Episode Details

I received a number of requests after last week’s post on the ‘Yeah-But defence’ to say more about the little hobbyhorse I mentioned in the PS—regarding how we think and talk about church and worship. I’ve already written quite a bit about these issues over the years (see some references below in the PS), and am not super-keen to trawl through that material again here (much to the relief of some, I am sure).

However, there is something important and (I think) fresh to say that relates not only to that hobbyhorse topic, but to nearly every other topic we grapple with in biblical interpretation and application.

It’s a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past three years or so, not only in relation to discipleship and disciple-making (in various ‘Trellis and Vine’ seminars and conversations), but in the methodological phase of the PhD work I’ve recently completed. It comes in two parts (this week’s post and next week’s), and those of you keen to think further about church and worship will have to wait patiently for the end of next week’s post before we get back to that topic.

The subject is apprenticeship.

The apprentice

It’s funny how words shift and slip.

‘Myself’, for example, now apparently means the same thing as ‘me’—as in ‘If you’d like to know more, please come and see myself after the meeting’.

And my kids were aghast when they discovered recently that I didn’t know that ‘beard’ means ‘a woman who marries or accompanies a gay man, in order to conceal his homosexuality’—although I may have just discovered this word-meaning in time for it to become redundant (because no-one seems very interested in concealing their homosexuality these days).

There’s nothing wrong with the constantly morphing nature of words and language. It’s how language does its thing.

But it does occasionally mislead us, or get in the way of clear communication. We know this well enough when we’re trying to communicate some aspect of the gospel to completely unchurched people, and discover to our frustration that what we mean by words like ‘sin’ or ‘faith’ or ‘God’ bears little relation to what our hearers think these words signify.

Imagine how annoying, then, it must be for the Bible—because the Bible is mostly a simple, plain-speaking communicator. It enjoys using normal everyday words that, in their original context, were as about as religious or technical as words like ‘dog’ or ‘rock’ or ‘washing machine’.

But over time, words shift and slip. They gather connotations and associations. And so to the Bible’s frustration (well it would annoy me, if I was the Bible), many of its everyday words have become specialized, inhouse religious words with a raft of extra meanings and associations. The ordinary Bible-words that mean ‘ask-for-something’, ‘assembly’ and ‘honour-or-serve-someone’ are for us the rich, tradition-laden, Christian words ‘pray’, ‘church’ and ‘worship’.

The English word ‘disciple’ is a fascinating case in point. Along with its related forms ‘discipling’, ‘disciple-making’ and ‘discipleship’, this word has become a specialized Christian word with a large range of connotations: ‘a follower of Jesus’, ‘to mentor a younger believer’, ‘evangelism, especially on an individual level’, ‘one-to-one Bible reading’, ‘the daily practical side of Christian belief’, ‘a kind of pastor or department in large churches’, and so on.

However, in the Bible, the word we translate as ‘disciple’ or ‘to make disciples’ is one of those ordinary, straightforward words (Gk mathetes or matheteuo). It pops up a couple of hundred times in the Gospels and Acts, and according to the standard Greek dictionary (known in the trade as ‘BDAG’), the word refers to someone who:

* ‘engages in learning through instruction from another’

* ‘is rather constantly ass