Video 7 A Safe Place
Christians, and especially those of us who are leaders, need to cultivate environments where people feel free to be authentic. Jesus is not glorified when we try to make ourselves look better than we are. We don’t want people to stay where they are—discipleship is about moving from who we are to who Jesus wants us to be. But there’s no point in creating church environments where people feel pressured to appear further along than they actually are.
David Kinnaman shares some troubling statistics in his book You Lost Me. In a survey of Millennials who have a Christian background, many reported feeling that church isn’t a safe place to wrestle with tough questions or admit doubts about God. More than a third said that they didn’t feel safe asking their most pressing life questions in church. One in five said they have had a crisis in life that has made them doubt their faith. One in ten said that they aren’t allowed to talk about their doubts in church.
Churches that aren’t safe places for people to express doubt will have a hard time discipling people. After all, Abraham, David, Elijah, Peter, Thomas, and even John the Baptist would have had a really tough time fitting in at a church that didn’t allow for doubt. After all, our biblical heroes of the faith doubted. Yet they’re still heroes.
A performance-based church environment will prevent disciples from genuinely wrestling with the deep issues of life—the things that cause them to doubt. But a grace-based environment will liberate disciples to invite others to address their deepest and darkest struggles head-on.
Freedom from people-pleasing. Performance based discipleship feeds off of human approval. I know this from experience, and you probably do as well. Think about those days when you are spiritually off the charts. You wake up early and pray for an hour. You read the Bible for another hour. You fast all day, witness to a coworker, and cancel your Netflix subscription (for now). You are really pursuing God!
Aren’t you just dying to let other Christians know about it? When your pastor asks how your day was, doesn’t it feel so good sharing all the details? “I’d love to meet for lunch, pastor, but see, I’m actually fasting today. Plus, I’m going out to lunch with this coworker that I’ve been witnessing to . . .” When we’re performing well, we’re often eager to let others know about it.
A good friend of mine just burned out on ministry. He was a pastor at a thriving church, and he was doing many amazing things to further God’s kingdom. He was teaching, preaching, counseling, and serving. He was working very hard—and that was part of the problem. He just couldn’t say no—to anything. He just kept doing, doing, doing. He was performing well for Christ. Or at least he thought he was. Actually, he was performing himself into exhaustion to please others. His hyperactive, nonstop, 24/7 performance for Christ was actually crushing him. He nearly destroyed his family and spent a whole month in counseling because his performance wasn’t driven by grace but by a desire to look good in front of people.
Since all Christians are deeply shaped by our performance-driven culture, we will need to work extra hard reminding people daily that the gospel liberates us from trying to impress other people with our spirituality. Pharisaical pressure from other Christians needs to be confronted as aggressively as blatant immorality. Any Christian—especially a Christian leader—who makes others feel unspiritual or unmotivated to admit their failures is a roadblock to discipleship.
God knows how broken and messed up we really are. Yet he’s still pleased with us because he was pleased with Jesus. We need to make much of Christ’s performance, rather than our own.
Accountability groups can be a vital means of cultivating discipleship. According to The State of Discipleship, “Accountability is essential for busy, scattered people to make the time to invest in their spiritual growth.” It’s tough to become more like Christ if other believers are not coming alongside you to keep you accountable.
However, accountability groups can also discourage people from becoming more like Jesus, especially if they are performance based rather than grace based. I love what Jonathan Dodson says: “Although accountable relationships start with a noble aim—commitment to confession, encouragement, and prayer for one another—they often devolve into relationships based on rule keeping or rule breaking.” What often ends up happening is that people tend to put more faith in accountability than they do in the gospel. “The unfortunate result is a kind of legalism in which peer-prescribed punishments are substitutes for repentance and faith in Jesus.”
Churches should cultivate accountability relationships that seek to magnify the gospel. Christian accountability should never shame someone into obedience or make them feel unloved by God. True accountability should always celebrate God’s finished work on the cross and his vast sea of forgiveness available to those who mess up.
The apostle Paul was criticized for giving people a license to sin by emphasizing grace too much. “And some people even slander us by claiming that we say, ‘The more we sin, the better it is!’” (Romans 3:8). A few chapters later, Paul addressed this criticism head-on: “Should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not!” (Romans 6:1-2). Grace doesn’t cause people to sin, and it should never be a motivation to keep on sinning. A person who sins because of God’s unconditional grace hasn’t truly understood God’s unconditional grace.
God’s grace meets us where we are, but it doesn’t leave us where we are. The same grace that encounters sinners also conquers sin. This is why Paul spends the first five chapters of Romans exploring God’s unmerited favor and then spends the next three encouraging Christians toward obedience. Obedience flows from grace. True grace enables and produces obedience. I love how Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15:10: “But whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his special favor on me—and not without results.”
Grace is not a cul-de-sac but a highway; it’s not an off-ramp but an on-ramp toward obedience. This is why Paul says that grace is “not without results.” He goes on to say that it was God’s grace that caused him to work “harder than any of [the other apostles].” How? Because God’s grace didn’t putter out after saving Paul. It kept chipping away at Paul until it pushed obedience out the other side.
Grace and obedience aren’t enemies. They’re friends. Grace doesn’t prevent obedience. Grace enables it. “Work out your own salvation,” Paul says, “with fear and trembling.” Sound legalistic? I know—it does to me, too. This is why Paul goes on to say, “For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13). Work hard—by God’s grace.
Both obedience and grace should hang in the air of our discipleship communities. As we seek to become more like Christ, we should talk more and more about grace, not less. Grace doesn’t just save us; it also sanctifies us. “No disciple will ever graduate from the school of grace,” Dodson says. “We are born in grace and we breathe by grace.”
Whether your discipleship community consists of one-on-ones, triads, small groups, or large groups, the group’s fuel tank must be filled with grace. When—not if—people fail, they need to be reassured that God is still for them, that he still scandalously delights in them, that their failures have been covered by the blood of Christ. Grace doesn’t just get us in the door of salvation; it’s what makes us more like Jesus. People will never be able to obey God until they first believe they are accepted by God. Acceptance precedes obedience.
Grace-based discipleship frees us up to engage in meaningful and authentic relationships. And discipleship is all about relationships. When two (or three, or four) broken people come together and have nothing to hide, no one to impress, and no plastic image that they’re trying to put on, it becomes so much easier to engage in honest relationships. And honest relationships are at the core of effective discipleship—the topic of our next class.