Walking Together on the Jesus Road: Intercultural Discipling

PREFACE

At the end of the 1980s the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain was ripped open. The West invaded Eastern Europe and a movement of Muslims turned to Jesus. I (Evelyn) saw blind peoples’ eyes opened, the sick healed, and heard of the paralysed walking and the dead rising to life. But the miracles were nothing compared to the fire of passionate love for Jesus in the people who were responding to him. The vast majority were women, and they loved Jesus intensely. Everywhere they went they gossiped the good news of the love of Jesus and they prayed. Thousands came to faith. All over the country the new believers met every evening squashed into homes, sang their own songs of love and praise for Jesus, and prayed from the depths of their being to him. Most experienced severe persecution from their husbands and families but nothing shook their desire for him. Violence against women was the norm. The women’s faith in Jesus was a major provocation for attacks by their husbands who feared loss of control in their homes and loss of face in the community. But the violence did not trouble the women. Here is a knife, said one, after her husband had broken a chair over her. Please, go ahead and kill me. Then I can be with Jesus.

I was a foreign Protestant missionary with no experience of domestic violence, no personal experience of miracles, and a rationalistic faith. I had come to help these new believers, plant a church, and train leaders and missionaries, but what did I really have to offer? I had Bible college training, years of consistent growth in the church in Australia, and some Christian ministry experience (teaching Sunday school, taking Bible studies, leading camps, Beach Mission, children’s work, student work, some preaching, some evangelism), but in comparison to these women, my faith was bankrupt. It still is.

Nothing I know compares with the depth of experiential relationship these women had with Jesus and, as far as I am concerned, nothing I can bring is anywhere near as important as what they already have. For me, that is the starting point for effective discipleship—a deep sense of your own personal inadequacy. If you think you have all the answers, you have failed to grasp the most fundamental basis for Christian ministry: it is Christ in us, not us giving to the world or even us changing the world.

I was profoundly impacted by my encounter with the Millet believers in Bulgaria. I honor and respect them, and wish I knew Jesus like they do. I think this is the primary task of discipleship—meeting Jesus through another’s experience of him. It is not so much what I have to give, but what I have to learn through another person’s discovery of Jesus. Discipleship is a mutual exploration of what it means to be an authentic follower of Jesus in the various contexts we find ourselves in. The Holy Spirit is the teacher. We walk together alongside him.

SECTION

1

SHARE YOUR LIFE

CHAPTER

1

WALK ALONGSIDE DISCIPLES

The imperative to make disciples is crystal clear in Jesus’ final commands to his followers. He told them to go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you (Matt 28:19–20a). In order for the good news about Jesus to be proclaimed beyond the groups of people where the church is already established, Jesus’ followers have to cross cultural boundaries. The discipling they do is intercultural discipling.

Despite Jesus’ clear command to make disciples, church leaders and missionaries in many parts of the world feel that this vital ministry is being neglected. Leaders in Thailand, for example, see making active disciples as the most pressing need in Thai churches.¹ In many parts of Africa, a failure to disciple people is a major reason for the lack of growth in Christians, according to Kenyan theologian Nahashon Gitonga.²

In places where discipling is being done, it makes a defining impact on whether people continue to follow Jesus. Being discipled by a more mature Christian was found to be the most important factor in new Taiwanese believers continuing to grow in their faith.³ Church leaders in China observe that for Chinese students who go to study in the West and become Christians there, being discipled overseas is key to returnees integrating effectively into churches back in China.⁴

Many Christians serving cross-culturally struggle, however, to find a good way to disciple people. Most discover that the approaches and methods they rely on when discipling people from their own culture do not work well when they try to disciple people from another culture. Finding an approach to discipling that suits people from other cultures is challenging. My greatest struggle was to identify a practical methodology of cross-cultural discipleship, a Korean missionary wrote after serving in Africa for thirteen years.⁵

Very few resources address the felt need for help in this area. There are many excellent books on making disciples in a Western context.⁶ There is also a growing number of resources that guide Christians in how to disciple people from particular religious backgrounds and in how to communicate across cultures.⁷ But the emphasis in the discipling literature has been on Western methods of discipleship. Christians working with people from cultures other than their own are consequently left with little guidance about how to implement biblical discipleship in other cultures.

Our aim in this book is to address the felt need of Christian workers for help in how to disciple people from cultural backgrounds other than their own. We explore the impact of cultural differences on discipling, outline principles that can help disciplers navigate these differences, and consider the practical implications of the cultural challenges they will face in discipling people from another culture. To do this, we draw on the insights of others who have written about discipling and on interviews we conducted with more than thirty intercultural disciplers, most of whom have served or are currently serving as missionaries. We asked intercultural disciplers the following questions:

•Can you tell me about how you began to disciple someone from another culture, how you came to be a cross-cultural discipler?

•Can you walk me through what happened and how the discipling worked?

•What are some things you did that you felt were particularly helpful?

•What were some of the major challenges you faced in discipling this person/people?

•What would do differently now?

•What has happened to the person you discipled?

•How are they going now?

•What have you learnt about cross-cultural discipling which you think it would be good for others to know?

We also draw from our own experiences of discipling Turkish and Millet believers.⁸

What Is Intercultural Discipling?

Intercultural discipling is the long-term, intentional process in which Christians from one cultural background walk alongside people from another culture, sharing life with them in order to help them in their journey of getting to know Christ and growing in their relationship with Him. Intercultural discipling involves new and complex challenges beyond those we face when discipling someone from the same cultural background as ourselves. The questions and issues that people wrestle with in their journey of coming to faith in Christ differ from culture to culture. Intercultural disciplers need to be able to adapt their approach to address these questions and issues in a way that takes into account disciples’ cultural values and learning preferences.

To understand intercultural discipling, we first need to understand disciple-making. Jesus is the expert disciple-maker. When he was on earth, his disciples learned by watching him, listening to him, and doing the practical assignments he gave them (Matt 10; Luke 9:1–6; 10:1–17). Jesus’ example shows us that discipling revolves around the relationship between disciples and discipler in which they spend a lot of time together. The kind of discipling we focus on in this book is similar to the discipling Jesus did with the small group of men who were with him almost all the time for three years (Matt 28:16–17; Mk 3:13).

The word disciple is a translation of the New Testament Greek word mathetes, meaning learner. Disciples of Jesus are people who are learning from and becoming more like Jesus. The overarching purpose of intercultural discipling—and indeed all discipling—is that disciples become more and more like Jesus. Intercultural disciplers do everything they can to present [disciples] to God, perfect in their relationship to Christ (Col 1:28). They invest in disciples so that they can become more and more like Jesus in their character and priorities, including growing to love God and people more and more (Matt 22:37,39).

Disciples have different personalities, backgrounds, gifts, and strengths. But there are certain areas that every disciple should be growing in. These include:

•BOW—Putting Jesus first in their lives (Luke 14:25–26; Matt 16:24)

•RESPOND—Responding to God’s word (Jn 8:31; Acts 2:42)

•GROW—Growing in their relationship with God (Jn 15:5–8; Col 1:9–10)

•LOVE—Loving fellow believers and other people (Jn 13:34–36; Eph 5:2)

•BE FRUITFUL—Evidencing love, joy, peace and all the fruit of the Spirit (Jn 15:5–27; Col 1:10)

•REPRODUCE—Making more disciples (Matt 28:19)

Discipling is a process in which disciplers help disciples along a journey of transformation from their old way of life to a new life as a member of God’s family. This journey is deeply relational. It is helpful to think of this journey as being like people walking along a road together. We call this the Jesus Road. Every Christian is a disciple who is walking on the Jesus Road together with other disciples. The intercultural discipler walks together on this road with those they are discipling for as long as their individual pilgrimages toward heaven intersect. This is shown in figure 1 below. The discipler, shown in black for easy visibility, is walking along the Jesus Road with a group of disciples from another culture (Culture A) who are shown in white with grey outlines.

Figure 1. Disciples and discipler walking together on the Jesus Road

JESUS’ DISCIPLES LEARNED FROM BEING WITH JESUS 24/7: WATCHING, LISTENING, AND DOING PRACTICAL ASSIGNMENTS.

The Challenges of Intercultural Discipling

A major challenge in discipling people from other cultures is the need to let go of our own cultural biases. Our culture deeply influences everything we do as well as the way we think. It also shapes the way we approach discipling. The model of discipling promoted in books written on this subject by Westerners has, unsurprisingly, been deeply influenced by Western cultural emphases and assumptions. Some of these emphases, such as intentionality, obedience, and multiplication, are positive; they reflect biblical emphases.

Other Western cultural emphases though, can hinder the growth of disciples from other cultures. One of these is an over-emphasis on the written word. While it is important to have the Bible available in written form, reading the Bible is not the only way that people learn what it says. Many cultures have a rich heritage of oral teaching and learning. Using an oral approach to discipling in these cultures can be far more effective in helping people to understand God’s ways than insisting on using written materials. When disciplers insist on text-based methods of learning, they unwittingly exclude some disciples who are keen to learn and prevent them from growing in their faith. Educated young people who are comfortable with Western methods of learning then become the focus of disciplers’ attention. Older, wiser disciples who are respected by others in their community can be bypassed or ignored. This can result in the Christian message being devalued in the eyes of the community because it is not endorsed by its leaders.

BELONGING TO GROUPS IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Another cultural emphasis that is a challenge to effective intercultural discipling is individualism. While individualism helpfully encourages personal responsibility, it downplays the importance of groups and the relationships, belonging, and identity they give. When Western disciplers unthinkingly apply their individualistic orientation to discipling, disciples from more group-oriented cultures can feel pressured to ignore or leave their group. This decreases the opportunity that other group members have to hear about Jesus and removes accountability structures, making the disciples more vulnerable to moral failure. It can also lead to disciples feeling extremely lonely, partly because disciplers and churches from individualistic cultures can rarely replicate the quality and intensity of community that more group-oriented cultures provide. The end result can be that disciples ultimately abandon their faith.

In addition to the challenge of needing to let go of our cultural biases in order to effectively disciple people from another culture, intercultural disciplers face the challenge of discerning exactly where a disciple from another culture is in their spiritual walk. This is usually more difficult in intercultural discipling than in discipling someone from the same culture as ourselves. The exact moment when a disciple is born again can be very difficult for the intercultural discipler to discern. Too often disciplers assume that disciples who have prayed a prayer of repentance have been born again. But if we too quickly assume that disciples have been born again, we can become frustrated when they do not seem to grow.

INTERCULTURAL DISCIPLING IS A DEEPLY RELATIONAL PROCESS.

A further challenge in intercultural discipleship is the time and patience it requires. Discipling someone from another culture is a long-term and deeply relational process. It takes time to learn the language, culture, belief system, and worldview of people from another culture. It often takes years for followers of another religion to make the decision to follow Christ. A Christian who has served among Turks for many years told us, It’s a long journey. If a person is not a believer it can take two to three years of you meeting with them before they make a choice. Then they start walking on the road.

These challenges of intercultural discipling—the need to let go of cultural biases, to commit long-term, and to be patient—are illustrated in the following account of a young woman who discipled her Chinese friend:

I was working together with Lily⁹ in a shoe shop. I had been reading Keith Green’s biography, where he talked about planting seeds. I felt strongly that I needed to talk to Lily about God. So, I asked if she believed in God. She told me that she felt very dark. I shared with her how God had given me light and peace and joy because of Jesus. After that, we just spent a lot of time together, not necessarily talking about God, but doing that too. We went swimming; we went shopping, and did a lot of other things together. After months of spending time together, she asked me for a Bible.

The relationship was very important. It wouldn’t have worked without a genuine relationship. For us the discipleship was mainly talking together and me answering the questions that she asked. Someone from university then started a more formal mentoring relationship with her. It was really good for her, though, for us to keep meeting too, as it gave her a person to talk things through with about what she was learning in the more formal discipleship. After several years, she eventually started going to church.

But that commitment took three to four years for her to make.

Throughout those years there were periods when Lily wanted to be very close and talk a lot, and other periods where she didn’t want any contact. It was very important that I was available to her when she needed time and it was important also that I didn’t push her at the other times. At that point, she decided to tell her parents that she had become a Christian. That was very difficult. It took them one to two years to accept. There were two levels of acceptance for them. The first was to become positive about the changes in her behavior and attitude towards them. The second was to accept her allegiance to Christ.

We had periods of distance when there were cultural issues that I wasn’t aware of and that she didn’t want to address because she didn’t want any conflict. For example, it was important for her that everything was equal monetarily. I didn’t realize at the time but later found out she felt very uncomfortable when I paid for our coffees. Years later she felt she had to give me a very expensive gift to make us equal.

I would say to others that you need to go at their pace. Be generous with your time but you can’t be jealous. You have to let them go. Be available when they need you rather than when you think you should be meeting. It’s really important for you to let other people influence them and meet with them, and realize that you don’t own them.

Passing on a Way of Life Through Relationship

When we first went overseas as missionaries we assumed we knew what intercultural discipling involved. Our assumptions about discipling were based on our own experiences of being discipled in Australia. We had experienced discipling primarily as a set of written Bible lessons that we completed on our own, combined with one-to-one and small group inductive Bible study. As a result, we began our ministry overseas with the assumption that discipling meant working through a defined set of written Bible study materials with someone.

We were not alone in thinking about discipling in this program-based way. We came across many other missionaries whose main work was translating written discipleship programs that they could use with local believers. These programs focused on working through a written set of materials.

Program-based forms of discipling are partly a result of an overemphasis on written knowledge. Many Christians focus on passing on knowledge about God and his ways through pre-prepared texts in the form of tracts, sermons, and books. An over-emphasis on written knowledge can lead us to assume that working through a prescribed set of lessons and assigned tasks will cause disciples to grow. This fallacy is illustrated by a ministry leader who led a group of Christian athletes through a series of Bible study booklets. After the group successfully finished the whole series, he recalls: There was only one problem: they were going through the material, but the material was also going through most of them—like water through a sieve.¹⁰ Once this leader realized that this approach was not helping athletes grow in their faith, he changed the discipling approach to a much more relational one.

Most people of the world see knowledge and learning as woven into all of life. This view of learning accords with the way that Jewish parents were instructed to teach their children through the spontaneous opportunities of daily life (Deut 11:19).

When we disciple people, we are passing on a way of life rather than simply knowledge. Doing this requires much more than going through a weekly lesson with them. A German missionary explained what he learned from discipling a Turkish family: You cannot do it in a German way. You cannot do it like a 40-minute lesson and then think you are done. So, we had breakfast together, sang, and did a Bible study and then had a meal together. It took the whole morning.

DISCIPLES LOOK AT THE WHOLE OF OUR LIVES.

The apostle Paul modeled the relational nature of discipling in the close relationship he developed with Timothy. He called Timothy my dear son (2 Tim 1:2) and my beloved and faithful child in the Lord (1 Cor 4:17). Paul reminded Timothy that he had passed on to him far more than words when he wrote:

But you, Timothy, certainly know what I teach, and how I live, and what my purpose in life is. You know my faith, my patience, my love, and my endurance. You know how much persecution and suffering I have endured. (2 Tim 3:10–11a).

Paul passed on to Timothy not only doctrine but a way of life. He modeled to Timothy how to live for Jesus, including how to love, how to keep trusting Jesus, how to be patient, and how to endure suffering. Disciple-making today should include all these things.

Disciples learn from how we live more than from what we know. They watch the whole of our lives. They scrutinize how we relate to other people including our friends and family, their friends and family, other Christians, leaders and other authorities, and people from various ethnic groups. They learn from how we pray and how we respond to crises.

PEOPLE HAVE TO ACCEPT THE MESSENGERS BEFORE THEY ACCEPT THEIR MESSAGES.

The people we disciple are looking for much more than knowledge. They long for acceptance, love, and a community to belong to. A Muslim man in his mid-thirties who came to faith in Christ told us his story. He decided on an impulse to visit a church but said, I was very afraid of what people in the church would think of me and how they would receive me. When he found that he was welcomed by everyone he met there, he was astonished and began to seriously explore Christianity. He noticed that Christians were respectful towards one another and introduced him to a wide circle of Christian friends, in contrast to the fragmented local Muslim community. This motivated him to learn more about the Jesus Road. What he saw in the lives of Christians was more important, at least initially, than what he heard from them about the message of the gospel.

This longing for relationship is highlighted by a Thai Christian leader with many years of experience in discipling. He observed that Western missionaries often press the gospel on Thai people without spending sufficient time getting to know them. He points out, in contrast, that Thai people accept messengers before they accept messages.¹¹ Good discipling happens in the context of a relationship that integrates practical matters with knowledge and character with ministry skills so that the whole of the disciple’s life is affected.

Sharing Our Lives With Those We Disciple

In order to pass on a way of life through relationship, effective intercultural disciplers spend lots of time with disciples. Disciples need time to see how we live and how we respond to the unpredictable demands of life. Spending time with people without an agenda is essential. When you are discipling, the life that you live is more important than the words you speak, an experienced intercultural discipler told us. Along the same lines, a Christian worker in the Middle East writes: The experience of many practitioners and researchers, as well as the testimony of ex-Muslim believers themselves, shows consistently that the growth of a new follower of Jesus depends more on his/her warm personal relationship with a mentor and with fellow believers than on the particular teaching content of a discipleship program.¹²

THE LIFE YOU LIVE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE WORDS YOU SPEAK.

Western disciplers often struggle to disciple in this deeply relational way. One told us:

I, as a German, never spend any social time with anyone unless it is really, really necessary. It feels like a waste of time. You are sitting there drinking tea. I know in my head it’s important but I have a bad conscience when I do it. I am an evangelist. I preach the gospel and then I want to leave. I get bored with their problems. I go to the homes of the people. I think it is a Bible study, but it’s not a Bible study. They bring up a problem and we talk about the problem for