"Discipleship is a nightmare"

About a year ago I heard a statement that I have been mulling over ever since. My instant reaction was, YES!" but lately I've been rethinking this and I wonder if I was off a bit, which wouldn't be terribly unusual!

"Discipleship is a nightmare isn't it. Can we just be honest about that? We want it to be like a superhighway but it is more like a dusty road through the desert with coyotes on each side."

We end up putting people together in different ways and calling it discipleship. I think my question when it comes to this is simply why are we trying to make this happen?

I know that sounds odd but why do we pour time, effort, and funds into programs we want to enable discipleship between people? It is a lost art I think, a needed aspect that rages against out instant, do-it-yourself culture. Discipleship is slow, and it has to start slow, and it has to spread through culture, the culture of the church and of its people.

I am learning that discipleship can look different than just the Disciples, and this is brilliant. Short times with specific goals of working through a book, or specific passages, or anything in order to help someone see Christ more and draw closer to Him. This is a bit of a different topic, but thanks for the insight there Steve P!

Short, long, whatever to make discipleship happen it has to be ingrained in the culture, it has to start with people discipling and being discipled (the second is more difficult often times). If we can enable others to do this we can burn it into the culture of this world. It just starts slow and spreads slow, that's how you change culture and personally I'm all right with that.

What you have learned and experienced is like everything else in this life: It's not about you and it's not just for you.

The only way to conclude this though, and it goes on forever in my mind, is to steal Nike's slogan: Just Do It!