again, I wondered, “Where was the social component to my discipleship?”
I had to admit that my years of teaching and preaching a “spiritual” discipleship had been misguided. Although friends might reject me as having lost my single-mindedness and total commitment to evangelism, I would have to repent and seek a Jesus-style discipleship. I had to go back to the scriptures and find a discipleship that brought together all of life—social, economic, political, spiritual— under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, a discipleship that dealt with today’s injustices.
I had never heard an exposition about the biblical responsibility to transform the social institutions of a city and secure provision for a pockmarked widow. I had never been taught how to help a poor squatter landlady who was oppressing those yet poorer as they rented her squatter home.
Discipleship means that disciples have to find Jesus’ answers for the exploited factory workers, and how the poor should respond to the moneylenders (who demand their six pesos tomorrow for the five they give you today). The Bible has much to teach about what we should do with such problems of oppression.
Discipleship also has to deal with the slums themselves, as well as with the displaced peasants who cannot cope in an industrial society. It has to deal with the animism and spirit worship that still clutch at society.
Disciple making is the transmission of life-to-life. It is caught, not taught. It is a fire that breeds fire. It is not a method, a program, nor even the teaching and preaching of the word of God—though all of these are involved. Disciple making is God’s love being poured out through one life into another, until the second life catches that love. It is faith imparted by one to another. It is an absolute commitment to the word of God, communicated in the midst of ministry pressures as men and women co-labor together.
I had given a woman one hundred pesos. But she had asked for my life. Sitting on a rock in the middle of a park, I made a life-long commitment to bring what has come to be known as “holistic discipleship” to the masses of Asia’s cities.
Culturally appropriate discipleship
The first step in moving from “spiritual” to holistic discipleship is the process of adapting Western models of discipleship.
The missionary who wishes to make disciples must go deep into the soul of the people. A disciple of Christ is one who follows the disciplines of Christ. Many think of these disciplines as the scheduling of set times of prayer, Bible reading, and so on. But Christ gave little teaching on such things (except to avoid parading them). His are the disciplines of the inner person, the disciplines of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount—qualities such as humility, meekness and peacemaking. These involve the transformation of the inner soul of a person. That inner soul is deeply molded by one’s culture, a culture that may include values close to those of Christ, as well as others directly opposed to him.
The perception of which values need transformation, at which stage of Christian development, and how this can be accomplished requires a deep understanding of any culture. The role of the missionary working with an indigenous movement is to understand these forces, acting as a catalyst to such changes within the movement’s leadership.
Many of us have a low view of disciple making, considering it as imparting basic Bible doctrine. We reduce concepts of discipleship into programs and packages. Programs and packages may be an important component of ministry within a specific sub-cultural grouping, but they are not transferable to other cultures. The resultant lack of cultural relevance is seen in reproduced Western church structures, Western church buildings, Western worship patterns and Western Bible school training.
I was fortunate. Gene Tabor and other leaders of the REACH movement had succeeded in re-thinking an American pattern of ministry from within a Filipino cultural framework. Few other groups have been as successful in this process. I could learn first-hand from my Filipino brothers and sisters about culturally suitable discipleship.
Ministry growth
God was blessing this contextualized ministry. Where we thought in terms of reaching whole social groups—whole offices, whole families, or barkadas, people came to Christ.
What does a missionary working in partnership with Filipinos among Manila’s middle class do? I usually preached two or three times weekly and enjoyed double-teaming with my leader who had responsibility for the development of the whole movement. This is the role I enjoy most in the ministry—supporting another, complementing, encouraging. It was a challenging task, requiring a dexterity far more demanding than being the kingpin and a greater depth of emotional maturity. I was encouraged to see the result of a similar supportive relationship from my earlier years in Manila. (There were now several disciple makers in the first church I had been involved in planting.)
We established monthly fellowships for different groups of people in Manila—a college group, a Makati group (the business center of Manila), a couples’ group, and a social workers’ fellowship. Requests for help kept coming from pastors, students, and professionals.
A pastor was excited about the idea of teaching his church how to have family devotions. It was the first time he had ever thought to have prayer times with his elders. There was a real breakthrough. Family devotions began to become a regular part of church life.
The ministry involved extensive counseling and training. I met weekly with ten to twenty people. I traveled on weekends with others on the staff to minister to students in the outlying agricultural universities. We put together manuals on the basics of Christian growth and follow-up for these three-day trips. The men who made up the teams during these trips are now leaders of these ministries.
The climax of my work with the professionals and in the wider ministry of the REACH movement came with the opportunity to lead a training program for 194 leaders from the core groups of each of the 13 agricultural university ministries.
One day, we split program trainees into groups of 15 and sent them out to the barrios to “preach the gospel to the poor.” Each group developed a drama, some special musical items and testimonies, while one of the men preached. Over 100 came to Christ. One of the men was so excited after this experience of preaching to the poor that the next month he gathered together a team to preach in a slum.
First steps
This process of culturally appropriate discipleship can be seen in the story of Manuel.
When I first met him, Manuel was a final year college student. He was an easy person to relate to. He invited me to a delicious supper of stuffed fish, rice and other dishes served by his family. After supper, we sat down together and discussed question by question a Bible study entitled “Assurance of Salvation.”
Even in this first study, culture affected the content of the follow-up. Three factors were constantly in mind as we discussed the passages.
First, Catholicism has used biblical terms, but given them different meanings. The result is that, for many, it takes weeks for the gospel to become clear.
Second, many in poor societies have grown up in broken family relationships. For such it may take months to establish a clear picture of God the Father as just, merciful, dependable and loving.
Third, since the basic culture is rooted in animism, basic follow-up begins by confronting a worldview of a pantheon of good and evil spirits.
Group or person-to-person discipleship?
In the highly structured, time-conscious, impersonal culture of the West, “person-to-person” discipleship is most effective. This involves, among other things, a weekly meeting of an hour to an hour-and-a-half for sharing in Bible study and prayer, and reviewing the memorized word. It is an extremely powerful technique in an individualistic culture.
But in a traditional, group-oriented, personal, creative, emotive society, with a time consciousness that is cyclic and event-oriented and a keen sense of the occasion, such a methodology is disastrous.
Personal discipling is an extremely threatening methodology to someone who has grown up rarely being alone— and usually never alone (unless married) with only one other person. In Asia, personal relationships are expressed by accompanying someone somewhere, in assisting someone to do something, or in attending a family function.
The principle of transferring truth in the context of a deep personal relationship is universal, but its specific cultural form is not cross-cultural. The ancient biblical principles of discipleship remain unchanged, but they are expressed in different cultural forms, with an appropriate fit between biblical and contemporary culture.
I believed that Manuel would come through to discipleship only if we reached his barkada around him (a barkada is a group of close-knit friends). I prayed for the opportunity to meet them.
The next time I visited Manuel, his drinking mates were sitting around the table with him. He was watching me carefully to see how I would cope, to see if I could relate. He asked his sister to serve me a cup of tea, and we joked our way through numerous introductions. Then the questions began to come.
Half-drunk men are painfully realistic. We talked a lot about that unusual person, Jesus Christ, and about trust.
“I trust no one, not even my closest friend!” declared one of the barkada looking around at his closest friends. He was a Muslim. His father had three wives, and he had grown up in an atmosphere of distrust. We talked of Jesus and his forgiveness, but the Muslim was too far drunk to consider trusting the man from Galilee.
After a while I took my leave, having made friends for myself but not yet for the Master.
But the following week, Manuel brought his girl friend Celia and two other friends to a Bible study in my home. My cooking was not up to such an occasion, so Celia cooked while we discussed how we could know God’s forgiveness.
The next week, Henry, one of Manuel’s friends, was high on drugs during the study. Two days later, he decided to leave his home, so he brought his belongings over with him to my place. We discussed the word of God about obedience to parents and sent him back home. Celia was not yet a Christian, so I took Celia and Manuel out for a meal in the restaurant in the park. We discussed how to get Henry off drugs, and then I explained to Celia how she, too, could know she has eternal life. She happily accepted it.
Animism
Manuel told me about the problem he was having memorizing Scripture. He would sit in his room, but every time he took out his verse pack to memorize Scripture, the lights in the room would die. When he put the verses away, the lights would return.
Some years before, we had been praying for his older sister to be released from demonic attacks.
In such a context, what are the first steps in disciple making? Is not basic follow-up to confront the occult powers, to transform the people’s worldview, showing clearly the difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world? Some months later, we went up to his room and prayed, commanding the spirit to leave.
But to free Manuel and his sister, the whole family had to renounce any dealings with the spirit world, including putting away their Catholic idols—statues of the Virgin and of the saints.
Many of the leading church-planters in the Philippines have come to a position of avoiding direct confrontation with Catholicism, preferring to teach new believers about the Bible and Christian discipleship. Believers very quickly cease praying to Mary upon learning the power of prayer. At times idols are publicly burnt, but mostly they are quietly taken down and hidden, destroyed, or, if family heirlooms, given to others in the family. In the same way, as it takes months, even years, for believers to cease their drinking, gambling, and immorality (oscillating between these and prayer and Bible study meetings), it takes some time for believers to assemble together into worship. When they do begin to attend regularly, demonstrating a clear stability of commitment and life, it appears wise to baptize believers. Earlier baptism is seen by the family only as a sign of conversion to Protestantism, not as a sign of repentance from sin, severely limiting any further evangelism among relatives and neighbors.
Cultural leadership patterns
In developing a leadership team for Bible studies, I needed to learn numerous other cultural values. Among them were the role of women, consensus decision-making, and group centeredness.
Filipino women are held in higher respect than their counterparts in other cultures. In the Philippines, women run 80% of businesses. Men are the head, the ultimate authority, but women do the real decision-making. Women usually handle family finances.
When I began, I tried to develop key men for the management of the work. That was a mistake, a trespassing on the woman’s role. The men’s role was to teach and preach— to be the figureheads. The women were to organize and determine where, when, and how.
A second change needed in my leadership style was in the process of decision-making. In the Philippines, the leadership team sits and discusses for hours. The leader should sit and listen, gently feeling for the consensus of the group. If a consensus is not reached in a meeting, no decision can be made.
Further discussion may create that critical harmony necessary for decision. Harmony with others, with God, and with nature are crucial components in most Asian cultures, in contrast to our own culture, where achievement is the ultimate and often only point of evaluation.
Hours of small talk, joking, and engaging in apparently “time-wasting” conversation are critical factors in the Filipino mind for creating the right atmosphere of freedom, harmony, and unity.
Planning, too, is developed on a different model. Filipinos, it seems, easily perceive the ultimate goal, the glorious vision of a brilliant future. The implications for the present are deduced from this, the group collectively deeply committed to its realization.
Intermediate goals may be verbalized, but the concrete steps required for their fulfillment are not spelled out in case they restrict the creativity that is the driving force behind Filipino achievements. This is quite a contrast to the highly structured planning models of the West, with their emphasis on pre-planning at every step.
Economic repentance
As my view of discipleship changed, my friends in New Zealand were also adjusting. They understood enough missions theory to appreciate cross-cultural deviations from the norm of disciple making, but what was most disconcerting for them—and threatening—was the economic implications of holistic discipleship.
While I lived with Ka Emilio, I had already been meeting some small economic and social needs. Four rabbits happily played outside the window of my room. I experimented to see if these might be a way of supplementing my regular intake of meat. I would go jogging each morning, collecting grass and ipil-ipil leaves for them on the way. Eventually I concluded that rabbits were too complex a husbandry project for most poor families.
For years, the REACH movement had a deep commitment to meeting socio-economic needs. This had been demonstrated symbolically in a pig farm. The six-week-old piglets were given to poor families who raised them to seven months on food scraps, and then sold them for a small sum to supplement their income. The farm had a training center where educated Filipinos could learn to work with their hands. It was also a center for other economic projects.
We spent time and effort to recruit money from Tear Fund for an airlift pump developed by a Canadian friend for the farm. He believed it would lower the price of the average farmer’s pump to one-tenth. It was a demonstration of our commitment to small scale, appropriate technology— projects at the technical and economic levels of the people.
After writing a few thoughts home to New Zealand on these economic projects, I received some letters asking if perhaps I had moved from my commitment to evangelism as the thrust of mission. I sought to answer these comments honestly, communicating my growing understanding. They served, as letters normally do, to confuse. I wrote:
I have begun to realize how much our Western culture has molded my view of the scriptures, how in most areas of our lives we compartmentalize: the social is not the spiritual is not the economic. We have a great divide in our thinking, which can be illustrated thus:
Spiritual issues = religion
Social-economic-political issues = life
But the scriptures are not Western; they are Eastern. They see life as a whole; they are holistic. Discipleship involves the spiritual, i.e. our relationship to God. However, even in the great commission, Jesus includes social and economic repentance along with proclamation to preach. He tells us not only to “go, make disciples . . . ” but to “teach them to observe all” that he had commanded (Matthew 28:19). Observance involves action. The action is evidenced socially, economically, even politically:
One evening during this time, I gave a talk on repentance. I mentioned John the Baptist’s demand: “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none, and he who has food let him do likewise” (Luke 3:11).
As I spoke, I was struck by the fact that I had never before spoken of economic repentance when I had been preaching the gospel. The repentance I had spoken of had been purely in spiritual terms. From this time on my preaching would define repentance economically, spiritually, socially and, where necessary, politically. It transformed my evangelism.
A development of the bridge diagram we had often used to portray the gospel now looked like this:
Jesus might be the answer, but as Christians, we had not been asking the right questions. Western notions of the gospel and discipleship were irrelevant in the Two-Thirds World except to the upper- and middle-class, whose problems were primarily psychological and emotional needs.
Mission and the gospel
What, then, are our social, economic and political responsibilities as disciples of Christ? The following responsibilities are commonly thought of as “disciple making”:
These are primary to all we do, but the Scriptures add the following ways we are to use to influence the world—as salt keeps meat from rotting and light expels darkness.
To these general principles, we may add specific commands regarding social, economic and political action:
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Speak up for the poor and needy
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Feed the hungry
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Protect widows
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Care for orphans
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Visit prisoners
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Clothe the destitute
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House the homeless
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Give to the poor
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Uphold the rights of the oppressed
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Look after aliens and refugees
Our mission as Christians is primarily to proclaim the truth about God, but we are also to live in the world. Expressing God’s life in us involves all of these other factors. We are to be “our brother’s keeper;” we are “to manage creation;” we are to “do justice.” This is the context in which God’s kingdom is proclaimed. All of the commands listed above are parts of our mission, as we await the return of our Lord.
Our thinking had moved from a Western “spiritual” concept of discipleship to a culturally adapted one, and then to a holistic discipleship. But there was one more step in my search before God could illuminate a theology and strategy for ministry to the urban poor.
Discipleship had been the theme of my life as it is a dominant theme in the Scriptures, but I was gradually becoming uneasy about making it the center of my theology. I had begun to reject the dispensational view, which divided biblical history into a series of dispensations, in such a way that (though this is never stated) God changes tactics and character in each dispensation. The Old Testament is relegated to irrelevancy by stating its dispensation. Similarly much of Jesus’ teaching becomes obsolete. What is left as important is the “spiritual” teaching of the apostle Paul. Even the apostolic dispensation is considered finished, and with it miracles, signs, and prophetic gifts.
My search culminated one day with explosive illumination—like walking into a floodlit room.
I was sitting in a class on the theological perspectives of community development.1 As Dr. William Dyrness mapped out God’s interventions (a community development term) in history (a theological starting point), God intervened! Suddenly, I saw the universal biblical theme around which all of life as well as ministry to the poor could be integrated. It was the greatness, the fullness, the unity of the kingdom of God in the Scriptures and the immutable, unchanging nature of God himself.
I studied how the economic principles of the kingdom were first expressed in the life of Israel, in the life of the Church. I saw that God’s economics, though expressed in different contexts, do not change from age to age, but are universal! The politics of God are also universal. His truth was unchanging.2
In a flash, the Spirit of God showed me the basis for a theology of developing movements among squatters. My excitement knew no limits. I devoured article after article, verse after verse, and working eighteen hours a day on the task. My years of searching and questioning had, at last, found a focal point. I now needed time to work back from this focal point and develop a total theology for reaching Asia’s squatters.
Eric Hoffer points out that popular movements begin with people of words—the intelligentsia who capture the feeling, the mood of the times, and bring it to the notice of the people.3
It was such a time in Manila—a time to forge the foundations for a ministry to the squatters from amongst the intellectuals. I sensed that my role, as a foreigner, was to identify the season we were in, recognize God’s purpose for the national church, and serve it with all my energy. Within a few days, God had enabled the writing of a 40-page article entitled “Christian Perspective on Development Philosophies.” It sought to integrate various biblical materials on the kingdom of God, the poor, economics, and the realities of present Filipino social conditions.
To some, such academic study may seem meaningless. But thought must precede action. Having broken the bonds of a tightly defined theological system, I needed to establish a new basis for mission. Others could follow—and develop new approaches—if the biblical basis was clear.
A clearly articulated philosophy of poverty and mission was necessary for the government as well. As regular reports were made on my activities in the slums, it was essential that I be able to define my position. The word, I knew, would be passed on to the appropriate authorities. Discipleship is “always being ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you!”
“When you first came, I thought you were a Marxist worker,” one of the community leaders would tell me in Tatalon. She was quite suspicious because Marxists had entered Tatalon before. They even had given scholarships to people and worked with the Catholic priests.
I had just explained to another friend in her presence how, as Christians, we wanted to put the control of production and exporting into the hands of the poor—to avoid letting the rich gain control of the economic projects, and to develop cottage industries. But unlike the Marxists, we did not intend to use our economic projects to buy people for Christianity. What we wanted was to assist those who already had spiritual life to become stable economically, so they could be relieved from peer-group pressures and from personally destructive behavior like gambling, drunkenness, adultery, and drug addiction.
As an extra bonus, academic mastery of issues relating to politics, economics, and the poor also gave entrance to social workers, community workers, religious leaders and academics in the upper class. Many key laborers among the poor would come from this group.
Theology in partnership
Twelve theologians from across Asia spent a year studying issues of poverty. Other Filipino evangelical Christians voiced their theologies of community development. It was important to keep in touch with these mainstreams of prophetic witness in the church. Proverbs tells us “in the abundance of counselors is wisdom.” The work among the poor grew from such counselors on the cutting edge of Filipino theology.
One of these was Pastor Johnny, the leader of a church we had been involved in establishing some years earlier. Early one morning, as the dawn glowed from pink to blue, we met in the park. We discussed how Jesus’ ethical teaching on right relationships leads into Paul’s theology of economic and social responsibility. Then we talked through a strategy for work among the poor.
A number of social workers were involved in Bible studies. We sought to draw them together to discuss the biblical basis of social work. Professors had taught them the empty shell of humanistic social work, but they had not yet been able to fully integrate their work with their faith. Some were trapped into doing social work without a biblical base. Discipleship had affected their personal lives in areas of prayer and Bible study, but they wanted it to become the heart of their work. These social workers had already begun to bring significant biblical reforms into government and aid agencies.
Over several weeks during the same period, six other graduates and I met together for a series of studies on the economic implications of discipleship. We discussed issues such as creating work, earning money, caring for the environment, being effective managers of finance, and discovering the responsibilities of the rich to the poor.
Out of these and other discussions, we produced a booklet entitled “Finances and the Kingdom of God” and a number of one-day seminars.
The major components of the theology behind our squatter movement were now on paper. The next phase of ministry was to clearly map out a strategy for the work.
Notes
1. See Bryant Myers, Walking with the Poor, MARC, 1998, for some theology and principles of community transformation.
2. Later published in Let the Earth Rejoice, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1998. Perhaps the best portrayal of the biblical theology of the Kingdom of God is George Eldon Ladd, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1999.
3. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Harper and Row, Reissued edition 1989.
© Viv Grigg & Urban Leadership Foundationand other materials © by various contributors & Urban Leadership Foundation, for The Encarnacao Training Commission. Last modified: July 2010Previous Page |
