Effective Discipling in Muslim Communities

Scripture, History and Seasoned Practices

Don Little

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830898527
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Ministry

Muslims who come to Christ face momentous spiritual, psychological and social obstacles that drive many to abandon their faith. Often conversion and discipleship are framed by individualistic Western models that do not acknowledge the communal cultural forces that constrain and shape new believers. Effective discipleship requires a more relational, holistic process of Christian identity development and spiritual formation in community. In this comprehensive resource, missiologist Don Little engages the toughest theoretical and practical challenges involved in discipling believers from Muslim backgrounds. He draws on New Testament principles, historical practices and interviews with seasoned disciplers ministering in a dozen countries across the Muslim world. Addressed here are key challenges that believers from Muslim backgrounds face, from suffering and persecution to spiritual warfare and oppression. Also included are implications for the role of disciplers in church planting among Muslims.

Part One

Biblical, Historical and Missiological Foundations for Discipling Believers from Muslim Backgrounds

Jesus stressed the importance of building on a solid foundation. When one first begins to help disciple BMBs, the help one seeks is often practical—advice on how to handle the often bewildering situations encountered. You may have picked up this book seeking the kind of practical advice on what to do in various situations that is given in part two. However, experience suggests that the longer one disciples and continues to encounter heartbreaking failure, one begins to reflect more deeply in order to better understand what is happening and what ought to be happening. In part one, then, before moving to the practical challenges covered in part two, we attempt to chart vital scriptural and historical bearings through a study of discipleship in the New Testament, followed by an exploration of how discipleship has been understood and worked out in several major historical and contemporary Christian traditions. This is done to help us have a starting point from which to better deal with what is happening in the diverse discipling contexts we encounter around the Muslim world. The theoretical foundation laid in chapters one through seven concludes in chapter eight with the introduction of a discipleship model that draws together many of the central elements in spiritual transformation explored in the first seven chapters.

1

Genuine Conversion to Christ Forms the Basis for Lifelong Discipleship

And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

Acts 2:38

Baptism is the Christ-ordained means by which the faith of the church is embodied in the life of its members.

Gordon T. Smith, Transforming Conversion

Conversion Is the Beginning of a Life of Discipleship

With more than seven years of experience ministering in North Africa and with solid ability in the local Arabic dialect, Steven considered himself a gifted evangelist, but he was increasingly frustrated that he was having trouble planting a church. Steven told me that he had led dozens of young men and some young women to faith but had seen nearly all of them fall away soon after their conversion (usually within a few weeks or months and most within less than a year). Now he and some co-workers were meeting with a group of about a dozen young believers on a weekly basis, and he was continuing his regular evangelism in the streets and cafés. He was hopeful that this group of believers would solidify and last as a house church before his planned departure from the country eight months later. His confidence in the ability of North African believers to remain in the faith was quite low. He was almost desperate for some new approach to discipling that would help him turn this persistently high discipling failure rate around.

Cheri’s experience of evangelism and discipling in North Africa was quite different from Steven’s. One of the questions I asked those I interviewed was something like: “How many of those who you have been discipling have fallen away?” Cheri’s thoughtfully slow response surprised me: “None that I can think of.” Over the previous decade God had used her to help lead perhaps fifteen to twenty women to faith in Christ, and she could not think of a single one who was not continuing as a faithful disciple of Christ. As I probed and sought to understand reasons for this unusual faithfulness following conversion, I discovered that it was closely linked to the way she approached evangelism. As she met and befriended women and shared the gospel with them, she would take months, sometimes years, in regular discussion and Bible study with them before they finally chose to follow Christ. She was insistent that they understood the gospel fully, and that they knew and understood what it would mean to be a disciple of Christ following their conversion before she invited them to become a disciple of Christ. At times, some of the women would express a desire to follow Christ after only several weeks of hearing about Jesus, but Cheri would not lead them in prayers of repentance and faith in Christ until she was fully assured that they knew, understood and were willing to embrace all that conversion to Christ might entail for them, including possibly severe persecution, being divorced by their husbands, losing their jobs, and so on. As a direct result of her approach to evangelism, all of the women whom she had the privilege of discipling became solid believers who were contributing members of local house churches and whose faith survived Cheri’s recent expulsion from North Africa.

These contrasting experiences of fruitfulness in discipling underline how important it is that we understand the nature and meaning of conversion. Though I did not get a full account of Steven’s approach to evangelism, he did tell me that sometimes he was able to lead a Muslim to faith in Christ during their first conversation. He had developed an evangelistic technique in which he was able to divert typical Muslim objections and turn the conversation to the person’s need to confess his or her sins and embrace Christ right away. He was convinced that once people had believed in Christ, the Holy Spirit would enter in and help the new believers to understand more and more of the meaning of their new faith after they had confessed faith in Christ. His goal was to bring them to the point of praying to receive Christ for salvation as quickly as he could.

Though Steven’s case is, I suspect, rather extreme, the contrast between Steven’s and Cheri’s approaches to evangelism underlines how important it is that we have a clear and biblical understanding of the nature of conversion. How much do people need to understand before they can meaningfully put their trust in Christ? How much does our own conversion experience color the way we expect Muslims to come to faith in Christ? What influence does the way someone comes to faith in Christ have on his or her subsequent life of discipleship? How much does an accurate understanding of the gospel and salvation prior to believing influence the discipleship experience following conversion? As the cases of Steven and Cheri illustrate, the extent of preconversion understanding of the gospel is very closely connected to the postconversion success in discipling and the likelihood of BMBs being able to persevere long term and thrive as disciples of Christ integrated into local bodies of believers.

This book is not about conversion, and space does not permit a long exploration of the biblical and theological meaning and experience of conversion, nor do we have time for a discussion of what conversion means experientially for Muslims who come to Christ.1 However, it is important to take time now, at the outset of the book, to think about the nature of conversion and the influence that one’s conversion experience has on one’s subsequent life as a believer. A good place to begin is to stress that conversion ought to be viewed as the beginning of a life of discipleship, and if a conversion experience has not launched a new believer into such ongoing discipleship to Jesus, then it is appropriate to ask if the conversion itself was genuine. In his compelling book on conversion, Gordon Smith stresses the close connection between conversion and the rest of one’s life as a Christian: “Conversion is the genesis, the point of departure for the rest of our Christian life. . . . The whole of our Christian experience is the working out of the full meaning and implication of our conversion” (Smith 2010, 1). Going a step further, Dallas Willard argues that there is a direct correlation between the gospel one believes and the likelihood of a convert becoming a lifelong disciple of Christ following conversion to that gospel:

Let us begin by noting that if we do not preach the gospel of the kingdom of God as Jesus did but preach some other gospel . . . we cannot truly progress in the formation of character into Christlikeness. That is because the message preached will have no essential connection with constant spiritual growth. We need to announce (preach), teach, and manifest the good news that Jesus Himself announced. That good news is of the availability of life now in the kingdom of God by placing our confidence in Jesus as the Lord of all (see Matthew 4:17, 23; 9:35; Mark 1:15; Luke 4:43; Romans 10:9-10; 14:17). (Willard 2010, 31, italics in the original)

Clearly, both the nature of the gospel message that people, including Muslims, believe, and the way that people come to believe in the message and entrust themselves to Christ’s life, will have significant influence on what the believers become and do following conversion.

So, what is conversion, and are there any aspects of conversion that are vital, or even essential? Are there forms of conversion that by their very nature, as Willard suggests, will lead to stunted growth and failed discipleship? Are there forms of conversion that will, conversely, consistently yield a life of strong discipleship and growth toward maturity in Christ? Might it not be appropriate to consider when the conversion experience of a BMB establishes a genuine and solid enough foundation on which to build lifelong discipleship? Taking time to reflect on the nature of conversion in the New Testament will provide some guidance in finding answers to these vital questions about the relationship of conversion to discipleship.

Repentance, Baptism and Conversion in the New Testament

As I have been sharing the outcomes of my research into discipling BMBs with workers around the world, I have often been asked about the role that baptism plays in discipling. Though I have long believed that baptism is an important part of obedience to Christ, I did not, unfortunately, include the topic of baptism in the interview research into discipling that undergirds this book. However, I have since come to understand a little more of the significance of baptism in the New Testament experience and teaching on conversion. In seeking to get a deeper understanding of conversion, one is hard pressed to do better than to turn to Gordon Smith’s Transforming Conversion (2010), cited above. Much of what follows in this section relies heavily on Smith’s study of the nature of conversion and the role that repentance and baptism play in authentic Christian conversion. Though Smith is not dealing with Muslim contexts in his book, he writes out of a wide experience of global Christianity and is very much aware of the challenges inherent in applying his insights to Muslim contexts.

The Philippian jailor asked Paul and Silas the classic question “What must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). Many and varied answers to that question have been debated among evangelists, preachers, missionaries and theologians ever since. Peter helpfully answered the question he was asked on the day of Pentecost, “What shall we do?” by saying, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Taking time to reflect on Peter’s answer here provides an excellent place to begin to understand the nature of Christian conversion in the Bible. This is the first appearance of this question in the New Testament subsequent to the death and resurrection of Christ, and it is quite plausible to argue that Luke is here setting out the theologically normative answer to the question for the church to whom he is writing a generation after Christ’s resurrection. Throughout Acts there are numerous conversion narratives that describe what happens in conversion, but it is here in Acts 2:38 that an explanation is given as to what needs to happen for someone to be saved. Smith points out that this pivotal text has two distinct dimensions of human response: a call to repentance, which is an interior and individual response; and the call to be baptized, which is an external and social or corporate response to the preaching of the gospel. Smith explores how this pivotal text shapes our understanding of conversion in the New Testament: “The two-fold movement of repentance and baptism incorporates a dynamic interplay between the individual and the community. . . . Though there is more to conversion than repentance and baptism, this text profiles these two actions—or perhaps better put, this dual action—as pivotal to the conversion experience” (Smith 2010, 114).

Smith suggests that the twofold response to the gospel, repentance and baptism, can well be viewed as “the hub or locus of a Christian conversion” (119). He devotes a full chapter to each element. He first explains what repentance means (chap. 7) and then explores why it is essential that baptism accompany repentance (chap. 8), and that both be seen as core elements of authentic Christian conversion. It is helpful to reiterate a few of his points to clarify the relationship that conversion has to the life of discipleship within the church of Christ, as seen in the New Testament and as applied to Muslim contexts.

Genuine repentance is a foundational part of conversion. Smith begins his chapter on repentance with this strong statement: “Repentance is so much at the heart of the matter that in many respects it is virtually synonymous with conversion. One could almost say that to convert is to repent. . . . Repentance is the pivot on which the experience of conversion rests. . . . The heart and soul of conversion is repentance” (Smith 2010, 127, emphasis added). According to Smith, repentance is “the particular and biblical response to God’s revelation to the heart and mind” (138). In the Old Testament, “repentance is fundamentally covenantal, relational; it is a turning to God” (130). The New Testament begins with John’s calling the people of God to repentance, and Jesus himself also preaches repentance (Mt 4:17; Mk 1:15; Lk 5:32; 13:3; 15:7). Jesus comes calling Israel to repent in a way that fits with the entire Old Testament prophetic tradition (130-31). Two things are particularly pertinent in the biblical witness about repentance: confession and repentance are integral to the normal patterns of community life and worship in God’s people and “the content of this repentance is a personal and corporate alignment with the reign of God in the world, through Christ” (132).2

To be a disciple is to be baptized. In the New Testament, baptism is clearly integral to the entire conversion experience and is closely tied to repentance. Baptism is the ordained means whereby we are united with Christ, and it is a conscious and deliberate identification with the death of Christ on the cross whereby following our resurrection with Christ in baptism, we are now identified with Christ and his reign as members of the kingdom of God. It is valuable to spell out what Smith believes to be the three primary dimensions of the meaning of baptism in the New Testament (141-48).

First, in baptism a believer appropriates the forgiveness of sins, so that as forgiven sinners we can now live in the light, renouncing our sins and walking in the light. Second, Christ’s eschatological promise that we would be filled with the Holy Spirit is initially fulfilled in our water baptism. In baptism one is initiated into the life of the Spirit, without whom it would be impossible to live the new life in Christ. Water baptism is the believer’s action, whereas Spirit baptism is Christ’s action as we undergo water baptism.3 Third, in our baptism we are incorporated into the Christian community. There are no private baptisms, because baptism is mediated by the church and is the conscious and deliberate act by which the new believer is incorporated into the church. Contra the teaching of the Roman Catholic church, it is not the church that brings us into the salvation of Christ, but Christ who gives meaning to our membership in the church.

Thus, I would affirm that, based on a careful reading of the New Testament, baptism ought to be central to our conversion exp...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Quest for Deeper Understanding of Discipleship and the Need for Seasoned Discipling Practices
• Part One: Biblical, Historical and Missiological Foundations for Discipling Believers from Muslim Backgrounds
• Part Two: Seasoned Practices in Discipling Believers from Muslim Backgrounds
• Conclusion: Helping Believers and Churches Thrive in Muslim Communities
• Appendix A: The Demographics and Design of the Research Conducted in the Arab World in 2007 on BMB Discipleship
• Appendix B: Questions Asked During the Interviews
• Appendix C: Supplementary Tables Giving Further Information
• Appendix D: Navigating Between Two Identities
• Appendix E: What About Witnessing Among the Sioux?
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Praise for Effective Discipling in Muslim Communities
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright