My Normal Life and my Great Commission Life are the same Life (Part 2)
Blog post by Spring Church Pastor, Matt McCoy
So, what do we do next? Last week’s blog post celebrated the joy of reimagining the word “Go” in the Great Commission. This week’s blog post will enter into the scary reality of reimagining the words “Make Disciples” in the Great Commission. Having a life-altering encounter with the Holy Spirit while reading scripture in community is beautiful, scary, wonderful and holy. These moments are some of my favorite memories. I loved all the conversations and prayers and moments of realizing that Denise was right: discipleship begins in the home.
But discerning what to do next is another matter entirely.
Let’s return to Greek class at Regent College in 2010. The word for “make disciples” is a pretty straightforward word in Greek, and I felt like I had a clear idea of what making disciples was all about. All Christians are invited into:
a life with prayer,
a life with scripture,
a life with the Church.
Yes, there are lots of other things involved with making disciples, but this is the basic starting point. And I figured I already knew how to pray, how to read the Bible, and how to go to Church.
Yet, that straightforward Greek word for “make disciples” challenged my assumptions when I discovered it’s a plural word. As a plural word, it’s not just me receiving discipleship from the experts who are offering it, or me giving discipleship to the people who need it. This discipleship Jesus is talking about involves the whole Church making disciples of each other at the same time. Thus, when others are doing their part to “Go” and they discover me, we are commanded to disciple each other.
We are called to give and receive discipleship. So it’s less about what I do FOR people, and more about what I do WITH people. My kids, people experiencing homelessness, the adult with severe disabilities at my church, the butcher working behind the counter at the shop down the street; I receive discipleship from all of them, as well as offer discipleship to all of them.
To give me something to hold onto through all this, I had a simple definition of discipleship:
Discipleship is the Church walking with Jesus in the direction Jesus is walking.
This is starting to sound more like friendship with people who are following where Jesus leads. This includes prayer, scripture and the church, but it also includes more than that.
Much more.
Now let’s return to my kitchen in Vancouver in 2010, where everything fell apart.
I knew in my HEAD that I was to give and receive discipleship in the places where I found myself, but my HEART very much still wanted to go somewhere exotic and do something amazing for Jesus. In order to help my heart re-learn how to love, I needed to start walking in the direction I saw Jesus walking in.
As I continued to study the Bible, I started to re-notice how Jesus ate with people all the time. Jesus ate so often with people that his detractors called him a glutton. I happened to be in a family with three children who wanted to eat all the time, too. I love food and eating. My imagination around what counted for discipleship grew beyond simply “prayer, scripture reading, and talking” and into something more holistic and embodied.
If this is the direction Jesus is walking in, then how do I learn how to walk in this direction, too?
I had never stopped to consider that somebody had to cook all those meals. As my imagination hovered over all these stories of shared meals in the Bible, I discovered that someone had to get the ingredients together, someone had to dirty up the kitchen making the meal, and someone had to clean up afterwards. Discipleship, as I was now defining it, included all these things, too!
This is so different than my notion of ‘Making Disciples’ as something I stop my normal life to go do, here was ‘making disciples' in the normal stuff of everyday life.
When the Bible told a story of someone eating a meal, I started trying to imagine how far the cook had to walk to get the food, what they had to trade in order to get the parts for all the side dishes, what kind of surface they used for the prep, what sort of fuel they used for the oven, and what it was like to clean it all up? All of this is a part of discipleship, too. My imagination was improving, but I still needed a way to practice all this if I was going to learn how to walk in this direction.
Rachel and Leah Cooking by artist, Balage Balogh
When I say the phrase “discipleship with my Denise” I think of prayer, bible study, and being an active part of the Church. And I’m right about that; it’s still the basic starting point for everyone walking in the direction Jesus is walking. But what if my understanding of “discipleship with my Denise” grows and includes something as mundane as meal planning? We decided to try it. It was awkward, beautiful, messy, and took about two months before I could say it felt “worth the effort.”
Yet something holy happened when we started planing out the weekly menu together on Saturdays, and for me it started with the confession that I didn’t like dedicating the time to do it.
ANYTHING else felt more interesting, more urgent, more significant than looking at the week and figuring out what we were going to eat each night. And the Holy Spirit used Saturday mornings to reveal that I separated out my Normal Life and my Great Commission Life. As I read the stories of Jesus, someone cooked the meal that Zaccheaus shared with Jesus, and if that’s a part of discipleship, then figuring out how to cook for my family can be a part of discipleship too.
The something holy that started with meal planning together bore a very unique and unexpected fruit:
after a few months of this, our stress around dinner time disappeared.
Our stress around feeding our family was so common and so normal and so ever-present that we didn’t really notice it, but we certainly noticed when the stress went away.
And being more relaxed around dinner time bore a very unique and unexpected fruit:
we were more receptive to having profound, hard, or challenging conversations about life and faith at random moments.
My children specifically bring up questions in the moment they think about it, and trying to bring it up later (when I feel ready) usually doesn’t work. “Mom and Dad, if God loves people, and God has all the power, then why do people suffer?” That’s not an easy question to explore on a good day, and it’s impossible if I’m stressed and overwhelmed. By being more relaxed at dinner time, we could disciple each other “wherever we find ourselves” simply because we’re more emotionally available to each other. We don’t pause our Normal Life so that we can enter our Great Commission Life to pray and read the Bible, we pray and read the Bible in a way that is woven into our Normal Life. These things all happen together.
Look, I’m describing the best parts of what happened, simply to illustrate that this is possible for all of us. Of course there are times when I’m too overwhelmed to be available to my kids, and of course there are missed opportunities to weave the vital elements of prayer, scripture, and the church into what we do together. Yes, there were plenty of failed meals, and yes, there are scars on my hands from accidents while learning how to wield a knife. And yet, in the midst of all that, we were discovering how to pay attention to what the Spirit is doing in each other. Not only am I discipling my children, they are discipling me as well. We’re in this together.
The most common image of heaven in the Bible does not involve clouds, harps, or halos: It’s a feast with God.
We were getting glimpses of that feast together, even amidst the spilled drinks and inappropriate fart jokes and dirty dishes. The Great Commission starts right here.
Spring Church leadership team dinner meeting during construction at the McCoy residence
Jack and Jessie at the “Heaven on Earth” Restaurant in Azalea, OR where the cinnamon rolls are as big as your head.
My hope in writing this is not that you would start cooking together more. And I would be so very sad if you read this and thought that you can substitute cooking for reading the Bible, praying, and an active life in the Church. Parents still need to be the primary people to raise their children to follow Jesus in all these things, because the home is still the primary place of worship. Please continue to pursue your own spiritual disciplines, be it scripture reading, prayer, singing, journaling, lectio devina, silence, and teach your children how to do the same.
Disciplines are the essence of what it means to be a disciple, it’s why we use the same root word to describe it, and it’s what the Great Commission is all about.
Have you ever felt that the holy parts of your life are separated from the normal parts of your life? Have you ever felt that the ‘mountaintop’ experiences with God are the 'real’ experiences? Do you find yourself bored with the idea of a routine around planning what you’re going to eat ahead of time?
If so, then my hope is that the ordinary and normal act of cooking and eating, with the people who are with you, becomes something else that you view as a spiritual discipline. No doubt things will look different for you than it does for me, and that’s a good thing. But I pray that we all learn how to value the time we spend prepping, cooking, eating, and cleaning together as of great spiritual significance to us, our loved ones, and Jesus.
If you’d like to join us as we explore how to pursue a life of prayer, scripture and the church, we'd love for you to join us for our worship service. Also, we’ve got a “Heading North” small group that gives us a chance to practice how to follow Jesus together.