Lately I’ve been thinking about discipleship. What has my own discipleship journey looked like? How has God discipled me?
It’s usually not been very linear—more like a jigsaw puzzle. He’ll point something out over here and I work on that for a while. Then something else comes up and I focus in a different place. Then I move back over to what I was doing before, but this time more pieces are in place so progress goes along more quickly.
Yet in spite of the back-and-forth nature of it, the process is not without a plan. The picture on the box tells me what the finished product is supposed to look like. I know what I’m moving toward, even if I don’t get there precisely one row at a time.
The way God does discipleship isn’t linear—it’s mosaic. The problem with most discipleship strategies is that we’re determining the agenda beforehand. We decide in advance what issues and topics should be addressed when. What if we used a different process? A process that was flexible according what we are hearing from the Holy Spirit in the context of community?
If you’d like to think more about this concept, I’m going to be hosting a webinar on what I’m calling nonlinear discipleship. You can join me by registering at EventBrite. The webinar will be held Tuesday, May 8th at 11:00am Pacific Time.