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mDNA

Lent 1- Rite of Election (112)

Catechumenate Disciple Making: On the Way in the Mission

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The 1st characteristic of mDNA that Alan Hirsch discusses (but the 4th in our series of blog posts) is disciple making or discipleship. This is what the catechumenate aims at: to form disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ and of his Father. So how does Hirsch define discipleship? “Following Jesus and becoming increasingly like him (Christlikeness)” (The Forgotten Ways, 41). Obviously, we cannot be exactly like Jesus since he was the Logos, of one substance with the Father, sent by him to take on the flesh of God’s creatures. For Hirsch, in his humanity Jesus provides the image of the true human. In Jesus, we discover what true and faithful “creatureliness” looks like. So to be a disciple, to model Jesus, means through and in him truly to become the creatures God intended us to be.

Since this is God’s mission in his Son—to make us into the true, faithful humans God intended—as Hirsch says, “We never move from being a disciple on the way” (103). The Word is always forming us into sons and daughters of the living God through the one true Son, Christ Jesus. This kind of discipleship—formation into being sons and daughters—runs counter to the ways in which we usually today incorporate people into the church’s life. We often do not expect much transformation from them or any substantial change in their behavior, or even in their beliefs. In current patterns, incorporating them into the church involves primarily the intellectual assimilation of ideas. Discipleship is much too easy. This kind of approach simply acquiesces to the religion of consumerism and moves the church into an attractional mode of mission. Make the church attractive (and God too) so that people will want to invest in the church, even if they are not really expected to change.

Hirsch’s vision of discipleship within the church’s mission entails “An actively Christlike (redemptive) presence in every neighborhood and every sphere of life” (114). This demands that in the world disciples “live our truths” and “express the message authentically through the media of … [our] … personal and common lives together” (114). Living our truth—the life and mission of the Triune God—demands change, because our old lives don’t reveal that truth. Such transformation into living reflections of the true humanity of the Lord Jesus is the foundation of the believability of God’s mission. It provides the compelling witness that is the vehicle for the church’s transfer of the gifts of God in Christ to others.

The catechumenate aims to form this kind of discipleship in the lives of the catechumens. The intentional, lengthy, ritually focused, and community embedded formation of the catechumenate embodies the gospel and gospel-centered life in the catechumens. It is a lived integrity. The catechumenate operates on the principle that disciples are acting their “way into new ways of thinking,” living, and belonging (122). This is why mentorship is so important to disciple making. The church has to model this way of acting. Central to the catechumenate is such modeling in the form of sponsorship.

Because of such embodied and enacted disciple formation in the catechumenate, there is a visible and palpable consistency between the message and the messenger, the gospel and the disciple. It produces disciples who understand that for the rest of their lives they are on the way toward God’s kingdom. From that moment forward, they are participants in inviting others to join them on that way to discipleship. As Hirsch says, they are “Active participants in the mission Dei” from the moment they join the catechumenate (119). From the outset, these catechumens becoming disciples are “hitting the road with Jesus” (120).

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Jesus is Lord: The Central Strand of mDNA

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We took a one week hiatus a week ago from the blog but continue this week after Thanksgiving with our series on Alan Hirsch’s five characteristics of genuinely missional churches, the mDNA that constitute Apostolic Genius. This week, however, isn’t so much one of the characteristics, but the central definitive feature that permeates all of the mDNA: the living encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ, God in the flesh. Hirsch refers to this as the epicenter of the missional movement and identifies it as the “biblical consciousness of God” (Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, 84). A central biblical passage is Romans 11:36: “for from him and through him and to him are all things.” It is the awareness and recognition that in the encounter with Jesus through the proclaimed Word God’s creatures encounter the one, true, and living God the Creator who reigns over all his creation. And he does so through the death and resurrection of His living Word, His Son.

               Hirsch contends that in the New Testament and in all vital missional movements the encounter with Jesus as the Lord (Christocentric Monotheism) propels the mission and the message. As Hirsch says, “The desperate, prayer-soaked human clinging to Jesus, the reliance on his Spirit, and the distillation of the gospel message into the simple, uncluttered message of Jesus as Lord and Savior is what catalyzed the missional potencies inherent in the people of God” (86). It is literally a Jesus as God movement. “At its very heart, Christianity is therefore a messianic movement, one that seeks to consistently embody the life, spirituality, and mission of its Founder” (94). A properly-oriented catechumenate will position the encounter with Jesus at the center of its formation.

               How does the catechumenate reflect this epicenter? One of the ways that Hirsch advocates for determining whether the encounter with Jesus as Lord is central to the community’s life is to ask, “Is the real Jesus really Lord in my community?” (99). Is the risen Lord really the congregation’s touchstone and defining center? If this consciousness is central to the congregation’s adult faith formation, then hopefully it will be reflected in the totality of the community’s life. A properly-oriented catechumenate will manifest this. As Hirsch says, we need “to recalibrate ourselves and our organizations around the person and work of Jesus the Lord. It will mean taking the Gospels seriously as the primary texts that define us. It will mean acting like Jesus in relation to people outside of the faith” (94). Since the Gospels are central to the formation of the catechumenate and it seeks to give God’s gifts in Jesus and elicit the response that our way of living is a confession of his lordship, the catechumenate is  a way of sitting at the feet of the Lord! He guides and governs all creation toward his fulfillment and is the heart of the church’s mission and life as the Lord.

               The other five mDNA reflect this epicenter. We make disciples because his lordship calls us to do so. We see ourselves as driven by a missional impulse because God’s mission has come in the flesh into the world God created in Jesus. We form a living community because Jesus is living among us. The catechumenate embodies these five characteristics because the catechumenate itself flows from the confession that Jesus is Lord. The catechumenate is itself a form of lived confession that Jesus as Lord is at the heart of it all: of the catechumenate, of congregational life, of the church’s mission.

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Apostolic Genius for Making Disciples

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This week we begin an ongoing series focused on disciple making. I don’t think there is any question that the primary goal of the catechumenate is making and forming lifelong disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. Disciples are those who believe in the God and Father of Christ Jesus, who trust that he has come to bring God’s rule and reign and renew the whole creation, and whose lives reflect Jesus’ reign through his death and resurrection. The catechumenate aims to shape discipleship under those fundamental parameters.

               Throughout the coming weeks, we’ll explore that aim and the intersection between the catechumenate and discipleship. One of the ways we have found helpful for assessing that intersection is through Alan Hirsch’s now classic missional book, The Forgotten Ways. Hirsch, the founder of 100Movements and an experienced mission leader, educator and church planter, wrote The Forgotten Ways (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006) as a descriptive analysis of the missional impulse in the early church, throughout church history, and in vibrant missional and church planting churches, organizations, and groups in the modern era. Hirsch also aims to be prescriptive, to advance those missional characteristics that he finds in missional-activated churches into churches that have lost their way. As the introduction to the book states, “I am committed to the idea of translating best practices in mission developed over the last century in the two-thirds world into that of the first world. This has aptly been called the missions-to-the-first-world approach” (22). While one might contest the prescriptive force of Hirsch’s aim—without denying that there is much to be learned here—we have found that his description of the characteristics of churches who possess a vibrant missional impulse is decidedly true of the congregations we researched that have vibrant catechumenates. We don’t think the link is accidental.

               What I will attempt to do this week is describe what is at the heart of missional movements from Hirsch’s assessments of those movements. The living missional impulse he calls Apostolic Genius. He defines it as: “the primal missional potencies of the gospel and of God’s people” that “lies dormant in you, me, and every local church that seeks to follow Jesus faithfully in any time” (22). Elsewhere he says, “Apostolic Genius” is “the built-in life force and guiding mechanism of God’s people and the living components or elements that make it up. These components I have tagged missional DNA, or mDNA, for short” (18). The elements of mDNA that he identifies are: disciple-making; missional-incarnational impulse; apostolic environment; organic systems; Communitas, not community.  We’ll examine these in subsequent posts. The key here is that Apostolic Genius (characterized by mDNA) is embedded in the church’s life. As Hirsch says, it “is coded into each and every community through latent mDNA; only for most of us it lies buried and forgotten” (78). In the congregations whose catechumenates we researched, Apostolic Genius has been re-awakened or sustained by their catechumenates. Their catechumenates have renewed them to be “a community of God’s people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world…the mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus” (82). Apostolic Genius is the church living out its identity as God’s mission to the world. And an active, purposeful catechumenate forms that Apostolic Genius in the people of God.