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What is discipleship and pastoral care in the light of who Jesus is?

Where else would we begin in our discussion besides the Trinity? The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the basis and context of all reality. It is not just ministry that has its basis and context in the Trinity. Everyone and everything exists in the Son (Acts 17:28) and therefore all existence begins with the Triune life of God. There is no other starting point for correctly understanding ourselves and the world around us.

The Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit take care of each other. It is foundational to relationship that the persons involved in relationship should support, care for, and help each other. The persons of the Trinity do not face the kind of struggles that we do – struggles with sinfulness and fallen nature. Nor do they struggle to find unity and peace in their relationship. Since there is only one God, the persons of God are of one substance and find perfect union in their life together. This means that the Triune life of mutual care is perfectly expressed. They are fully united in their plans and in their vision for what they want to do.

The Son has included humanity in this perfect life of relational support and mutual caring by permanently taking up residence in our human nature as the human being Jesus. However, we often fail to experience the fullness of this life in which we have been included. Our sin, our fallenness, hinders our ability to care for each other in a way that mirrors the kind of perfect and complete care that the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit show each other.

This gap between the reality of the Triune life in which Jesus has included us, and the experience of our own lives, is the reason for the ministries we call discipleship and pastoral care. In discipleship we are learning to live as children who are loved by the Father. We do not come into this world knowing how to participate in the life of the Trinity as children of the Father. We do not know that we are the beloved children of the Father, just as babies born to human parents do not know – when they are first born – who they are within their families. Like infants growing up in a family, we must learn who we are and how to participate in the life of the Father’s family. This process of learning who we are in the Trinity is discipleship.

Learning whose we are, and how to be who we are, does not make us who we are – it is just catching on to what Christ has already made us. We are who we are (children of the Father) because Jesus has made us children of the Father. All we are doing in discipleship is learning to live authentically in harmony with our true identity as children of the Father. Family life reflects this truth. Babies do not become children of their Moms and Dads when they believe they are children and start to behave accordingly. First they are born as children, and then they later come to believe this truth about themselves and act like what they are – beloved children of their parents. We do not become children by believing that we are children.

So, the proper order of thinking about discipleship is belong, believe, behave. Because of the Son’s adoption of human nature into the Trinity, through his incarnation as the man Jesus, all humanity belongs to the Father as his children in Jesus. This is the gospel declaration of the good news of Jesus Christ to humanity: “You belong! You are included! You have been adopted!”

Discipleship is that process by which people incorporate this truth about themselves and learn to believe this truth and then actualize it by acting like the kind of children they were created to be. In the Great Commission, Jesus does not tell the disciples to “go save people” or “go get people adopted as children of the Father.” Jesus has already done that by his birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Rather, Jesus tells the disciples to “make disciples” (i.e., do discipleship) by baptizing people into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and then by teaching them to obey everything Jesus has commanded.

In a moment we will look more closely at how we practice these two dimensions of discipleship. For now, we simply want to see that discipleship, in the light of who Jesus is, has to be seen as helping others discover and live within the identity that is already theirs in Jesus. There is a gap between who we really are and what we believe and how we act. This gap is widened and worsened by our fallenness in Adam. This is where pastoral care enters the picture.

Pastoral care addresses our need to believe and behave like the children that we really are even in the midst of the consequences of sin. For example, we get sick and die because of the fall. This is a traumatic process that strains our faith. Through pastoral care, ministers of Jesus enter into such a situation and help people continue to believe in their adoption in Jesus – and help them continue to live like children of the Father – even in the midst of such a heavy strain on their faith.

Pastoral care also addresses those times in life when a person’s own sin is the cause of their suffering. Illness and death come to us all because of humanity’s generally fallen nature, but other suffering – like marriage problems, abusive relationships, and addictions, just to name a few – are the result of specific sins by specific individuals in specific contexts. Sometimes we are victims of others’ sins; sometimes our injuries are self-inflicted. Often, there is a mixture of both. Pastoral care is the act of ministry by which ministers of Jesus enter into these sinful situations and help others learn to believe and behave more like the children of the Father that they really are.

This is why we are addressing discipleship and pastoral care together in one chapter. Both ministries involve helping people believe they are children of the Father in Jesus and helping them to put into action their identity as children of the Father. Discipleship addresses these issues in the more general sense of what people believe about who God is, who we are as human beings, and what life is all about. Pastoral care addresses these issues in more specific contexts of the actual suffering brought about by false belief and wrong behavior. Both ministries address themselves to helping people believe more truthfully and behave more authentically within their identity as children of the Father.

The two ministries interact with each other and cannot be separated. In the process of discipling people (assuring them of their true identity within the Trinity and teaching them to obey Jesus), you have to deal with pastoral care issues such as their marriages, their relationships with friends, and the addictions they are struggling with. As soon as you begin to deliver pastoral care to people, you come up against their beliefs about God and their questions about who Jesus is, what he commands us to do, and how we do it. Discipleship and pastoral care are two blades of the same pair of scissors. As we disciple people, we are caring for them pastorally, and as we care for people pastorally, we are discipling them. Both ministries, done in partnership with each other, help people grow out of spiritual infancy as they begin to be transformed by the truth that they are children of the Father in Jesus, and they begin to behave accordingly.

Here is a Christ-centered, Trinitarian definition of discipleship and pastoral care:

Discipleship is how we participate in this ministry by helping people learn the truth about the Trinity and humanity. Pastoral care is how we participate in this ministry by helping people to learn the truth about the Trinity and humanity in the midst of the consequences of our human sinfulness.

How do we practice the ministries of discipleship and pastoral care?

To begin thinking about how we practice these ministries, we want to return to what we said earlier about belonging, believing, and behaving. These three words can appear in different orders depending on our theology, and the order has a profound impact on how we practice discipleship and pastoral care.

For example: in popular American theology these words are often ordered as “believe, behave, belong.” Ministers say to people “if you believe in Jesus then you will belong to him, and if you behave, you can belong to our church.” In this theology, it is not Jesus that makes us children of the Father – it is our own belief. Belief is the work by which we get ourselves adopted and save ourselves. Jesus is not our adoption and he is not the Savior. In this theology Jesus is the one who creates the potential for adoption and the potential for salvation, but it is human decision that causes adoption and salvation to take place. Salvation is not by grace. Rather, it is the potential of salvation that is by grace, while the actualization of salvation is by the human work of belief. This has a profound impact on how discipleship and pastoral care often take place.

Discipleship, in some churches, becomes synonymous with “getting people saved.” Since Jesus has created only the potential for adoption, and not actually adopted humanity into the Trinity, the first and most important act of discipleship is to get people to believe so they will then belong to the Father. Since it is human work that causes us to become children of the Father, discipleship after the “moment of decision” also focuses on human work. If you made yourself into a child of the Father, then it follows that you can un-make yourself. Therefore, discipleship is primarily about teaching people all the rules they need to follow – all the ways they need to behave – in order to continue belonging to the Father and not lose their adoption as his children.

In a similar way, pastoral care in this theology becomes primarily about “getting people saved.” The first question ministers ask themselves when visiting a sick or dying person, or counseling an addict, is the question “is this person saved?” Since this theology says that people get themselves adopted and saved, it follows that if they have not taken care of this important first task, then any pastoral care or counseling will be useless. Why talk to a dying man about how Jesus is sharing his resurrected life with him (1 Cor. 15:22) if you do not believe that the dying man has a share in Jesus’ resurrection? It would be like fixing a broken window when the whole house is burning down.

When the order of discipleship is “believe, behave, belong,” discipleship and pastoral care become, to a large extent, about salesmanship. The ministers are constantly trying to sell Jesus as the product that will fix people’s problems. They are constantly trying to close the sale by getting people to say a certain prayer or behave in a certain way.

What Jesus told us to do in the Great Commission is in contrast to the kind of discipleship and pastoral care that we have been describing. Jesus says that making disciples is about two actions: baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey Jesus. The order of what Jesus says in Matthew 28:18-20 is significant.

First, Jesus says in verse 18 that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. This is more than Jesus just saying, “I’m omnipotent!” This is a statement of Jesus’ identity as the Cosmic Christ, the one who holds all things together (Col. 1:17), the one who has reconciled all things in heaven and on earth to the Father (Col. 1:20), the one who has filled the universe with his presence (Eph. 4:10) and the one who has reversed Adam’s fall, and has thereby created one, new, righteous humanity in himself – a new humanity that will live forever in his resurrection (Rom. 5:18; Eph. 2:15; 1 Cor. 15:22).

Since Jesus, as the one with all authority, has reconciled humanity to the Father, we can interpret Matthew 28:18 as Jesus’ declaration to humanity, “you belong!” When Jesus says “Therefore, make disciples” (v. 19), he is implying that the making of disciples is the natural and logical outflow of the truth that all humanity belongs to the Father in Jesus. Because all nations have been adopted into the life of the Trinity, we are called to join Jesus in his ministry to make all nations into disciples.

What is a disciple? Jesus defines a disciple in verses 19 and 20. A disciple is someone who has been baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and who is seeking to obey Jesus. When the person agrees to be baptized, the person is admitting that Jesus has made a thorough re-orientation of what life is for. Disciples believe that Jesus has already made them children of the Father, through the Spirit, and are learning the fullness of what that means for their own lives.

Discipleship is not the process of helping people come to belong to the Father. Humanity already belongs to the Father, because all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus, who is also the second person of the Trinity. Discipleship is the process of helping people incorporate this truth into their own lives, and helping them learn to become people who live in congruence with this truth about themselves.

This is why the first task in practicing discipleship is baptism – physically and spiritually. Discipleship begins even before the person becomes a believer – discipleship involves teaching the people who God is, who the people are, and how they fit into God’s family. The gospel is the first step in discipleship. We want to teach people who they already are in Jesus. As we said in the chapter about baptism, our job is not to fix people. Our job is to bathe people in the love and acceptance the Father has given to them in Jesus, through his Spirit. When we have participated with Jesus, in step with his Spirit, in doing this first act of discipleship – through preaching and evangelism – then people will be ready to participate in the physical act of being baptized in water as an outward sign of the invisible reality.

The second task of discipleship – after immersing people in the truth of God’s love for them – is to help others learn to obey Jesus and thus become people who live like the children of the Father that they really are. This is often done before people believe, as well – any time we teach in our churches or in public, there may be unbelievers present. Indeed, some of them may not believe until they see the congruence between grace and obedience, that Christianity does have an inner coherence. This belief does not come through clever preaching or the wisdom of the listeners – it comes through the Holy Spirit, who leads people to belief.

You can see this process in 1 Corinthians. Paul tells the people at Corinth that they are holy in Christ and have been given grace in him (1 Cor. 1:24). This is the message he preached to them when he first met them (v. 6). The Corinthians belong to Christ – not because of what they have done but because of who Christ is. First they belong. Then, Paul says, they believed this truth about themselves and were baptized into it – even though they are still struggling to understand what it really means to be baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (vv. 13-15).

Because of who Jesus is, they belong, and they have come to believe it, and now it is time for them to be disciples and learn to obey Jesus. That is what the rest of the letter to the Corinthians is about. We see Paul engaging in discipleship by helping the Corinthians learn how to act like the children of the Father that Christ has made them to be. Or as some have phrased it, they need to become what they already are.

Corinthians is an indictment of any theology that says that our behavior determines whether we belong to the Father as his children. Paul says that the people in Corinth are in Christ. He also says that they are drunks, vain, back-stabbing fornicators – and that’s just the first few chapters.

Discipleship is not about behaving correctly so that we can then believe that we belong. It is not even about believing correctly so that we can then belong and behave. Discipleship is about the fact that we do belong and we are now learning to believe that truth and behave accordingly. What we are doing in the ministry of discipleship is participating with Jesus in his ministry to teach others who they are, so their lives will become congruent with their past (created in God’s image) and their future (in eternal fellowship with the Trinity).

The consequences of sin – like fear or broken relationships – flow out of our lives because there are still aspects of our fallen personhood that have not been transformed by the assurance of our identity in Jesus. Pastoral care is about helping  people be more assured of it.

Take the example of a person who is dying and knows it. The person may have lived all of life as a disciple, confident in being a child of God, but this person has never died before. This is something new, and it is often an occasion for the person to be strengthened in the truth of being in Jesus, and also an opportunity for obedience. What will Jesus be doing in this person’s life at this time? Through his Spirit he will be assuring the person: “You are a loved child of the Father and I have given you a share in my resurrection and eternal life.” Jesus will be teaching the disciple how to obey him even to the death.

If we are to join in Jesus’ ministry, we must be in step with the assuring work that the Holy Spirit is doing in the soul as people die. We must speak words of assurance that help them see death in the context of the life and resurrection of the Trinity. We must join with Jesus in helping them trust Jesus so they can face death as something that will ultimately be for their good and thus as something in which they can obey Jesus by not fighting his decision to allow them to die.

Another example: a married couple whose relationship is in trouble. As you talk with them over the course of time, you will to see how each person is contributing some broken sinfulness to the problem. Where does our brokenness come from? It comes from 1) a desire for autonomy, to be a law unto ourselves, and it goes hand in hand with 2) a desire to hide from God, to fear his punishment, to see him as working for our hurt rather than for our good (the sequence we see in Genesis 3).

It involves our failure to believe the truth about our Father, and thus we lack assurance in our life as his beloved children. We sin because we do not believe the Father is good and that what he tells us to do is for our good, so we take matters into our own hands. As we share with the married couple, together as a couple and as individuals, the truth of who God is for them, we are helping them grow in their confidence in the Father’s goodness, and in their willingness to obey Jesus by caring for each other in the ways that Jesus commands married people to care for each other.

How do we feed Jesus’ sheep in body, mind, and soul through discipleship and pastoral care?

Body: This process of being assured of who we are in the Trinity, and learning to obey Jesus, has a lot to do with how we use our bodies. Paul talks extensively about how we use our bodies in 1 Corinthians as he disciples them in how to behave as the children of the Father that they are.

This means that we have to join Jesus in helping people learn to control such aspects of their bodily life as how they use their tongues, how much they eat and drink, and how they express their sexuality. The constant temptation that assails us as ministers is to try to control others instead of joining with Jesus in helping them learn to control themselves. How does Jesus help human beings learn to control the use of their bodies? By pouring out his Spirit upon them (Acts 2:17) and working through the Spirit to help them learn to keep in step with the Spirit by following his direction in how they use their bodies (Rom. 8:9-17).

Jesus does not control people. He adopts us into the life he shares with the Father, gives us the Holy Spirit, and then helps us learn to live in sync and in rhythm with the lifestyle of God’s Triune nature. The life of the Trinity is not a life of lying, drunkenness, rage, bitterness, or sexual immorality. All these actions flow out of our fallen human nature’s inability to keep in step with the Spirit. The reason such uses of our body are a sin is not just because there is a written rule against such things, but because such uses of our bodies are contrary to the flow and existence of the Triune life in which we live through Jesus.

Take sexual immorality as an example. Why is it wrong for a couple to have sex without being married? Sometimes it causes hurt – unwanted children or disease – but just as often sexual immorality seems to hurt no one.[1] Causing obvious harm is not the only criterion for what makes something a sin. In the case of sex outside of marriage, a lie is being told, and it impacts our souls whether we know it or not. Sex was designed for marriage, which is a reflection of our relationship with Jesus in the Trinity. Any misuse of sex will then affect our relationship with Jesus as well.

The divine Persons live in a union in which they mutually indwell each others’ existence. The Son is not just “with” the Father, he is “in” the Father. In his book On the Trinity, St. Augustine compares the three to a Lover (the Father) his Beloved (the Son) and the mutual love they share (the Holy Spirit).[2] This mutual indwelling, called perichoresis, is reflected in human existence by the bodily act of sex when two persons become one flesh in a way that echoes the three divine Persons existing as one God by indwelling each other.

Since the mutual indwelling of the Triune Persons involves perfect covenant faithfulness, there will never be a time when one or more of the divine Persons finds another “god” with whom to be in perichoretic faithfulness. The Father and Son, in the Spirit, will forever be faithful to each other as one God. When we practice sex in ways that reflect a lack of permanent commitment in the faithful covenant of marriage (premarital or extramarital), we are expressing a lie with our bodies. Such a use of sexuality fails to accurately echo the perichoresis of the Trinity in whom we live. We are out of step with the life of the Spirit. The act of sex outside of marriage is sinful because it is our body telling our soul that there is such a thing as healthy intimacy without commitment – and that is a lie. That lie damages our souls and hinders our ability to trust the Father.

To illustrate, we might imagine a dialogue something like this:

Body: “Soul, I am having sex with a person I’m not married to. Later I will find another person to have sex with. It feels good.”

Soul: “If it is possible to feel good while in perichoresis without commitment, then the Father must be lying to me in what the Holy Spirit is saying. The Spirit tells me that healthy perichoresis exists only in the permanent commitment of the Father and the Son to each other in the Spirit. If perichoresis can exist without commitment, then I may live in the Son now, but he might eventually abandon me to find another he likes better. Therefore, the Father, Son, and Spirit cannot be trusted.”

Body: “Soul, why do you always have to be such a wet blanket?”

Rather than simply saying to people, “This is what God commands, obey him or face the consequences,” we need to join with Jesus in the ways he is working in people’s lives to help them see how behavior is connected with God’s purpose in our lives, to draw us into a life that is enjoyable forever. The Holy Spirit assures them in their souls that Jesus is faithfully committed to them. Therefore, we also encourage them to believe that Jesus is faithful in how he uses his body, and he will share that faithfulness with them to empower them to use their bodies in the way their bodies were created to be used.

Mind: Ministries such as Communion and baptism primarily impact the body, but discipleship and pastoral care primarily impact the mind. Our bodies have the potential to be in step with the Spirit’s witness to our souls. In the midst of this comes our mind, creating static and thwarting the proper bodily expression of the truth implanted in our souls by the Spirit.

If we were to imagine our minds participating in the dialogue above between body and soul, we might imagine the mind throwing in comments such as, “everybody’s doing it and it seems to be OK for them” or “why would God care who I sleep with?” or “nobody loves me, anyway, I might as well enjoy whatever fun I can get out of life.” These thoughts illustrate wrong thinking about who we are, who our Father in heaven is, and what we were created for. Erroneous thoughts (lies) are major obstacles to our becoming mature disciples and receiving the pastoral care of Jesus.

In discipleship and pastoral care, we participate with Jesus by finding out what people are thinking, confirming their right thoughts, and challenging their wrong thoughts.

We need to begin by finding out what people are thinking. This takes us back to the listening ministry we talked about in chapter 2. In order to disciple others and care for them pastorally, we must learn to listen to what they are saying and to listen to what Jesus is telling us about them through his Spirit. As you are listening to a person talk, keep your mind open also in an attitude of prayerful receptiveness to see if the Spirit would draw your attention to any particular statement or thought the other person expresses. When we listen to others both to understand them and to hear what Jesus is sharing with us about them, we have the best chance of really hearing and understanding what is going on in their heads.

If we listen long enough to the other person and to Jesus, we will hear some correct thinking come out. Every sane human being participates in Jesus’ life to some extent. Even if all the person does is love a pet lizard, that love is an expression of the life of the Spirit. Purves tells us that we should try to be “midwives of the positive.”[3] We never want to miss an opportunity to affirm and encourage optimistic, hopeful, or loving thinking on the part of others. That sort of thinking comes from the Spirit and is a sharing in the mind of Christ. It is easy for us as ministers to become fixated on what is wrong with others, and fail to see the ways that Jesus is sharing his “rightness” with them.

Once we have listened, heard and understood, and affirmed whatever is right and good in the other person’s thinking, we have to confront wrong thinking. This is a delicate task in which we must ask the Spirit to give us special access to his wisdom. Too much correction of another person’s thinking can crush, discourage, or even anger the person. But if we do not ever try to correct wrong thoughts, the person may believe lies about the Father for years to come.

The “debt of love” (Rom. 13:8) compels us to join Jesus in pointing out to others when they are thinking in false images about who the Father is. When you come to care for sick people and they say, “God doesn’t care about my pain,” then you are faced with a lie that must be countered by good news.

How can we use the good news to counter that lie? That is a matter of circumstance, context, and the nature of your relationship with the people involved. The better you know them, the more they trust you, the more direct you can be. The more mature they are as disciples, the more you can appeal to their knowledge of who Jesus is, and the more you can use Scripture to affirm what you are saying. The less well you know them, or the less mature they are, the more you will have to express yourself in ways that suggest to them, or encourage them to admit, that there might be another aspect to life other than what they are thinking about in their time of pain.

Soul: To feed the souls of Jesus’ sheep through discipleship and pastoral care is to join the Spirit in nurturing the heart and core of human existence.

We might consider the analogy of an apple orchard. Apple trees need the right conditions to be healthy and bear fruit. They need the right nutrients in the soil, the right amount of sun and rain, and even the right amount of cold weather – not too much or too little – during the winter months. The farmer who nurtures the trees and ensures, as much as possible, that they receive what they need to thrive will find that the trees produce good fruit. But patience is required. It can take 3-7 years, depending on the variety, from the time that trees are planted as saplings until the time they come to maturity in fruit bearing. Standing in an orchard yelling at trees to make them feel guilty and thus produce fruit has been found to be less effective than nurturing them and being patient.

Likewise, in discipleship, the right nurturing conditions are of paramount importance in bringing disciples to maturity so they can bear fruit – the fruit of the Spirit and the fruit of multiplying new disciples like themselves. As leaders in the church, we can easily grow frustrated and think that the people we are discipling would be producing more fruit in their lives (however we define fruit) if they would simply work harder, apply themselves more consistently, or simply do what we have told them to do. But the fact is, that if we see disciples who do not have fruitful lives, it is because they have not been nurtured in the life of the Trinity.

We need to water disciples with the cleansing life of the Holy Spirit. Encourage them to sink their roots deep into the soil of who they are in Jesus. Shed the light of the love of the Father into their lives so they can soak up the truth of how much they are loved. Keep nurturing their souls in the Trinity, year after year, and you will see a harvest in due season, when the time is right.

Pastoral care requires that we join Jesus in nurturing people’s souls and being patient. Every human being on the planet has been damaged by dysfunctional relationships. We have all been emotionally and spiritually abused to some extent. We are all in need of healing from Jesus in our souls, and our differing dysfunctions make us grow at different speeds in different areas of our lives, all different to what other disciples experience.

Healing never works exactly the same way twice. No two people respond exactly the same way to the same medicine or the same procedure. Medical science operates on averages. Statistically speaking, if more people get better from taking a medicine than from not taking it, then the medicine is regarded as effective. Some people take it and never get better. Some people take it and have side effects that are worse than the disease. You never know exactly how it is going to go.

So it is with joining Jesus in the healing of souls. We see it symbolized in the physical healings he performs in the Gospels. Sometimes he asks if the person wants to be made well, and sometimes he does not. Sometimes a person is healed instantly, another time a man’s blindness goes away in stages. One time he did not do many miracles in a place because the people there had so little belief (Matt. 13:58). At other times he performed miracles despite the person’s lack of faith.

Jesus does not control people, and he does not call us to do so. Jesus nurtures people in the truth of who they are in him, and he gives them the freedom to be themselves, to believe, to grow, and to heal, as they are ready and willing to cooperate with the Spirit’s work in their lives to produce this fruit. It is this ministry of patient nurturing in which we are participants. As Jesus shares his ministry with us, we learn to never give up on the healing of people’s souls. We learn to not set timetables or try to control the work of the Spirit.