Living at the Intersection of Discipleship and Becoming 7: some notes from Monday night’s Leadership Community

These are my notes from a talk I delivered this past Monday night at our quarterly Leadership Community gathering at Eastbrook Church. We have spent a good deal of energy around the idea of growing in discipleship at Eastbrook, and I wanted to explore how that connects with one of our other vision objectives related to multi ethnicity and multiculturalism at Eastbrook, which we call “Becoming 7.”

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One of the things I love when traveling around the world is experiencing the sights and sounds of new places. When I returned to Burundi and Rwanda this past Fall with Dan Ryan and a team from Eastbrook, I was reminded of the wonders of those hilly places. Particularly in Kigali, Rwanda, as I was out running some mornings I was just so struck at the uniqueness of that place, the vivid clothing people wore, the activity all around me, and the steep inclines that I ran (or walked) up and down. The same uniqueness could be said of other places I’ve visited around the world: India, Tunisia, Honduras, Djibouti, Jordan, Ireland, Loas, Mozambique, China, and on and on.

But it’s one thing to see the external uniqueness of a place or culture, and it’s another thing to step inside the richness and thickness of it. Once when I was visiting a church partner in the Middle East, the local church team was cleaning up after a major outreach event with refugees and I started to roll up my sleeves to jump right into the clean-up help. My friend, who was the pastor, gently put his hand on my arm and said, “Don’t do that. Let everyone else serve. If you start doing their job it will dishonor them.” I found my Midwestern American tendencies challenged and wondered just how greatly the way I read the gospel or consider discipleship is shaped by my culture. 

We often speak at Eastbrook about becoming a Revelation 7 church. That idea is rooted in the vision of Revelation 7:9-10, a description of the bride of Christ fully displayed in the presence of God. Let’s hear those verses:

⁹ After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰ And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:9-10)

There are so many things to note about this passage. Salvation belongs to God and to the Lamb, who is Jesus our Savior. And gathered all around is this multitude of a noticeably multiethnic, multiracial, multi-peopled, multilinguistic community that is the church. And what has stood out to me for some time is that while this gathering is in God’s presence heaven, the gathering is noticeably—yes, noticeably—diverse. I find that so wonderful that the heavenly picture of the church is a place where the uniqueness of backgrounds and cultures and languages show up. 

And this is a wonderful thing in heaven, but I also believe it is a wonderful thing here on earth. In the Bible we see that the first gatherings of the early church began to develop in this direction pretty quickly with Jews and Gentiles being together, men and women being together, slave and free being together. You can read about it in Paul’s letters, like Philemon and Ephesians, and you can see it described in Luke the evangelist’s story of Jesus in the Gospel and his history of the early church we know as the Acts of the Apostles. What we catch pretty early on is that this good news of Jesus reaches so many people and brings them together, as Paul writes in Ephesians 2, by breaking the dividing wall down. Jesus brings this new unity through Himself, His work on the Cross and in the resurrection. 

But, working that out together takes some effort and growth.

And this is where, at least in part, discipleship intersects with what we call “Becoming 7,” growing as a Revelation 7 church. Discipleship starts with the work of Christ, His saving work on the Cross, and discipleship continues with the presence of Christ being shaped into us by the Holy Spirit day by day over the course of our lives. It is Christ from start to finish but it is also us surrendering, or yielding, to that work of Christ. Paul writes about it this way in the book of Philippians, “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” (Philippians 2:12-13). Work it out, Paul says…but it is God working it out in you.

So, too, with the multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial community, it is Jesus from start to finish. Jesus brings us together through his work on the Cross. The unity is won by Him. But we also must commit to that unity by surrendering, or yielding, to that unity day after day over the course of our lives. It’s a sort of intercultural discipleship or multiethnic sanctification that God works out within His people as we yield to Him. Just like Paul wrote to the Philippians, we might say we have to work it out but know that it is God working it out in us. 

At Eastbrook that means we lean forward into unity by growing together as a disciple community. We don’t just want to be together and see difference amongst us. We want to learn about that difference and thereby grow into the image of Jesus together. We want to practically work out loving our neighbors as ourselves. This means we are invited to seek first to understand and then be understood. 

We want to be curious and inquisitive about the beautiful and even the hard things that stand between us in our relationships. 

We want to learn to listen well to one another. We want to love our neighbor as ourselves, even our ethnically different neighbor, so that we can truly make space for each other and love one another well. This takes work. 

I know that we have all felt the tensions of recent years around these discussion points. I know that there have been discussions in the culture and in politics that have heightened our sensitivities around these sorts of issues. I know that this is true not only outside the walls of the church but even within the community of the church. And as we enter into an election year, I know that there are powers in the political realm, on right left and center, that will seek to disrupt the church from our identity, love, and mission in order to use us for their ends.

As a pastor, I want to call us now into the place where our discipleship to Jesus impacts our journey toward becoming the disciple community that Jesus lived and died and rose again for. It is that beautiful bride made spotless through Jesus where people from every nation, tribe, people and language belong and love and grow together. We want to love our neighbor as ourselves, even our ethnically different neighbor, so that we can truly make space for each other and love one another well. This takes work. Again, to point toward the Apostle Paul’s word to the Philippians, we have to work it out while knowing and trusting that it is God working it out in us. Yes, it is work.

This takes self-awareness so that we can identify ways we are hurting each other, implicitly and explicitly, and bring that to God so we can love each other better. We want to be humble and gracious, but also willing to ask hard questions and give space to one another. That is hard work. It means we are on the journey together to learn. And this is not some add-on to the Gospel. It is actually essential to the Gospel of Jesus Christ who came as the Savior for the nations in fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that all the nations would be blessed through Abraham’s seed. So, friends, I want to hold up before us this Gospel journey we are on, this intercultural discipleship and multiethnic sanctification journey, we are on as a community being shaped from the heart of God by the power of the Holy Spirit for the glory of Jesus.

May God give us grace for that.