A HOMELESS PEASANT BORN IN A FEEDING TROUGH: THE SCANDAL OF FOLLOWING JESUS

He was an unmarried peasant who was executed by the state for treason. Many of his friends were criminals, sinners, thugs, and misfits. Few of them were religious. He got kicked out of his home church (or synagogue) after saying things that deviated from the status quo. He spent most of his time with drunks, gluttons, fornicators, and thieves. He was so close to sinners that the religious leaders thought he was one. And nearly everything he said and did made religious people mad — such as when he told them to turn the other cheek, love their enemies, and give their money to the poor.

Jesus — the Jewish prophet-king from Nazareth — was dangerous. He wasn't tame. He wasn't predictable. He wasn't safe.

Even though he befriended immoral people, he upheld a moral standard that was so impossible to obey that he walked out of a grave for us to attain it. He wasn't very sensitive to those seeking to follow him. He never eased anyone into the kingdom or said things that people wanted to hear. Jesus was a hard-hitting, enemy-loving, harlot-embracing, wildeyed Messiah, who resisted doing things the way we've always done them. The biblical Jesus hits us between the eyes with truth and embraces us with tears when we disobey that truth. Jesus demanded that "if anyone would come after me" — that is, become a disciple — "let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say, "When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die."

In this book we will explore what it means to become like Jesus, which means that it's a book about discipleship. When we talk about "becoming more like Jesus," we've got to slam our clichés on the operating table and dissect them to see if they're biblical. And this book is going to serve as the surgeon. When we talk about discipleship and becoming more Christlike, we've got to keep asking: What does it mean to become like Jesus?

The Moral Jesus of Therapeutic Deism

As we'll see, discipleship means becoming more like Jesus. This doesn't necessarily mean we should sell our homes and walk around the streets as homeless peasants. But I do think we need to take a fresh look at the scandalous nature of becoming Christlike.

If I can be completely honest, I've never had a huge desire to write a book about discipleship (don't tell my publisher). I just figured that all the pastors and churches in America are doing a pretty good job. And if it ain't broke, why write a book about it?

But then I read the recent Barna study The State of Discipleship, and my desire to write this book was ignited. In 2014, the international outreach ministry The Navigators commissioned the Barna Group, a Christian research firm, to perform an extensive survey of adult Christians, Christian scholars and influencers, and ministry and church leaders about their understanding and practice of discipleship. Some of the results of that study were informative; others were encouraging. But many of the results were depressing. We'll unpack some of the depressing details in due time, but to sum it up: The American church is not doing very well at discipling its people. Which is a big problem since discipleship means becoming like Christ.

The State of Discipleship revealed that our methods of making disciples are broken. Whatever we're doing, it's not working. Few churches and Christian leaders are effectively helping people become more like Jesus. Reading the results of that study really fired me up to want to write this book. Once I realized that our methods of making disciples have proved ineffective, I decided to peek behind the curtain to see what was going on.

One of the problems I found was that many Christians who are trying to become like Christ are not becoming like the Christ of the Bible — that radical Jewish peasant-prophet from Galilee. Instead, they are seeking to conform to the god of moral therapeutic deism. And when I peeked behind the curtain (that is, read the Barna study), my suspicions were confirmed.

Moral therapeutic deism is a phrase coined by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their groundbreaking book Soul Searching} Their study was focused on the religious beliefs of American teens, but it captures the typical beliefs of many American Christians:

• God exists and watches over the world.

• He wants us to be good people who are nice to others.

• The goal in life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.

• God isn't too involved in our lives unless we need him to solve a problem.

• Good people go to heaven when they die.

The God who exists in the minds of many churchgoers is "one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in one's affairs — especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved."

Of course, not every Christian thinks this way. But a surprising number do. My evidence for this used to be anecdotal — based on my own limited experience with other Christians. But then I read The State of Discipleship (and other studies like it), and my anecdotal experience was confirmed.

While many Christians say they want to become more like Jesus, the Jesus they're imagining is largely a modern (and American) religious and cultural construct. He's a Jesus who wants us to be good people, work an honest job, go to church as often as we can, be wise with our money, save up enough to retire well, raise well-behaved kids who don't drink or party or have sex before marriage, and be nice to our neighbors while seeking justice for our enemies. But the short-haired, dark-skinned, unmarried peasant who received the death penalty for treason — the Jesus of the Bible — neither modeled this nor taught it. If we're going to become like Jesus, we need to clear aside the clutter and see this Jesus for who he really is.

What Is Discipleship?

I've been a Christian for more than twenty years. This means I've heard the words disciple, discipleship, and discipling (a word unrecognized by Microsoft Word) at least 13 billion times. Like many Christian buzzwords, discipleship terms clutter the church airwaves, yet few people understand what they actually mean.

This could be bad news for a book about discipleship. We can't get very far until we clearly know what it is we're even talking about.

So what is discipleship? Is a disciple a special kind of Christian? Or one of the original twelve...