What Is Missional Discipleship?

When Jesus said, “Come Follow Me,” it must have sent a chill through the spines of those who were hearing these words.  What would it really mean to follow this man who seemed to capture our attention in a way that was unlike anything we had ever seen.  He healed people, disrupted people, changed people, and angered people.  He refused to be boxed in.  He talked about a Kingdom that was within us but not of this world.  His invitation stirred our hearts, bringing out a longing we didn’t know existed. It was a longing for wholeness, for life, for something that spoke of love and trust and what it meant to be whole.

What would it really mean to follow?  What would it mean to lay down our life only to find a new one?  What would it mean to love the loveless, our enemy, our broken neighbor?  What would it mean to step out of our comfort zones and protective shells to discover a life filled with risk and love, joy and suffering, peace and suffering, courage and trust, and so much more?  What would it mean to participate with him in the restoration of our hearts, our neighbors and the world around us?

These are the questions that we, at Thrive, have been asking for more than a decade.  What would it really look like to follow Jesus in today’s world?  What we’ve come up with is what we call missional discipleship.  It simply means to follow Jesus into God’s mission of restoration and reconciliation in the context of a tribe.

This process of following is not a one-time event, but a new life to live into.  Some call it a journey because we’re always stepping into the unknown.  It constantly leads us out of an old way of living and into something entirely new, something whole, something restorative.  And this process calls us to trust so we can engage love.  By following Jesus, we can discover our true Father, who then gives us His Spirit to live a life like Jesus.

But where do we begin?  We begin with a willingness to participate in God’s mission, to follow Jesus.  We’re not just trying to get to heaven, but to help reveal His kingdom here on earth.  We’re not just going to church. We’re engaging love and trust as entirely new practices.  We’re learning to engage our hearts, our stories, our wounds, and our wholeness.  We’re learning what it means to follow His leading because it leads to a life worth living.

And we don’t attempt this journey alone.  Jesus offered an approach that is deeply effective.  He gathered together a tribe of people who were willing to engage God’s mission together.  He brought them into a liminal space of trust, unlike anything they had ever experienced before so that together they could discover a life they were always meant to live, one that looks like Jesus.  And the value of this tribe was having people deeply committed to each other’s restoration.  It was deeper than just an authentic community.  It was a family.  It felt good because we had people we could trust.

This mission was all about restoring relationships.  These included our relationship with God the Father, and our own self.  We’re learning what it means to get honest with reality, and engage forgiveness on a regular basis.  We’re learning what it means to redeem our story and leave our junk at the cross.  We’re learning what it means to be love so we can love.  And this restoration led us to begin restoring the relationships around us.  It could include the person on the other side of the world, but likely began with our neighbor.  It meant stepping into a third way that was restorative, and had a distinct ring of the divine.

Central to the mission was understanding God’s story in Scripture.  We’re not just practicing random acts of kingdom, but aligning ourselves with an entirely new Kingdom.  We’re not just selecting principles for living. We’re engaging an epic story of a God bent on restoring humanity, a story that answers the fundamental questions of what it means to be a people created in the image of God.  We’re not just following some guy, but the very image of God that reveals who we are designed to be.  We just want to participate in what He’s already doing.

We’re asking these questions because we believe there is a group of people who really do want to follow Jesus in today’s world.  And we’ve been documenting a potential path for you to engage what that means.  It’s not THE path, but A path.  We’ve created a specific way of operating in an intentional community.  We’ve developed practices to engage, teachings to read through, leadership materials to learn from, and exercises to help engage this mission.

So consider this your invitation to follow.  We’re looking for leaders who would like to create their own Tribe, who are willing to take the risk to follow Jesus in today’s world.  If you think this is you, contact us.  Let us know.  If you would like to know more about what we do, don’t hesitate to ask.  We’re here to help.  We’d like to offer you a free digital copy of our Leadership Manual.  Just send us an email.