Disciple

From Dallas Willard’s The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship:

“For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship. Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership — either of entering into or continuing in fellowship of a denominationn or local church. I would be glad to learn of any exception to this claim, but it would only serve to highlight its general validity and make the general rule more glaring. So far as the visible Christian institutions of our day are concerned, discipleship clearly is optional.”

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See Dallas Willard article in ChristianityToday.

"Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing 'the arm of the flesh'—their natural abilities—to negotiate their way," he says. "They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him. But they don't have any sense that he is an active agent in their lives. As a result, they don't become disciples of Jesus. They consume his merits and the services of the church. … Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today."

He says these problems are theologically grounded: "We don't preach life in the kingdom of God through faith in Jesus as an existential reality that leads to discipleship and then character transformation." He adds, "When you don't have character transformation in a large number of your people, then when something happens, everything flies apart and you have people acting in the most ungodly ways imaginable."

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Also, related article by Cornelius Plantinga Jr. in Christianity Today:

"Extending a line of thought that runs through such Christian writers as Teresa of Avila, William Law, Jonathan Edwards, C. S. Lewis, and Richard Foster, Willard calls us to want and to plan for something much more ambitious, namely "thoroughgoing inner transformation through Christ" to "clean the inside of the cup." To rejoice in our forgiveness, teach right doctrine, and yearn for heaven are wonderful things. But, as Willard testifies in his classics The Divine Conspiracy and The Spirit of the Disciplines, and most recently in The Great Omission (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), God has much bigger things in mind for us.

He wants us to join his mighty project. That's a main reason we need thoroughgoing transformation. He wants people like us to become fit enough to follow Jesus inside "the infinite rule of God," becoming searchers for his kingdom, agents within it, witnesses to it, and models of it. We now have little kingdoms of our own, just as God intended. Depending on our age and level of responsibility, we have a small realm "where our choice determines what happens." God wants us "to mesh our kingdoms with the kingdoms of others," all inside his master kingdom, "which pervades and governs the whole of the physical universe."

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According to Willard, the problem is that a lot of us nod amiably at these instructions for a big Christian life in God's kingdom. Then we ignore them. For one thing, the instructions look like they're beyond us. For another, they are. The reason is that many of us are out of shape, spiritually speaking. God doesn't seem real to us, so we don't pray. And then God doesn't seem so real to us. When our own kingdom has a good year, we quit longing for the kingdom of God. We divert God's kingdom resources to our own side-projects and then lament when God doesn't bless them. (I'd like to see a cartoon of a Christian, palms up, complaining: "I stepped out in faith to build a Jesus Wins gaming casino that would employ hundreds, with a gospel singer lying on the King David Lounge piano and everything. But the casino went belly up. Where was God in my tragedy?")

Dr. Willard's diagnosis: A lot of us are doing Christianity at a putt-putt level. We want to be forgiven without following Jesus.

We're afraid to follow Jesus, because then we'd have to die and rise with him. We'd have to mortify our old self with its "fondest lusts," as Jonathan Edwards described them. Then we'd have to vivify Jesus' excellent virtues in their place. The truth is, we're mildly attracted to his virtues, but we're strongly attracted to our vices. We wouldn't like to lose them because they please us, and the prospect of a significant life with Jesus doesn't so much. Do we expect a new Christian life will just happen without our having to make inconvenient changes in how we live Monday to Sunday? If so, we are like people who want to be solvent and who also max out their credit cards. Or people who want to be sexually pure and who also bookmark porn sites. Or people who want to speak Japanese without all the tiresome study that's normally required. Here's Willard's devastating summary:

The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions."