I am very grateful for Jen Wilkin’s recent article at Christianity Today about “The Great Omission” in our churches’ discipleship efforts.
…we have forgotten that discipleship requires learning. We have reduced its definition to attendance, service, giving, relationship-building, and mostly peer-led, feelings-level discussions. But at its most fundamental level, discipleship is a process of learning—of renewing our minds to no longer conform to the world.
We tend to view the Great Commission as a call to make converts, when in fact it is a call to make disciples—learners. It explicitly requires teaching those converts to be learners who obey all that has been commanded. According to Jesus, we are to replicate by passing along the good deposit that was passed along to us.
Conversion happens in an instant. Discipleship, on the other hand, is the work of a lifetime.
We have raised a generation of people who don’t know the Bible. And this biblical illiteracy has dramatic theological consequences, such as 28% of evangelicals believing that ““Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God,” and 47% of them believing that “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.”
Wilkin issues a much-needed challenge to our normal ways of conducting Christian growth, along with a wise 5-point plan well worth considering.
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