Discipleship: Come out and be separate

I'm a pastor, church planter, and a voice in the lives of others seeking to follow Christ. I'm also a guy who wrestles with what it means to be a disciple of Christ and how to help others in their path of discipleship.

In my previous posts I've wrestled with the time it takes for discipleship and my particular formation as a follower of Christ. As I look back on my journey I'm grateful for my experiences, particularly for the experiences that pulled me away and pushed me to grow.

The more I wrestle with what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, the more I think we need times where we separate ourselves for our own development.

The challenge with becoming proficient in something is that it requires a dedication and devotion that is uncommon. In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers (mentioned in my

previous post), he shares about a study at the Berlin Academy of Music (read the story) and the discoveries concerning top level violinist and pianist. Each group of the best had put in the 10,000 hours or more of dedication to the craft. If you think about it, practicing violin and/or piano for 10k hours sounds excruciating, but it is the difference.

I transferred this 10k hour rule of mastery to discipleship and I've asked how can one achieve the 10k hours. This is where I think opportunities like youth camps, Bible College, Seminary, etc come into play in our discipleship formation.

It is well accepted that to grow in your faith you need to attend church regularly. Some may argue this point, but the majority have come to recognize the role of the Christian community (typically expressed as the church) is vital to our growth. Yet, there is more to our faith development than merely going to church. And if going to church is our only act of discipleship it will take a really long time to achieve our 10k hours.

Alan Hirsch in his book The Forgotten Ways borrows the idea of communitas from anthropologist Victor Turner as a way of helping us see a vital element of our faith development. Essentially, communitas is when a community forms through a shared experience of trial or hardship and carries an intense kinship with it that bonds those from the experience together. I see communitas as being a critical component of achieving our 10k hours of discipleship formation.

For many Christians, their first exposure to communitas is a youth camp. Certainly, these are not life threatening experiences but the separation from the normal into an abnormal place, routine, and relationships creates an experience that shapes and bonds the participants. This is part of the reason so many campers will make decisions of faith during the week and long to return to the experience year after year (regardless of the quality of the camp). This time of separation allows a camper to accelerate the hours they spend in their faith development. For instance in that week they increase from 1-3 hours to 80-100 hours depending on the programming.

The most influential time of communitas is probably college. This time of separation from one's family, support system, and likely home town begins to shape a person in immense ways. The new environment with its academic and social challenges (not to mention financial) begins to test the student in a huge way. They form bonds with others going through the experience. Many of these bonds are brother or sisterhoods (fraternity or sorority) that endure through the years. This is also the time when a person devotes a great number of hours into their development. For instance, it is possible a college student could spend up to 5,000 hours focusing on a field of development. That's half of the hours needed to reach the "expert" status mentioned by Gladwell and others. This is why choosing the right college is critical. Bible and Christian colleges along with seminaries stand in a tremendous position to help form disciples.

Rather than focusing on one discipline of discipleship formation, it is critical our Bible and Christian college along with seminaries seize this opportunity to develop disciples across the disciplines. Todd Hiestand has done a great job of outlining the areas of discipline or formation.

The five different puzzle pieces as I see them are:

• Liturgical Formation - The community gathered for worship is where we are re-oriented together to the story of God through the scriptures worship, prayer and communion.
• Personal Formation - This emphasizes our need to relate to God intimately through spiritual disciplines.
• Servant Formation - We are called to love and serve others and when you care for others, you cannot help but be changed.
• Relational Formation - We are not called to follow Jesus alone. We intentionally seek relationships that were encouraging one another on towards Christ-likeness.
• Educational Formation - We seek truth together and seek a knowledge that leads to faith. This “renewing of the mind” is a vital part of our formation.

As I see it, the preferred track to achieving our 10k hours must involve the above formation pieces in association with communitas which is only possible when we step into a level of devotion that includes separation for development. Trying to frame this into a 21st century North American society is becoming increasingly difficult.

While reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book Discipleship, I stumbled across this:

Following Christ means taking certain steps. The first step, which responds to the call, separates the followers form their previous existence.

I added this thought: the call of separation is likely the hardest step because we are so comfortable in our surroundings.

I feel like I'm on to something, but I have as many questions now as I do thoughts. How can we experience communitas in a world where we can rarely separate ourselves from the 24/7 noise? How can we devote the time needed to faith development when we are faced with the demands of work, family, etc? How can we separate from life for a season of development without creating tremendous earthquakes in our lives - or is that the point?