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Becoming Servant Leaders:
Keeping The Disciplines 1
By Parrish W. Jones, Ph.D.
©All Rights Reserved 2005

Deuteronomy 15:7-11
Acts 2:37-47

  The last two weeks we have been considering the idea of being Servant Leaders. Week before last I dealt with it in its general context. Last week I considered the notion of our call within the realm of God and the importance of seeking our call to our lives. During that sermon, I suggested that we would deal with the disciplines for becoming Servant Leaders this week and next.

These disciplines come partially from our text from Acts where we are told that the disciples devoted themselves to the Apostle’s teachings, fellowship, and the breaking of bread. Also, on becoming disciples, persons sold all that they had and gave the proceeds to all as any had need. Thus we discover an incredibly generous but vital ministry. However, our text is only one among many.

There are four primary disciplines of the faith: being in worshipful community with others, daily devotional relationship with God, financial generosity, and being with those who suffer, especially the poor. I’ll deal with the first two today and the last two next week.

Before we begin, we need to recognize our disinclination to discipline which seems to be an American, if not human, characteristic. However, discipline is just as necessary for being a person of faith as it is for being a good batter.

I once heard an interview with a batting coach. He was asked what made the difference between a mediocre batter and a truly great batter. He responded, “Practice!” The interviewer pressed him for more. He said that the difference between someone who had the natural gift for being a great batter and being a great batter was practice and willingness to be coached. He said that he could never be a great batter, but he was a good coach. He went on to say that there were several other potential excellent hitters on the teams he coached besides the ones who became excellent hitters. The ones who were excellent, he said, practiced hitting for hours a day and listened to coaching advice from him. The one’s who did not reach their potential practiced less and almost never listened to him.

It is a bit silly to expect to be spiritually prepared for life when we have done no spiritual preparation. Just as being a good baseball player requires practice, spiritual depth and richness require coaching and practice. It requires discipline.

The discipline of being in worshipful community with others seems a given. You commit yourself to that when you join the church or begin to attend regularly. However, worshipful community with others implies more than attending worship services. Community means that we share in common with one another which means that we enter into times of fellowship in order to get to know each other.

The Greek word translated “fellowship” in the English means more than just getting together for meals or snacks and talking about football or whatever. “Koinonia”, as the Greek says it, means to build deep relationships of commitment and support such as we see forming in the text from Acts. So worshipful community depends on the regular and faithful involvement with our faith community. That is why the Presbyterian Church encourages people to join a church close enough to where they live that they can be active in its life.

This community is built around worship, but also the teaching of the Apostle’s which we have in the scriptures, we call the Bible. It is not necessary that we be biblical scholars or theologians to be Christian, but being Christian implies a yearning to know the Bible well and the basics of theology so we can talk coherently about them and know what it means to be faithful to God.

This community of faith depends on all its members having a close relationship with one another but also with God which leads to our second discipline. A close relationship with God requires regular conversations with God through daily devotional times. We often think of this as prayer, which we mistakenly understand as our talking and God listening, but our daily time with God needs to be a time when we mostly listen to God. It should include a reading of a Bible text and perhaps writings about our faith.

What this time is designed to do is help us move from knowledge about God to knowing God. As you know, we cannot hope to know someone unless we give them a chance to speak to us, therefore our devotional time needs to include some time to be quiet and listen. This time is a time for us to reflect on the things we know about God so we come to understand who God is in relationship to us.

For example, the scriptures tell me that Jesus is savior and saves me from sin. Our devotional time gives us time to meditate on the meaning of Jesus being my savior, of sin and the fact that Jesus saves me from sin. In this way I grow not just in knowledge but in relationship as I converse with God.

Our daily communion with God is also like a Sabbath time each day. It calls time out to be at peace. It disciplines the day and gives it focus. It is a way of saying, “This is the day the Lord has made”, a day in which to glorify and enjoy God. In a culture that breeds anxiety in us, such a time is a way of letting go of anxiety, distractions, and busy-ness to relax in the arms of God and hear God’s call to us.

These two disciplines are demanding in themselves because our world leaves no time for apparently non-productive time, but they prepare us for life in the spirit. They help us to discover and keep in our hearts God’s call to us. We may be able to worship God anywhere, but if our faith grows on its own, it will probably grow in distorted ways. Our faith community prunes, hoes, cultivates us so we maintain a perspective and so we learn through relationships the areas of our lives that need more work and more discipline. It will also help us refine our personal sense of call within God’s realm.

It’s not easy being in community with others. It is more challenging to be in spiritual community with others because they irritate us and bless us with the truth about ourselves. Through our Christian brothers and sisters, God speaks to us. Our faith community is where we can learn to lay aside the works of the flesh and put on the fruit of the spirit. (Galatians 5:16-26)

Just as our Christian behavior and attitudes can grow in distorted ways if we are alone, we need more than ever  in these days good coaching on doctrine and Christian worldview. Stanley Hauerwas, a Christian Theologian at Duke Divinity School, says that the big challenge of the church in America is to get the Bible back into the hands of the church.

What he means is that if individuals interpret the scriptures without the discipline of the guidance of their faith community, they develop distorted understandings of scripture and theology. The community of faith provides a context for biblical and theological discipline.

In the church we call this church discipline. We are told to gently correct one another out of love. ( 1 Timothy 2:20-26)That goes for behavior, biblical study and theology.

Therefore, the two disciplines of being in community with other Christians and being in communion with God go together. Out of the community of faith can grow guidance for the daily communion with God. Out of daily communion with God comes a divine intimacy in ourselves that we share with the community which strengthens it. Thus we become bound together as sisters and brothers in Christ so we can do the mission we are called to.

One last note: We are a people who want to get by on as little as possible when it comes to discipline. Because we want to be physically healthy, many of us have become almost obsessed by exercise and eating right. Spiritual health requires our commitment to it. When you ask, “Can I put this off today?” remember that Jesus sought both a faith community and time alone with God. If Jesus needed these two disciplines, how much more must we?