BELONGING - A Covenantal Discipleship Model
In Genesis 12-15, God calls Abram to a new vision of the good life and invites him into a covenant relationship. Abram is the one God makes the covenant with, but the blessing is to extend to many generations and all the nations. God paints a picture for him of the covenant promises with three simple elements. He promises to be his God, he promises to make him into a people, and He promises to give them a place to dwell. Each aspect of the covenantal promise speaks directly to a need or longing of his people. We need God. We need others. We need a place to call home.
As we continued to turn the ideas over in our minds and hearts, the word BELONGING emerged as a guiding light to the solution. We, image-bearing human beings, all long to belong. Dr. Curt Thompson said, “We are all born into the world looking for someone who is looking for us.” To find a full life in the covenant of God’s grace means to find an experience of belonging to God, to others, and to the places he has called us.
God’s three promises (presence, people, and place), equally valued in the language of the covenant, revealed the particularity of our First Pres discipleship shortcomings and a potential solution. Most, if not all, of our discipleship was aimed at asking folks to learn more about the Lord, or do more in terms of service. A steady diet of introspection and worship aimed at holiness or outward expectation aimed at service. And yet our movement into Christ-likeness was stunted. Why aren’t we changing, more quickly and in greater degrees, into the likeness of Jesus? Why is there a perceived lack of joy in our midst?
And then it hit us… Perhaps we were malnourished in our discipleship because we lacked the sharpening iron of deep friendship, people with us, and for us in the way God designed us to need one another. Maybe we had been working with a two-legged stool of belonging to God and Place but had forgotten the emphasis on people.
Our folks are lonely and disconnected by their own admission, but to begin to see that problem as correlated to their discipleship felt new. Maybe belonging to others is more than a “nice to have,” but in fact the linchpin to more beautiful lives in the likeness of Jesus. Our approach needed to be rounded out, grounded in proximate places, with messy people, full of desire for the holy, mysterious, loving, graceful presence of the living God – all at the same time. There is beauty in each aspect of the covenant promise, but they are made excellent and transformative as all three function in harmony!
So we envisioned a Venn diagram of three intersecting circles, nestled in the middle is holistic discipleship—a life of enjoying and embracing your belonging to God, to others, and to a place. Not a linear progression of holiness, but a deepening experience of humility drawing all aspects of discipleship to the middle.
THE IDEA
For Discipleship to be Whole Life, belonging must reach in three directions. Upward to God/Presence. Inward to People. Outward to Place. These three spheres cover the whole scope of life, hence the term, whole life discipleship. To have one without the other two offers a skewed understanding of discipleship because Jesus was never simply concerned with only one aspect of the human experience. The way of Jesus was an invitation to all or none of it. Belonging is holistic.
Belonging to God/Presence (UP)
Belong to / Bought by // Be with // Become like
Belonging to People (IN)
Availability to // Affinity for // Authenticity with
Belonging to a Place (OUT)
Co-labor in our communities // Christ proclaimed (share) // Community served (love)
Each of the areas of belonging has three subcategories. They are there to clarify the general idea of belonging and can also function as a formula or path for how to do it. They aren’t meant to be exhaustive, rather they represent a distillation of the ideas. They are the loaf of bread we are offering after having been in the wheat field of ideas for quite some time. We have mined these elements to try and find simple ways to understand the gift of belonging. What are the essential parts? What is the essence of each? What can set us on the right track or path to enjoy and embrace belonging in these ways?
PRESENCE
Let’s Start with God. How do we belong to him? Living Coram Deo - before God’s face.
His Work – First, at the risk of sounding redundant, we begin our belonging to him by understanding what it means to belong to Him. How has He made us his own? How have we become His possession? If He has taken us as His own, what does it mean? This is the section that reminds you of all God has done, through Christ, to rescue, reconcile, and renew you and me. It is theology proper, the doctrines of Grace, the free gift of God to all who will believe. It is the reminder of the grand narrative of redemption, beginning in the garden, and ending in the city, with a loving relationship at its core. It’s the wonderful story of God coming after us, through the incarnation, and making a way for us to love and enjoy God forever. He has purchased you and me with His life, death, resurrection, and ascension. In fact, this story is your only hope. You are not your own, you belong body and soul to your faithful savior, Jesus Christ. To enjoy and embrace this belonging is to know the story and to begin to live as if it were true. Old masters fall away, the loud voice of our Good Shepherd speaks and we can now listen.
Our Work – Second, we can grow in our belonging to God through being with Him. This section is meant to be a deeper invitation into time with and love of the living God. The language used throughout the Old and New Testaments invites us to see our connection to God as genuine relationship. We are His people, the sheep of His pasture, the branches growing from His vine, His bride, His children, His friends. And if we know anything about healthy friendships, we know showing up is the first step! That is why the discipline of being with God is so important in our belonging to Him. We need to learn how to show up to a God who is both closer than the air we breathe and invisible to our most common human senses. We must learn how to listen to His voice, how to pray, how to read His Word, how to follow the Spirit, how to enjoy the presence of God as He offers Himself. In some sense, this is simply teaching the practice of paying attention anew. God is never far off, He has promised His presence, but we need eyes to see.
His Likeness – Third, we begin to become like Him. Belonging culminates in becoming! As we walk, more and more in the light of Christ we are transformed into the likeness of Christ. Most simply put, we begin to practice loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving our neighbor as ourselves. Consequently, we find the life we’ve been looking for, full of the presence of God, the guiding of the spirit, and the grace of Jesus which fills our days with work, grief, sorrow, joy, delight and purpose. It’s not the life we thought we wanted, but a life that is full, a life like the life of Jesus. Guided by the Spirit, soaked in prayer, fraught with compassion and people, a life of abundance of the things of the Lord!
The gift of the presence of God in our lives is often where we seem to believe our discipleship begins and ends. However, I believe this is an understatement of what human beings are made for. Not because discipleship is anything less than a relationship with God, but I think it is more. The only thing that was not good in the Garden of Eden was that Adam was alone. We were made for healthy relationships with other people. Relationships are not extra luxury, but rather essential to the abundant life in the likeness of Jesus. To recover whole-life discipleship is to recover what it means to commit to belonging to one another! We need to rediscover the gift of friendship
PEOPLE
Moving on, how do we belong to other people? “With you, for you, you too?”
Shared Spaces – First, we make ourselves available. This is not altogether different from learning what it means to be with God. We have to show up. We have to make the time to be proximately present to the people we hope to grow in relationship with. This means making decisions to say no to certain things so that we can say a stronger yes to the place where we hope to grow in relationships. There are plenty of places, spaces, and attractions longing for our attention and availability, but to grow in friendship means to show up, and to do so often. Another way to say this is careful constancy. We need to begin to be a constant in the lives of those we hope to know and be known by. We also need to be careful not to overdo our constancy. There is a line. It is a balance. But we need to show up. We need to commit to being “with” others.
Shared Hearts – Second, we need to show up with authenticity. As we begin making ourselves available, we need to learn how to risk showing up authentically. We are plagued by a posturing culture, folks curating every element of their lives to only be seen in the ways they want to be seen. They protect their image, they defend against their insecurities, they bask in the love of their adoring onlookers, and they mourn the emptiness of being loved, but not truly known. And they do so because being known and not loved is an unbearable idea. True friendship – deep and meaningful relationship – demands that we lay down the facade and allow ourselves to be truly known. It is risky. It is scary. It may not always work out. You may allow yourself to be known and the person across from you lets you know you are not loved or lovable because of it, but it is the only way to real friendship. As we show up authentically, we must also be prepared to offer the very gift we hope to receive, acceptance, comfort, and care. To practice authenticity is not to share everything on the first date, but to pace ourselves on the longer race of friendship development. Slowly but certainly risking more and more as we go. We need to let these people in our lives know we are “for them.”
Shared Values – Third, we need some sort of aligned affinity. Affinity is just a word that means something you like. We add “aligned” because in friendship it is helpful to like something together. C.S. Lewis says you need something for the friendship to be about beyond simply connecting one to another. You need to stand side by side with another person and realize that something you love is something they love too, to which you exclaim, “You too?” Christianity offers us a bedrock affinity that can truly transcend any other hobby. The love of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins gives us common ground with anyone else who has been humbled in this way. Further, we have the great gift and goal of becoming more like Christ! This process of sanctification paired with a love for the person you seek relationship with can offer a lifetime of affinity as you both seek to see the other flourish in the likeness of Jesus! This goes particularly well when both friends can hold to the image of Christ while also knowing that the embodiment of his likeness will look a little bit different based on the uniqueness of every individual. Faithful friends are able to embrace the imperatives of the Gospel and hold each other fast to that direction of living, while refusing to sacrifice the particularity of their friend’s giftedness, calling, and the pace at which Jesus is bringing them along!
The gifts of God’s Presence and a People to enjoy are wonderful and filling and yet there is one more component to our lives that we dare not miss. Where does all of this happen? In what context are we to live these lives before the face of God and with people we care for deeply. We are not meant to be vagabonds, wanderers, pure adventurers. We are meant for a place. We now turn our attention to proximity and place and the providence of God in having us where he wants us.
PLACE
How do we belong to a place? What does it mean to live faithfully in the places God has called us?
Kingdom Work – First, we find ways to Co-Labor. For too long we have discerned certain work as work unto the Lord and certain work as more menial and secular. Let us, once and for all, do away with these silly delusions and remind ourselves that the economy of God is big enough to knit the spiritual and physical together for the flourishing of his people! To Co-Labor means to find good work that is worth doing, that serves the community and particularly the people in that community in ways that they need to be served. Of course, we do all of this to the glory of God, but the glory of God is man – fed, clothed, sheltered, entertained, and alive!
Kingdom Story – Second, we share the good news of Christ with others so they might come to know and love Him as we have. The work of evangelism has often been outsourced to professionals like missionaries or pastors for lots of reasons. Most often these reasons have to do with fear or feeling like a fool. In our vision of belonging to a place, each of us who know and love Jesus will learn how to carry the name of Christ into the places where we live, work, and play. The good news of the gospel will not simply be a religious idea we subscribe to but the gift of God that changes us each day. The transforming love of Christ revealed in His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming enlivens our hearts to the hope we have beyond. And as we come to love others in the places where we live, work, and play we will long for them to know the grace of God, in Christ, just as we have. The hope of the Gospel is not simply good for the afterlife, it is the gift of life and life abundant now! As we die to self and are raised to walk in the newness of life we discover the gift of humility and grace that allows us to love God and love others in ways that bring peace and rest both to ourselves and the places we dwell.
Kingdom Come – Finally, we belong to a Community. With the advent of many of our beloved modern technologies, we have become less and less tethered to proximate places. Each morning we are able to awaken and hear more about news from neighboring states or countries than we hear about what is going on with our actual neighbors. We use social media to connect or keep in touch with people all over the country or maybe even the world. We shop on Amazon which keeps us from having to go to our local stores. We use Uber Eats and contactless delivery so that the human element of the way we obtain goods and services is personless. We build nicer backyards so that we have less need for local parks. There is much good to be said about the new ways we are able to live and yet, it begs the question, is our sense of community suffering because of it all? To belong to a community is to enjoy and embrace the spaces where we live, work, and play. To seek its good so that it might flourish and us along with it. To belong to a community is to know it and love it. To belong is to invest in the spaces and treat them like your own. And to invest in the people and treat them like your neighbors. It is much too easy to live as placeless people, vagabonds, wanderers, mindlessly meandering from meeting to meeting, website to website, city to city, only to find ourselves more lonely than we were before. To belong to a community is to know your limits, to invest as you can, and to trust that God has you in one proximate place for a reason.
Whole Life Discipleship holds all three of these big ideas together.
Presence. People. Place.
The promises of God to his people are both the assurance of what He will do for us and simultaneously the vision of what we were truly made for. As we invest more deeply in our belonging to these three spheres, we will find more beautiful lives in the likeness of Jesus.