Community and Discipleship - Panel Discussion (Dean Taylor, Etc) — Dean Taylor

Well, I'm really looking forward to this opportunity to be taught by four experienced brothers in Christ who have a lot of insights to share with us on the topic of the panel this evening, community and discipleship.

And I'm going to introduce them to you, beginning at my right to your left, and perhaps they need no introduction, but there may be some here that don't know who these brothers are as well. So Brother Dean Taylor will be speaking to us, he'll give us a prepared presentation in a little while on historic examples of community.

When he's finished with that, then Brother John D. Martin will come forward and he will speak to us about biblical foundation for community, and Brother Matthew Miglione will come forward and he'll present examples of community, and then Brother Ernest Eby will come forward and he will speak to us on principles necessary for community.

So we're going to hear some prepared presentations, brief presentations, on the biblical foundation for community, historic examples of community, present examples of community, principles necessary for community.

I didn't quite give them to you in the same order the second time, but that's the presentations, the prepared presentations that we'll have. When we finish with that, then we have harvested your questions.

There have been some other questions provided. We're going to engage in a time of interaction between the panel members on these questions. And what we'd like to do at the end, somewhere around 7 .45 perhaps or thereabouts, we'd like to give opportunity now for you as participants in this discussion to address the panel if there's any points that need clarification and additional enlightenment.

So that's kind of the broad overview of the evening. And I'm just thinking this could be a tremendous blessing to all of us as we have this opportunity to talk about this subject together and to consider it community and discipleship.

What does discipleship really look like in community? And so I'm going to ask Brother Dean Taylor to come forward and begin the prepared presentations. You other brethren can just follow along then in turn.

Historic Examples of Revival and Community

Given the topic of the historic examples of community and then given five minutes to do it is interesting. You know, I will just say that I have been interested. I've always been a student of revivals.

I love studying revivals, the histories of revivals. And I will say that when I started to study revival, many times you see experiences when clearly God has broken into a place and revived people, souls were saved, things were changed, sin was put away.

But then every now and then when you read through history, you read not just an individual being converted and radically changed, but you hear the entire congregation. And then from that, there's something that happens that gives birth to something extraordinary.

And that has always been something that's been very interesting to me. I've seen that in the early church and several times, particularly the revival that happened in 1525 with the Anabaptists, of course, I was very interested in.

Also, I'm very interested in and a student, I've become a student of the Moravians. And I do have a documentary that Mike Atnip and I did. It's for sale back there. And I went into detail. I was very impressed with the discipleship that I saw amongst the Moravians.

And when I lived here in Lancaster County, just right up the road is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which was a mission community. And there's something as I studied those brothers that were there and how they shared their life and everything they did.

Their businesses, their things that they did went to prosper the kingdom of God. And the more I studied that in groups like that, I just get inspired. And so I guess maybe that's part of my vision and dream to see that in reality today.

But to go in and just a few minutes left of what I have here of historic revival of discipleship and historic communities discipleship, I thought I would just read the account in the book of Acts. If I could bring it down, you know, what do you do?

I'd love to say something about the Moravians, the Anabaptists, the different ones. But I'm just going to read the account in Acts. It's in Acts chapter 2. And when the Holy Spirit came, it says in verse 43, and fear came upon every soul.

And many wonders and signs were done by the apostles and all that believed were together and had all things common and sold their possessions and good and part of them to all men as every man had need.

And they continued daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people.

And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved. Holy Spirit poured out again when they prayed for boldness in chapter four and verse 31. And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and they spake the word of God with boldness and the multitude of them that believe were of one heart and of one soul.

Neither said any of them that off the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common. And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and the great grace was upon them all.

Neither was there any among them that lacked for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the apostles feet and distribution was made unto every man according to his need.

Now, real quick, I have about a few seconds left. Again, the beautiful thing about we read in the Acts account is that this is not a command. And I said that in my sermon this morning. We don't see anything in there that's a command.

You have to do that. But don't miss it because it's not a command. It's a testimony. And what is it a testimony of? It is a testimony of a church living out in a radical way the teachings of what came before it, which was the teachings of Jesus Christ.

In my opinion, it's the only church that we completely see that was started by no man. It was started by God. In my opinion, it's like the Holy Spirit saying, OK, everybody step back. I'm going to show you what the stuff supposed to look like.

And so but as we see different radical expressions, we see it in the book of Corinthians. We see different brothers doing these things. The point is this. The point is Jesus. And Jesus came to establish a kingdom.

He was glorified when he establishes a people and sanctifies them in the midst of an unjust nation. And when he does that, he is glorified. And I'm blessed with the example that we see here in the book of Acts.

And I'm blessed as I've been a student of revival that every now and then you see a group to be able to lay down their differences, become one, and walk out those kingdom principles together. As John G. always says, to show the whole world what the whole world should look like if it only followed the king.

So, amen. I thank you for those examples. I thank the Lord for those examples in history, and I praise the Lord for them. A biblical foundation for community. John the Baptist and Jesus both began their ministry with one word, repent.

The Kingdom of God as the Biblical Foundation for Community

Now, in common understanding, what should have followed that is repent if you want to go to heaven. That's what most people hear after that word, or if you don't want to go to hell. I don't want to minimize those two realities.

I believe in both of them. But Jesus specifically said, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Now, Jesus always called the gospel the gospel of the kingdom. You go through and read it. The seed.

If you ask most people, what is the seed that was sown in those four soils? Most people say the word of God, and that's correct. But in Matthew, it specifically says it was the word of the kingdom. And we have his kingdom parables, and we have a prayer that is just saturated with the kingdom.

We'll talk about that in just a moment. And so, Jesus' message was the kingdom. He said he was sent to preach the kingdom. Now, his audience, when they heard that, what would they have thought? Well, they were Jewish people.

And I think in their minds, a kingdom of heaven, that would be an ideal king. Oh, yes. Our prophets spoke about a time like this. They said there would be a day when there would be no war. There would be no poor.

Everybody would have what they need. Children could play safely in the streets. Old people would be taken care of. It would be the ideal community. This must be what Jesus is talking about. And if you look at what he says right after that in the Sermon on the Mount, that's indeed what he's talking about.

A community where the property accumulated to oneself is not the norm. It's sharing and giving. A place where there's no violence. Evil is not resisted. A place of purity. A place of prayer. And then you go to the prayer.

The prayer has all plural pronouns. There's not I. There's not me. There's not mine. There's not my. It's our. It's us. And ours. And so, it's very obvious that Jesus had in mind a redeemed society. Right.

The emphasis today is on redeemed individuals. Amen. That's good. You can't have a redeemed society till you have redeemed individuals. But if that's as far as the gospel that you understand goes, you have only part of the gospel.

God's purpose is to redeem individuals because he wants to make up a redeemed society, present to the world what God intended originally at the beginning before sin came into the world. He's always wanted a people.

In the Old Testament, he wanted a kingdom that would show all the other kingdoms what his kingdom looks like. And to be very honest with you, it was not the perfect kingdom that Jesus came finally to give us.

But it was good enough that the Queen of Sheba came and she said, in my country, I heard about this, but now I can see that the half wasn't even told me. This is a blessed people. They have blessed laws.

It's a blessed society. God has always wanted that. What makes us think that he wants anything different in the New Testament? In fact, Peter says, you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people that he should show forth the praises of him who hath called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

So it's the same ideal as in the Old Testament. Now, the early church took this seriously. Our brother just referred to it. And so they took the teachings of Jesus and then you read Acts 2 and Acts 4 and that's what it looks like.

It says they broke their bread from house to house. Their possessions were freely shared. It was at least a partial realization of those wonderful Old Testament prophecies. And we live in a time, I tell you, I answer the billboard lined number for Kim.

And when I present this ideal to them, this really resonates much better than if I just stuck to individual salvation. When I paint the picture of what this is supposed to look like, finally, when God has them redeemed, joins them with others who are redeemed and the society they can enjoy and present to the world, it's indeed a very appealing message.

So the biblical basis for community is right there in the first words of Jesus. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has arrived, is here. And God help us to present that to the world.

Intentional Community as a Spectrum of Shared Life

Well, they were both right on five minutes, so I better stay on mine. You know, when I was asked to speak on present examples of community, my initial impulse was just to give you a one-minute bio of five different communities.

I could have talked to you about Dean's community, I could talk about my community, different ones that we've seen, maybe some of the first communities I came into. And I realized at some point that's just a shortcut.

That's not what I should talk about here. In this short time, what I would like to convince you of is that community is a ubiquitous term. There's no command to be in community in the Bible because you are in community.

And community is a spectrum event. There are all kinds of communities that are nested inside of each other. Community means the group of people that you have things in common with. And what we're talking about when we talk about biblical community is doing that on purpose and finding things in common, like making choices to have things in common.

Because I'm in community just because I was born in an Italian-American immigrant family, because I was raised in a certain part of the country, because I live in a certain town, because I have certain interests, hobbies, professions.

All of these things are communities. And what we're seeing, what I want to present to you as present examples of community is actually not the ones we're talking about. See, I live in Boston. In Boston, there's all four major sports teams.

I hate sports. But my life revolves around them because they clog the whole city. We have a football team, a baseball team, a basketball team, and a hockey team. And it clogs the whole city. And I see people that have a community in Boston all the time.

They wear their colors. They have their chants. They do their things. And it's fascinating from a sociological perspective to say, what is it that's motivating all these people to have all these things in common?

What are they getting out of this present example of community? They're getting a shared sense of value. They're getting a place of belonging. They're getting common goals and achievements, a sense of story.

All of these things are what we take out of our notions of community. And just like Dean talked about this morning when he was first coming out of the United States military, my wife and I had a similar experience in coming out of our gang on the streets that we had an initial impulse that we had come from a group of people who were deeply concerned about each other, who were deeply involved in each other's lives.

And for my wife and I, when we came into the evangelical church under this individual salvation model, it was just about us. And what we found was everybody was just about them. And so we had this longing and this lack.

And I saw Brother Bob on Sunday morning and on Wednesday evening, and I didn't know Brother Bob from Adam. All I knew was that he was the guy that shouted amen in the pulpit, in the pew. I didn't know anything about him.

And we longed to be a part of a people. And I was so glad when I found out that the gospel wasn't about me, that the gospel was about being a part of a community, that God had taken me out of my horrible, wicked place and made me a part of a people.

And that's the present example of community. And I looked long and hard for that in a lot of different places. And one of the first places that my wife and I found it was when we came into Mennonite churches.

And we're so grateful to our Mennonite brothers and sisters for being an example of that, because for the first time, I came out of the evangelical world. I had a lot of radical ideas about Jesus's teachings and the kingdom of God.

But what I saw with my own eyes for the first time was a group of people who knew each other apart from Sunday and Wednesday. A group of people that they shared tools, they shared life, they knew each other.

They were extended families together. They lived in the same area together. And they knew about each other. And that was so refreshing to me. So what I've learned since then is that our present examples of community are a spectrum.

There's not any one thing that is community. And what I would say to all of us here is that how are you doing that on purpose? Like, what about your experience in community? What's more important to you?

People that fish in the same place as you fish or hunt in the same place you hunt in the same way? Or people that do the same trade as you? Or people that you're involved with in some other place? Or are you purposefully making decisions with your life to have more in common with your brothers and sisters?

Because, you know, one of the early Christians said that if we are heirs together of the grace of life, how much more the things of this life. And so there's not the specific, we don't find this specific command that says thou shalt live in intentional community.

But what I always ask myself is, what would drive us the other way? What motivation would there be in separating myself out of the community? What biblical concern would lead me to a place where I wanted more of my own life, more separation, more autonomy, more independence?

And that's where we should evaluate our spectrum of present community.

Principles of Discipleship in a Healthy Church Family

Principles necessary for community. I'm going to focus specifically on principles necessary for discipleship in community. Prior to the New Testament era, there was much focus on family lineage and family loyalty.

We see this all throughout the Old Testament. Often when a person is introduced in the Old Testament, his father's name and or his tribe is also mentioned. This pattern changes abruptly in the early church.

As the early church got started, all of these family dynamics were greatly diminished and the family concepts got applied to the church, the family of God. Many people in the early church joined the church at great cost.

Their family members did not often join with them. And so the church was their only family. So the first principle necessary for community to happen is for the church to become our family. In a healthy biological family, each member is more interested in the success of the family than in their own personal accomplishments or interests.

The same must be true in the church family. In a healthy family, discipling and spiritual nurture take priority over ministry projects or financial accomplishments. In a healthy family, individuals listen to each other and learn from each other and they care about what the others are thinking and feeling.

Can you make parallels to a healthy church family? Can you imagine what it would look like if all of our churches were like a healthy family? You can contrast this with an immature or dysfunctional family in North America in which each person does his own thing independently of the others.

Nearly 20 years ago, I volunteered at a discipleship training center that ministered to broken and dysfunctional men, men who found it difficult to love or be loved. Our goal as staff was to disciple these men in a healing, healthy Christian community.

This environment was the closest thing I ever experienced to what these brothers have been talking about so far this evening. Talking about spiritual things, personal needs, and praying for each other was as natural as talking about the weather.

Each day during the week, we gathered early in the morning to pray with each other and to give each other advice and encouragement for the tough challenges we would be facing that day. Next, we shared what we had learned from the Lord that morning and the men discussed their past 24 hours with their mentor.

Once a week, we looked each other in the eye and said, Brother, I love you. I like how you and then we would go on to mention some things that we appreciated about them as a person. Also, each week, we had a time when the men would look each other in the eye and say, Brother, I love you.

Here's a weakness I see in your life. And here's an example of the weakness that I saw just the other day. And even though this was very difficult to do and very difficult to receive, the men in the program who made the most spiritual progress would say that this exercise was probably the most helpful part of their time at this discipleship center.

The rest of the day, we worked together in a wood shop that had scripture verses painted all over the walls. It was in this wood shop that I got a real vision for what community could look like. It was not uncommon at all for one man to go to another brother in the shop and talk about an intense struggle that was going on in his heart.

And if a man was struggling severely or being attacked by Satan, we would shut the whole shop down and we would gather around this man and pray with him. As I lived there day after day, this seemed really right to me.

Having previously worked in a business that was geared toward efficiency and profitability, this wood shop seemed to have the kind of atmosphere that I think that God intended for all Christian workplaces to have.

But good things like this come at a cost. It costs somebody or some church about $25 ,000 to $30 ,000 in donations in order for a man to spend eight months at this discipleship center. For some reason in our Western culture, we've lost the principle of discipling each other, but we're willing to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to non-profit organizations to do this discipleship work for us.

Then life goes back to the normal, fast-paced lifestyle that doesn't take time for people. I think there's something really broken about this system of living. In fact, I think it's so broken that I wonder if we can even call it living.

Many of the broken men who came to the discipleship center where I served would have never ended up in the broken state that they were in if someone would have mentored them earlier in life. All of us can benefit from discipling, but discipling is especially effective with people who are in their teens and 20s and 30s and 40s.

So the principle here is that an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure when it comes to Christian discipling. For some reason, we think people in our churches should be willing to disciple others for free.

But if those same people then go to work for a non-profit organization, then they deserve to be supported financially. And so a final principle for community discipleship is that those who labor on behalf of the church, especially where you do not have community of goods, these people need to be supported proportionately.

Otherwise, people in the community are going to get missed and they're going to get neglected. So in conclusion, I would like to call the Church of Jesus Christ to create healthy communities, communities that are a safe place and a place where children and adults can experience the same kind of spiritual nurture that many of us experience in a healthy Christian family.

Okay, thank you each one for that. I'm going to move the lectern off to the side now so you can see the panelists better. And if it's okay, I'll go ahead and leave the microphone here. If somebody's distracted by that, I'll remove it.

Just make it known. So we've got some questions that we want to address to the panel, and we're very anxious and waiting with anticipation the responses, the insights that they have to offer to us. Okay, I think we're ready to begin.

God bless you with insight and grace as you minister to us this evening. I'd like to ask you brothers this question. Different times today we've heard the term used, Anabaptist. And perhaps you could give us a little insight as to what did the Anabaptists and others believe about the call to discipleship within close, accountable brotherhood relationships following Christ, not merely individual commitment?

Anabaptist Discipleship and the Rule of Christ

It's a great question. One of the biggest differences when the Anabaptist revival started was it's a contrast with the state concept of the church. And the very idea that you were forming this church of believers automatically made them separated from the state church system that they were finding themselves.

And from the very beginning, you see this just coming out right from the beginning. When revival started in Zurich, right over to Zolokon the next time, they just automatically broke into sharing. They were accused of automatically going into having all things common.

And there just seemed to be something natural. And whether it's the Hutterites or the Swiss Brethren, and particularly more the Swiss groups, both of them had radical expressions of helping each other built into their gospel.

And I take it down to two principles of the reason why I'm with the Anabaptists today. In an early letter from Conrad Grebel, he said two things that I think are fundamental in our understanding. He said, the teachings—excuse me.

He said, the Word of God is intended to be—I understand the Word of God without complicated interpretation, and out of that I speak. Simple Word of God. The next thing he said was, the words of Jesus were meant to be put into practice.

Those two things made it different than the state church system, and it had within it a sort of family that the early Anabaptists had. I think it's still—we see it in all the Anabaptist churches. Like Brother Matthew said, when you come from an evangelical to any of the Anabaptist church, you automatically see that sense of community that we knew nothing of in that evangelical world.

And I thank the Lord for that. Well, the Anabaptists had a tremendous emphasis on what they called the rule of Christ, which was Matthew 18. You committed yourself in an Anabaptist setting to speak to a brother who needed your admonition and correction, and that just simply was—they referred to that as the means of continual revival in the brotherhood.

So the discipleship was a real thing with them, where each person took responsibility for whatever needs they saw in their brother.

Just two quotes here, one from an early Anabaptist and one from a more present-day Anabaptist. First one's from Michael Stadler. He says, Is the church really demonstrating the new life in Christ if there's no discipline, if there's no fencing in of the Lord's table, no demand for purity of life?

And the one from a more modern writer goes like this. Corporate worship, mutual aid, fellowship, and mutual accountability characterize this community. An individualistic or self-centered Anabaptism is a contradiction in terms.

Who was that?

Thank you. Thank you for those responses. Here's another question. How can we cast vision for and promote the biblical model of community that we see demonstrated in the book of Acts?

Geographic Proximity and the Three Dimensions of Community

Well, it's very hard to have community if people are living miles and miles apart. I think one of the downsides of the automobile was to scatter our communities to the four winds. And I think if we're really going to have community, we're going to have to think in terms of what we can do.

And it'll be a very intentional thing to bring our people geographically together. I mean, it just is a reality that you're not going to be a part of your brother's life if he lives a half hour to an hour away.

You're going to see him on Sunday morning, and that's about it. So geographical proximity is a real issue. And I don't think that since the acceptance of the automobile, we really have given much thought about what the automobile has done to us and how we should address this issue to bring our communities geographically close together.

I would say that in academic studies of community in the broad sense, not just the Christian community, communities are broken into three main categories. One main category is geographical communities.

A second category is communities of lifestyle or shared value systems. And the third major delineation of community is shared goals, like you would find political action communities in that category. The Christian community, properly understood, is all three.

It's a geographical community with a shared lifestyle and common goals. And it makes it a very dynamic community when all three of those things line up and there's a synergy between that. For my own purposes, community has fulfilled the function the way I implore other people to be more intentional about their expression of community, is that I recognize somewhere along the way when I abandoned my nationalism, my national identity, and forsook it to Christ, that there was a judgment coming of the nations, of all the nations.

And I happen to be born in this one, and there's a lot of very specific judgments that are going to come on this one. And what I determined early on is that I have to do something with my life to distinguish myself to God as not being a part of that community, but being a part of his community.

And so there's some very good reasons why we should be forsaking the status quo that some of us were raised in and that we see all around us, and imploring one another to have more purpose with each other.

And those three categories of geography and lifestyle and goal are a good way to think about that.

One of the things also, I think the question, how do we get back to the axe model or something like that? The one thing I will say is, the one thing that needs to be done is give the axe model a try. It seems like even in some of the casual discussions that I've had here at the place, there seems like immediately a reason why that doesn't work.

You know, well, you can't do that because of this or the other. And it kind of goes back to that example of the Bach manuscript. There's something beautiful about this expression, and I think it's exciting when I see groups and all these represented up here of just giving this whole thing a try.

And I think we'll start to see that once we do that, we'll say, oh, I'm starting to see the reason why the Holy Spirit did that. Again, without any kind of legalistic way of looking at it, but expressing that just like we see it in this beautiful pages of the symphony that we have before us.

I'll speak from a Mennonite standpoint. In my experience through the years, when the discussion got to Acts 2 and Acts 4, most of the discussion was on why those should not actually be practiced. And really what we should have done, well, I think part of it was we thought Hutterite.

That's the way that's done, and we don't believe in that. What we really should have done is looked at those and said, look, there may be many ways for this to be worked out, but here are some ideals.

Let's move toward the ideals represented in this passage rather than X-ing out the whole passage and not even considering what might be there for us to consider and ways we can actualize what we see pictured there.

Q. Thank you. Is it possible for true discipleship to happen, using this term to speak about a personal decision to follow Christ and teaching others to follow Christ, in a spatial building one day out of seven?

Can that really be called the body of Christ?

A. Well, that's a yes and no answer, and the answer is no.

Q. I think the simple answer to that is yes. Many people have been discipled with far less interaction with Christians under Duras. I think maybe if we ask the question like this, can true discipleship happen if a person chooses to limit his interaction with other Christians to one day in seven, then I would say the answer is obviously no.

A. Point well made.

Q. My experience would be that discipleship, when it gets real, is about real stuff. We people, in general, happen to be very good at keeping the parts that need the most work away from the most possible people.

What I find in my community, one of the ways that we're trying to shape our life together is that it's informed by this perspective that I have that some of my favorite saints, some of my closest brothers, people that I have loved and respected the most, tend to have this one glaring inconsistency in their life.

It's a very common thing that people that I have loved dearly have one kind of niche in the armor that makes them weak and vulnerable, and I have to assume, after having all those experiences with men that I respected, I thought better men than myself, having this kind of weakness, this fatal flaw, we see it even in David, is that if all these men that I respect have these problems, these issues that they need help seeing, then I have to be humble enough to say that I must too.

And the biggest problem that I have in my life is the one that I'm least apt to see on my own. And so recognizing that principle is a spirit of wisdom, because wisdom loves correction, because wisdom sees correction as an opportunity to be more like Christ.

And if I don't have my life in the middle of people that I have loving relationships with that I trust and know are serving God with me, then I don't have, I'm not being open enough and vulnerable enough to let people see that part of me that needs grace and healing and repentance.

And that's what's at the core of this question, I think. Thank you.

Cultural Obstacles to Discipleship and Kingdom Alternatives

Next question. How does the culture we live in militate against true discipleship? We see things like capitalism, individualism, and materialism, which we believe are not of the Father but of the world, and all that is in the world is passing away, but the Kingdom of God will last forever.

Have these things affected we Western Christians in far greater ways than we realize? How can we escape from being a frog in the kettle in the twenty-first century context that we find ourselves living within?

Kind of a long question, but I think you get the point.

Yeah, amen. You know, when Jesus came in, He brought in an entire new way of life, a new humanity. And in this concept of a new humanity, He gives us the grace to live out this Kingdom that He wants to establish.

And you are right. I mean, Jesus spoke of the world in very caustic ways. I mean, He spoke of it, you know, coming from the evil one. And in Revelation, it sort of sums up all the different systems of the world with the attractive term of beast.

And as we see Jesus giving us this Kingdom of God, His design is for us to defeat this beast. Well, what is this beast trying to do to us? It's trying to destroy the things that Jesus wants, and so it wants to break us down.

And we see through history things that have happened, like during the French Revolution, we see it now breaking down groups of any kind, breaking down church, break down associations, and you get people into individuals, and then the nation runs the whole thing.

Jesus wants for us to be able to come together, be a people of God, that He can be glorified in that people of God. And that's going to affect every parts of our lives. So, I think everything in this modern world, and perhaps it's always been, has dictated in war against the Lamb and against His church, from individualism to the way we use our money, to the way we spend our life, to those sorts of things.