Last week from Thursday to Saturday, I was in Orlando with one thousand forty of my closest friends from the Florida Georgia District. We were together at the President’s Equip Conference, a conference that is held every three years and invites pastors, teachers, DCE’s, lay people, and everyone else to gather and think about a topic. The conference topic this time was “Living as Alongsiders,” an obviously made up term to get at the idea of “discipleship”.
If you’re deep into church world stuff, you may recognize “discipleship” as a term…but you also may not. You may recognize that Jesus told His disciples in Matthew 28 to “go and make disciples,” but what that looks like may be a fuzzy picture. That’s where “Alongsiders” comes in. A disciple is someone who agrees to come alongside someone, just as Jesus’ disciples were called to come alongside Jesus as He ministered to people in Galilee and beyond. His disciples then made new disciples by coming alongside new people. Those people then became disciples and came alongside other people. You are a baptized child of God because some someones came alongside you because some people came alongside them.
Many Christian thinkers smarter than myself have bemoaned that Christianity has somehow left behind an emphasis on discipleship, trading it for a more efficient and easy to measure programmatic approach. The critique is that while this has maybe been more efficient, it has turned Christianity into a set of answers to trivia questions rather than a concern for people’s lives. Has our focus on giving people the right answers, important in their own right as they may be, caused us to lose out on the lives into which those answers are contextualized? There may be a point there. We may have some repenting, some turning around, to do.
Today, it may be a good thing to think about someone that you might be able to come alongside. Who might that person be that you could spend a little extra time with? How could you show them that you care about them? How could you bring Jesus into the equation of your relationship with them? How could you become an alongsider?