Discipleship as Conversion

In a recent issue of The Victorian baptist Witness (Sepot 2006, p4) Simon Moyle said, "We see discipleship as conversion, rather than necessarily something that follows conversion".

I like this statement - it expresses a conviction I have had for a long time. I believe the idea may have come from George Eldon Ladd, but the first time I saw it spelled out clearly was by Dave Andrews in Christi-Anarchy. Here he outlined the concept of open and closed sets. The traditional evangelical understanding of conversion was as a closed set. If one was anywhere outside the boundary of the set one was headed for hell, whereas being anywhere inside the boundary led to heaven. There was a well-defined set of formulae by which one could cross the boundary from outside to inside, such as "the four spiritual laws" and the "sinner's prayer", and there was usually no way to make the reverse journey - once saved, always saved! Of course, different groups had a different set of formulae.

The open set idea, espoused by Andrews, and blogged about more recently by Steve Collins, is the one that resonates in my heart. It says that there is no actual boundary to the set, and whether one is "in" or "out" is determined more by whether one is moving towards the centre, where Jesus is, or moving away. The distance from the centre relates more to how one lives, rather than to whether one is saved or not. It is possible for someone on the journey to God to sometimes be moving towards God, and sometime away. In fact, it would be possible for someone close to the centre to reverse their direction by conscious rejection of Jesus, and to head directly away from salvation!

This idea allows for the possibility of people coming to faith in Jesus from any direction, even via another religion or no religion at all. However, only Jesus is at the centre, not Buddha, not Mahommed, not any other spiritual, philosophical or political leader, guru, god, demon, or idea.

I'm not syaing that the Kingdom of God is all "open set" or all "closed set". These are just models which help to illustrate different aspects of the process of salvation. The important point here is that it is a process!

The idea that rather than discipleship following conversion, discipleship is conversion, is much closer to what Jesus did with his disciples. "What must I do to receive eternal life?" he was asked. "Come, follow me!" And in the following life transformation takes place.

In our work in prayer ministry at Beth Tephillah Ministry Centre we see this happening all the time, not just in those who come for ministry, but even more importantly in our staff and students. Of course, they are already followers of Jesus or they wouldn't be staff members - we don't turn just anyone loose on severely wounded people! But they are still being converted!

As they walk in obedience, often right out of their comfort zones and having to trust God to "show up", we see them coming more and more alive. They find that God is trustworthy in areas of their lives that were previously unsubmitted. They find that they can do things with Jesus they would have been afraid to attempt before, or simply unaware of. In short, they constantly become more like Jesus.

This, for me, is the meaning of conversion and discipleship. It is the "have been saved, am being saved, and will be saved" that the early church understood.

For most of our staff, Beth Tephillah Ministry Centre is about bringing healing to the wounded. But for me, it is more about training and releasing people into ministry. While we never like people leaving us, we are most encouraged when we lose some of our staff because they have gone to start another healing centre somewhere else. In this way our seeds are being planted in many places, including Ballarat, Warnambool, Wodonga, Geelong, and through the Healing Prayer Ministries Network, all over Victoria. In fact, through our online teaching, they are spreading across the world!

One of the pioneers of this form of ministry, John Sandford, called it "evangelising the unbelieving hearts of believers". He discusses it in Transforming the Inner Man: God's Powerful Principles for Inner Healing and Lasting Life Change (Transformation), a classic book which every Christian counsellor and minister needs to read.

This is just one of the aspects of being church at Beth Tephillah. While being tiny in the more traditional measures of "church", we are a catalyst for other ministries in the body of Christ - and not just in our own denomination. Our own staff belong to 16 different churches, and each of our "daughter" centres has the same vision for the Kingdom of God and the community, not just the building up of their own church.

If you looked at Beth Tephillah on a Friday night, which is when we gather as Williamstown Baptist Church, you would see something different again. I love what Inspiral and others in the emerging church movement are doing. In his article Simon Moyle describes the people of Inspiral as "a bunch of people who would never darken the door of a traditional church". At Beth Tephillah we have the same, but these aren't the "young, relatively affluent post-moderns" that are the focus of many new initiatives. Ours are largely the older wounded and rejected of society - the alcoholics, schizophrenics, bipolar, downtrodden, depressed, damaged by church and broken families - the "difficult" people.

In fact, a few young, relatively affluent post-moderns would really brighten the place up! They would also instantly find themselves with a ministry on their hands. We'd love to encourage our folk to be more caring of others, but a higher priority for some is to get them caring for themselves!

Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven!