by Aaron Pierce
Unsurprisingly, discipleship is a buzzword that has increasingly arisen in church conversations over the last decade. This trend is positive since many pastors of the twentieth century unfortunately relegated discipleship to the backburner. But with this new re-emphasis has appeared a vast array of materials, curriculums, and opinions on the nature and practice of discipleship in the local church.
One particular approach is relational discipleship, which describes an approach to discipleship that is currently garnering much attention. After reading this essay, readers may ask how to implement and practice relational discipleship, but that question is beyond the essay’s scope. Instead, my purpose is to give a brief overview of relational discipleship, examine its biblical merit, and contrast it with the most popular model of discipleship in the twentieth century to show its value in our approach to disciple-making in our ministries and churches.
What Is Relational Discipleship?
Several recent authors, most notably Jim Putman, who has founded a network of churches called The Relational Discipleship Network, have popularized the notion of relational discipleship.[1] However, Putman’s contemporaries and pastors who preceded his ministry have utilized its ideas for several decades.
The core philosophy behind relational discipleship is simply that a person must have meaningful, accountable relationships with someone or with a group of people who are intentionally investing in his or her life in order for him or her to mature in Christ. In other words, it is an approach to making disciples that centers on relational investment, not just on teaching believers truth and doctrine. According to proponents of relational discipleship, this approach is the model that Jesus and His disciples employed and not simply a pragmatic approach for our modern culture.
Putman argues that necessary components for spiritual growth go far beyond mere formal teaching about God and include things like “conversation, modeling, encouragement, debriefing, and practice, all of which need to happen in the context of a relationship.”[2] Robby Gallaty also argues that the call to discipleship is not one that is centered on a person learning more about God and the Bible in isolation but is instead on a relationship to Jesus and “a focus outward towards others” in a multiplying relationship.[3]
Discipleship through relationship stands in contrast to how most American churches are structured today. In fact, many churches do not even create environments in which meaningful relationships can exist, much less emphasize the importance of relationships to discipleship. Most of our discipleship efforts are based on an educational-only model instead of on a relational model. Church leaders often assume that discipleship occurs by the mere transference of knowledge without any environments created for meaningful relationships and without personal investment in others for the sake of multiplying disciples.
For example, many of our regular rhythms in churches focus exclusively on the public preaching and teaching of the Word in non-relational settings. This educational model can be summed up by the typical weekly experience of the American churchgoer. This typical weekly experience includes attending a Sunday school class to hear a Sunday school teacher lecture, followed by a Sunday morning worship service where a trained and educated pastor preaches a sermon to a passive audience. This Sunday morning experience is followed by another sermon in the same format on Sunday night, followed by another lecture-based Bible study or video series on Wednesday night. In this approach, the church becomes a place to gather more information rather than a place for deep, accountable relationships to help disciple one another.[4]
Contrary to popular opinion or to the experience of American Christians in the last century, this was not always the only approach to church structure or discipleship. While I will examine what relational discipleship is and give a few clarifying points to contrast the educational approach to discipleship, we will first examine how Jesus made disciples. While we could argue about the practical benefits for either the relational or the educational model of discipleship, the most important thing to consider is what Jesus did to make disciples. After all, He is the supreme disciple-maker.
How Jesus Made Disciples
The best way to examine how Jesus made disciples is to look at how Jesus used the various environments and relationships within His earthly ministry. We can see this clearly in four relational environments, which Putman uses to show how Jesus spent His time with people in His ministry.[5] These environments include: public (more than 120 people), social (between approximately fifteen and 120 people), personal (four to twelve people), and intimate (one to three people).[6] Every person has various relationships within each of these environments to some degree. The smaller the environment, the more intimate that environment becomes. A person has the capacity to develop deep relationships with only a few people; by contrast, having deep relationships with 200 people in a single environment is impossible.
With these environments in mind, we can see that Jesus spent time in all four during His earthly ministry. He was in His public environment when He taught large crowds or when He taught in synagogues. His social environment included His spending time with tax collectors or sinners, going to weddings, or even socializing with people who did not permanently follow Him everywhere. His personal environment comprised His twelve disciples, and His intimate environment included His inner circle: James, Peter, and John. Jesus operated and even ministered to people in each environment.[7]
The important question to ask is, “Which of these environments did Jesus spend the most time in?” The answer is the personal environment, which could include moments where He would also have been with the inner circle along with the other nine. By simply reading through the Gospels, one can easily see that, the vast majority of time, the twelve disciples were either with Jesus, learning from Jesus, or being given ministry training and experience by Jesus. Even when Jesus preached to large crowds (public environment) or in social settings, the twelve disciples were with Him. Yet still at times Jesus purposefully avoided the crowds to debrief and to spend time with just the twelve (Lk. 9:10).
Modern-day pastors and Christians may find that Jesus’ strategy of growth difficult. Instead of starting a megachurch, He poured into twelve men who would then go and make more disciples. As Ed Stetzer said,
The conversations they [the twelve disciples and Jesus] engaged in, the times they served Rabbi Jesus together, the processing of Jesus’ teachings around a campfire, even the missteps these men shared were all in Jesus’ plan for making them into the mature disciples. . . . [D]oing life together is an unquestionable essential in the disciple-making process.[8]
Clarifying the Implications of Relational Discipleship
In view of these principles, I want to issue a few warnings and to clarify what relational discipleship does not mean, especially in contrast to the educational model of discipleship. First, relational discipleship does not mean that churches should create relational environments simply for the sake of allowing people to make friends and socialize. Bill Hull points out that, though Jesus’ call to “follow Me” is one of entering into a relationship with Him, the ultimate purpose of relationship with Jesus is to transform disciples to be more like Jesus.[9] In other words, if the relational environment is not intent on centering people on the Word and pushing them to grow in their walk with God, then it is just a social environment and not truly relational discipleship.
Gallaty’s definition of discipleship highlights the fact that relationship is the means to help get people into a position for God to transform them: “Discipleship is intentionally equipping believers with the Word of God through accountable relationships empowered by the Holy Spirit in order to replicate faithful followers of Christ.”[10] Proponents of relational discipleship are not arguing that relationships apart from the Word of God and Holy Spirit make disciples but instead that relationships can become transformative and that real discipleship takes place when we bring God’s Word to bear on someone’s life through accountable relationships.
Second, relational discipleship does not mean that regular, biblical, expositional preaching of the Bible is not important. Jesus obviously preached and taught! The New Testament affirms the centrality of the preaching of the Scriptures in the life of the church body. Putman argues that relationship building can occur at various levels and in all four of the environments mentioned above and that “although the smaller-size groups are more effective at equipping disciples, all four discipling relationships are important components of a disciple-making church.”[11] Putman goes on to argue that preaching is part of God’s plan for the life of a disciple and that it is best utilized in the public environment.[12] Proponents of relational discipleship are not aiming to minimize preaching but rather are arguing that preaching alone will not produce mature disciples, especially apart from intentional relational environments in the church.
Relational discipleship also does not nullify the necessity of biblical and theological education in the local church. The problem with the educational discipleship model is not that churches today teach too much but that its leaders give no intentional effort to bring disciple-making relational environments alongside solid biblical teaching. More importantly, if Jesus spent most of His time and energy relationally investing in a few and not only preaching to the many, then should we as pastors and leaders not give a significant portion of our weekly time and effort to investing deeply in a few of our people?
Proponents of relational discipleship are trying to demonstrate that the people in our churches will miss a necessary component to their spiritual growth, as well as one of the main approaches to disciple-making that Jesus Himself used, if they merely listen to good sermons and teachings apart from intentional, accountable, life-investing relationships with other believers.
Conclusion
I believe the proponents of relational discipleship have brought a much-needed re-examination to our local churches’ approaches to discipleship. Their emphasis on looking at how Jesus made disciples instead of merely reaching for a new pragmatic approach to discipleship helps ground relational discipleship in the Word and larger Christian tradition. We could explore much more on the topic of relational discipleship but suffice to say that relational discipleship is a helpful corrective to our modern-day churches’ over-emphasis on educational discipleship at the expense of relational investment.
About the Author: Aaron
Pierce serves as the Multiplication Pastor at Peace Church in Wilson, North
Carolina. He holds a B.A. in Biblical Studies and Pastoral Ministry from
Welch College and a M.Div. in Christian Ministry at Southeastern Baptist Theological
Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He has been married for six
years to his wife Courtney. His interests include historical theology,
ecclesiology, discipleship, and church planting.
[1]The history, core beliefs, and purpose of the Relational Discipleship Network can be found here on its website: Relationship Discipleship Network; https://rdn1.com; accessed March 15, 2019; Internet.
[2]Jim Putman, Real-Life Discipleship: Building Churches That Make Disciples (Carol Stream: NavPress, 2010), 22.
[3]Robby Gallaty, Rediscovering Discipleship: Making Jesus’ Final Words Our First Work (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015), 84.
[4]Certain classroom environments can be relational. The point of the observation here is not to say that classroom settings are bad but rather that classroom settings can become another place to receive information without meaningful relationships if we’re not intentional to avoid that result. Even classroom settings that are not intentionally relational is not a problem if there are other intentional environments that exist in our churches for meaningful relationships to develop. However, many churches do not have such environments and assume that accountable, discipling relationships are occurring in these classroom settings, when in reality they are not.
[5]Jim Putman and Bobby Harrington, DiscipleShift: Five Steps That Help Your Church to Make Disciples Who Make Disciples (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), 107-08.
[6]Ibid.
[7]Commentators use the term inner circle to describe Jesus’ closer relation with these three relative to the other nine. Examples include that Jesus asked only those three to accompany Him on the Mount of Transfiguration (Mk. 9:2), to pray with Him in the garden (Matt 26:36-37), and to accompany Him for the healing of the ruler’s daughter (Lk. 8:51).
[8]Ed Stetzer and Eric Geiger, Transformational Groups: Creating a New Scorecard for Groups (Nashville: B&H, 2014), 7. I added the parenthetical statement in the quotation for clarity.
[9]Bill Hull, The Complete Book of Discipleship: On Being and Making Followers of Christ (Carol Stream: NavPress, 2006), 62-63.
[10]Gallaty, Rediscovering Discipleship, 155; italics added.
[11]Putman, Discipleshift, 109.
[12] Ibid.
April 11, 2019
Thank you for a great overview of relational discipleship. I recently read Francis Chan’s Letters to the Church. I am sure you are aware that he stepped away from the megachurch that he started and began a home church movement largely because of frustration of lack of relational discipleship. You wrote, “Discipleship through relationship stands in contrast to how most American churches are structured today.” Chan makes this point as well and I find myself drawn toward the idea of house church. I guess my struggle is how do we structure the local church in a way that fosters relational discipleship? I certainly need to study more on this and your article has helped me; I plan on reading some of the books you cited thank you.