Young Whole Life Disciples: A rough introduction.

One look at the title of this article and you might be thinking 'but isn't discipling always supposed to be about the whole of life? Why add 'whole life' to the mix?'

Good question.

And if we're saying that discipleship needs to be whole life focussed then does that mean that current models of discipleship within the church aren't? The LICC isn't saying that those models aren't working but we are saying that they're not as effective as they might be. An obvious point perhaps - there's always room to improve in church, but what we're highlighting is a deficiency that, when corrected, will seriously motivate mission and will improve our efforts to engage with the world at large in the way Christ meant us to.

To illustrate the issue we're referring to what LICC often speaks of as a 110/10 split. That is, if you're committed to a local Church on average you'll spend 10 hours volunteering for or attending some form of Church meeting. Churches tend to spend a good deal of time and resources equipping people for those ten hours but precious little energy is dedicated to resourcing people for the time they spend outside of Church - the 110 hours Christians spend at the office, home, school or socialising.

One of the downsides of this is that we don't identify a large bulk of our life as being relevant to God; that is we can feel that we're not serving God in those 110 hours, only in the 10 we commit to the church. Or we feel that God is only interested in the hours we spend 'doing' church. This can leave us feeling more than a little spiritually undernourished. Whole life discipling recognises that all of life, be it work, rest or play, is to be lived to the glory of God and that this needs to be a fundamental part of our church outlook.

Our heart to see whole life discipleship become central to church life is a bit like Jamie Oliver wanting dodgy school meals banned and 'five a day' stamped on the really nourishing good stuff! Our current forms of discipling may look like food, smell like food, and stops our hunger for a while but it's just not as nourishing as it could be, it's not helping us follow Christ in a way that leads us into life and life to the full.

And that's because our view of how God views the universe needs a little correction. None of us are going to have a true and full understanding of 'God's perspective' until Christ's return; as the apostle Paul so eloquently put it in 1 Corinthians 13 'when perfection comes the imperfect disappears.' But, with a healthy re-adjustment of how we view God interaction with and his overseeing of creation, the church can further realise it's mandate in ensuring God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

So what's the problem? Well if the antidote is whole life discipleship then the 'poison' is the sacred secular divide. To illustrate it, here are three scenarios.

A young computer systems engineer at a high flying firm has an alternate career in helping lead the Church youth group. She' at a cross roads - 'Maybe it's time I did something for God.' She thinks 'Maybe I should quit being an engineer and go full time into Christian work.'

A young Christian easily finds God in worship music, 'Christian rock' and, obviously, the lyrics of a band like U2 but can't see God in the poetry of Yeats, or current poet laureate Andrew Motion and certainly can't find God in their science class.

Finally a young upstart moves into a remote American town and starts dancing in empty cattle markets and enticing local youngsters to do the same, and on Sundays! The local Church minister spews rebuke against the evil of jive from the pulpit. Sounds like the story for Kevin Bacon's finest hour the 1984 film Footloose and it is.

Let's discuss these back to front. First Footloose the lyrics say it all 'loose, footloose, kick off your Sunday shoes.' Why sunday shoes? because we don't dance on Sundays. Why? Obviously because God doesn't dance on Sundays!

It's not that God doesn't do enjoyment it's rather that we often have a neat line drawn up of the things God does and doesn't enjoy. He enjoys people dancing in the spirit i.e. in 'worship' sessions. He doesn't mind people doing the conga at Soul Survivor but he doesn't do Abba.

Now you might think it's a long while since any church in the UK has banned dice games or watching TV on a Sunday. We've got over that and I exaggerate to make a point but what we haven't really developed is a strong understanding of how much God does enjoy his universe. The idea that God created because it gave him pleasure to do so, that God who steps back from his handiwork and says 'it's good' enjoys the created world more than we do. This is a God who created physical intimacy because he himself loves physical intimacy.

This in part describes the sacred secular divide: the notion that the things of the 'spirit' are good and the things of the 'flesh' are bad - and we extended this split to stand for the divide between 'church' and 'world'.

But the list of what's good and what's not just isn't that simple because if it's good, it's God's. The feel of sand under your feet, an adrenaline rush from base jumping, the nerves you experience before asking someone on a date for the first time, lying in on Saturday mornings because you don't have to go to work. All good, all God's.

There's not enough space here to really do justice to this issue but for now let's say part of the problem here is that we think the relationship between body and spirit is similar to that of a Dr Who alien. In particular those aliens who are little more than intelligent gas but can possess a body. So we think spirit is a little like that - it's the 'good' part of us that's trapped inside this lump of flesh that enjoys the nasty stuff like eating and kissing. One day we'll be released from this body, the centre of the 'appetites' that lead to temptation and so 'sin', and become a magical vapour that gets joined to the big beautiful ball of gas that is God.

I'm exaggerating again but if that's the case, if we're all going to end up as so much 'spiritual' steam why did God create the physical world in the first place? We've borrowed some of this thinking from the Greeks. Some Greek scholars had the idea that philosophy, spirituality and religion could help us escape the 'soul cage' (great name for a metal band, you can have it if you want) that is the body. And so we've often viewed Heaven as a place of cloud, a place of limited physical activity apart from sitting on your backside playing a harp.

Yet in the Old Testament in Job 41 we read of God wrestling creatures of the deep, a God who loves experiencing his creation, a God who surfs. And in the New Testament we have the resurrected Jesus cooking and eating fish. Our new resurrected bodies will still enjoy the physical, we'll probably still be doing breakfast on the beach in ten billion year's time. And the picture of the future painted in the Bible is one of a new heaven and a new earth: that means bigger and better waterfalls, nebulae, sharks.

So there isn't really a split between 'spirit' and 'flesh' in the way we've traditionally understood it. Embracing whole life discipleship means celebrating all the good that God has created and enjoying it in the way he meant us to enjoy it.

And because God is intimately involved with his creation we can tell the young Christian thinking about music that God's fingerprints are all over music and poetry whether it directly mentions God or not. That God is as interested in the lyrics of Fall Out Boy as he is in the lyrics of Tim Hughes. And that God can be worshipped just as much in the solving of a maths equation or the failure or success of a science experiment as he can by playing bass in the church band. Because, as Colossians reminds us, the mission of Christ was to make peace with all of the cosmos, not just humankind and certainly not just the 'spirit' of humankind but every animal, every plant, mountain, rock, stream and black hole:

'For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile all things to himself, whether things on earth or in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.'

All things: things on earth, things in Heaven, and in that passage from Colossians one Paul keeps repeating 'all things'. God is interested in every element of his created order and every task or creative work humankind undertakes. From alternative rock to politics to sex to Michelin starred menus to parenting and snooker, God wants to 'reconcile' - to make peace - with everything that is.

And that brings us to our systems engineer. It's a well worn cliché to say that we're all in full time Christian work, but this particular IT guru nearly made the mistake of thinking that she could serve God better by being a 'professional' Christian. There are precious few careers in society that cannot be used to glorify God; we honour God by excelling in our tasks and asking him to shape our attitudes that we might be good servants to colleagues in whatever arena of work we find ourselves in be it home, the local coffee shop or the office.

So the question for our discipling of young people is to help them realise that God is passionate about every aspect of our lives: he doesn't just connect with us when we need to sort out our mess or when we're singing his praises. He's with us when we're building our own electric guitars, comforting friends who've been jilted, considering which university to attend. That being so we need to equip our young people to see their lives through a whole life perspective - to play their part in Jesus mission to see God's will done on earth as it is in heaven.

For God always intended us to be his co-workers, he first created us to be stewards to take care of his creation. Now in a fallen world he still invites us to be co-workers to help him with the task of redeeming his creation and not just a part of it but all of it.

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