Ever since Jesus commissioned his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” the church has created a variety of tools for that task—from early church leaders’ formulating creeds to clarify the gospel, to nineteenth-century innovators like Robert Raikes and Dwight Moody launching “Sunday schools” to teach street kids how to read—and how to follow Jesus. In this special section, historian Bruce Shelley describes three time-tested ways the church has made disciples, and two pastors describe how they’re doing it today.
“Get’n saved, get’n sanctified”
The American frontier was marked by a new kind of ministry: revivals and camp meetings. While fiery Presbyterian and Baptist preachers took part, this form of making disciples was perhaps most fully developed by the Wesleyans.
Wesleyan Christians believed in salvation and sanctification. While many frontier camp meetings were about “get’n saved,” many more were about “get’n sanctified.”
John Wesley was a great revivalist. But he was a greater “methodist.” Beyond a powerful emotional experience at a preaching event, he knew how to organize converts for discipleship, for methodical progress toward deeper faith.
Young John Wesley got his methodist label during his student days at Oxford. But the genius appeared only after his heart was “strangely warmed” in 1738. He became a powerful evangelist and faced the problem of making living Christians out of raw converts.
The Methodist system of societies, classes, and bands, traveling preachers, simple preaching houses, and quarterly love feasts was all set up under Wesley’s watchful eye. His vision was a discipline-in-community system. At its heart was what we might call small groups. Only there is a significant difference. Today’s small groups are often feel-good fellowship without discipline. Not Wesley’s!
After 30 years Wesley’s system numbered 27,341. Exactly? Exactly. Wesley counted them. He even had little membership cards to keep track—weekly.
The “class meeting” was the cornerstone of the whole structure. But don’t think of classes as instruction. They were more like house churches, a dozen or so people meeting in neighborhoods where they lived. Class leaders (both men and women) were pastors and disciples.
Classes normally met one evening each week for an hour or so. Each person reported on his or her spiritual progress, or on particular needs or problems, and received the support and prayers of the others.
A leader had two duties each week:
- To meet with each person in the class to inquire how their souls prospered. Here was spiritual counsel and exhortation. Then came the responsibility. The class leader then received whatever the member was willing to give to help the poor.
- To report to the Minister and the Stewards of the society on the progress or problems of each class member and to give the Stewards what they had received from the weekly class.
This simple system became the primary means of grace for thousands of Methodists. But it also empowered the movement’s evangelistic and discipling mission.
In his Pastoral Theology, Thomas Oden reminds us that in the narrow sense the care of souls now refers to the quiet sphere of one-on-one meetings with persons who look to pastors for interpersonal, moral, and spiritual guidance.
In a wider sense, “soul care” is the church’s total task.
Pastoral soul care
While Wesley taught spiritually vibrant lay people how to do soul care, Richard Baxter showed pastors how to do it.
When Baxter, England’s great Puritan pastor, began his ministry in Kidderminster parish in the green Worcestershire hills, he found hundreds of families without any clear signs of the grace of God.
In his own words, they were an “ignorant, rude, and reveling people.” So he asked himself, “If a tree is known by its fruit, how many of the people in this parish have ever been ‘awakened’ by God?”
The Kidderminster parish, nearly 3,000 souls in about 800 homes, soon had almost 1,000 attending church to hear Baxter’s effective preaching.
Still, he had the good sense to admit that preaching alone was not enough. Baxter recognized the only way a preacher could tell the comfortable from the disturbed was by spending time with them.
“You cannot cure unknown diseases,” he said.
Convinced that one word of “seasonable prudent advice” from a minister to a person in spiritual need does far more good than a whole series of sermons, he created a plan for visiting every family that would receive him.
Going into their homes, Baxter got to know his people, but not by mere chit-chat. These conversations were serious conversations with every member of the family about the condition of their souls.
He refused to baptize a believer before he or she gave a clear testimony of the grace of God at work in their life.
This ministry became the distinctive mark of Baxter’s entire ministry and made it the long-admired model for pastoral ministry to this day.
It clearly strengthened Baxter’s pulpit ministry. He once wrote: “He who knows what man is, and what godly men are, only as well as I do, has an insight and authority that compel attention.”
Outside St. Mary’s Church in Kidderminster today, you can find a giant statue of Baxter, the Bible in his left hand, long flowing robes reaching to his ankles, and, in full-preaching form, his right arm pointing to heaven.
Baxter’s vision is hard to find in our time. People love their privacy and pastors their specialties. But here and there—more often in small towns and ethnic communities and on church staffs, Baxter’s vision lives on.
Know some answers
Before Sunday schools and small groups and the cure of souls, there were catechisms. Reformer Martin Luther was one of the best at making use of this tool.
In the Preface to his Short Catechism (1529), Luther wrote, “I must still read and study the Catechism daily, yet I cannot master it as I wish, but must remain a child and pupil of the Catechism, and I do it gladly.”
Luther wrote his influential Short and Long Catechisms in response to the spiritual ignorance he discovered in sixteenth-century Saxony.
For Luther a catechism was a clear statement, in question-and-answer form, of the essentials of the Christian faith, especially the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the sacraments. This is the common, modern meaning of the term.
But the work of “catechesis” itself is part of a much older tradition. In the early church, Christians—to move professing believers to serious practice of the faith—used this kind of instruction.
Converts to Christianity were thoroughly prepared before their baptism. This preparation had two parts: a preliminary and often long training in doctrine and ethics, followed by intensive spiritual preparation (involving prayer, fasting, and exorcism) immediately before baptism.
After Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion and public support of Christianity in 313, the churches had too many converts under pastoral care to continue this lengthy preparation for baptism. Since catechumens could not participate in the Lord’s Supper until they were baptized (usually the next Easter), most converts received only a brief period of teaching and special preparation during Lent.
Over time the early Christian discipline and discipleship had faded. Thanks to noble missionary efforts over the centuries, the church baptized most of Europe, but then seemed willing to settle for nominal Christianity.
When the Reformation broke over Europe, Luther and the other Reformers drew from early church practice. Luther’s Short Catechism is a masterpiece. Another is the Heidelberg Catechism, composed by Zacharias Ursinus and Kaspar Olevianus. A third is the Shorter Catechism produced by the Westminster Assembly in 1648 (with its oft-quoted statement of the purpose of human life: “What is the chief end of man? The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever”).
The Reformers were aware of the dangers of mere rote learning; they all insist that the pithy answers be learned “by heart.”
In his book Evangelical Truth, John Stott writes: “Too much religion is ritual without reality. … But Evangelicals have sensed that holiness is essential. … The history of evangelicalism has been a history of the search for sanctification.”
The primary purpose of the Spirit’s indwelling is to change believers. Over the years Christians have tried hundreds of ways to move church attenders and nominal Christians to a deeper, soul-shaping faith. Sometimes the attempt has stressed Christian truth; sometimes Christian obedience or behavior.
But all recognize that neither church membership nor professed justification is any guarantee of personal sanctification.
Bruce L. Shelley is professor emeritus of church history at Denver Seminary P.O. Box 10,000 Denver CO 80250
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