Category Archives: Ministry

According to the Cambridge Dictionary an apprentice is “someone who has agreed to work for a skilled person for a particular period of time in order to learn that person’s skills”. Merriam Webster adds, that an apprenticeship is “an arrangement in which someone learns an art, trade, or job under another”.

Skilled trades often come to mind when I think about someone who is an apprentice or serving an apprenticeship – trades like carpenters, plumbers and electricians. But what if we were to think of our life in Christ, our life of discipleship in the terms of apprenticeship? Could such an understanding bring a freshness or new energy and eagerness to how one endeavors to follow Jesus?

I’m not sure that “disciple” or “discipleship” are completely overused or worn out terms, or that they carry the negative connotation for some Christ followers, and pre-Christians as say the word “evangelism”. But, both words are oft used in the church and Christ following circles. How many times in a sermon have you heard the word “disciple” used? Or, how many times is “discipleship” a topic of a prayer or a devotional writing you may participate in? (Maybe you should count?) Sometimes a new or different word causes us to pay attention in a new or fresh way. Thinking about being an apprentice of Jesus has done this for me.

What works in this understanding is that following Jesus has always been about a way of life. When Jesus was first approached by a couple of the disciples of John, curious about this one John had identified as the “Lamb of God”, Jesus invites them to “come and see” where he is staying? It’s a way of saying, come and try this out, follow me, learn from me. Certainly there must have been information and teaching shared, the didactic part of discipleship, but that’s not what is most obvious about their following Jesus. What’s most obvious is that they spent time with him, literally shared life with him, watched and learned from him, maybe even began to imitate the things he said and did. They became his apprentices.

Somewhere in its history the church turned discipleship away from this “way of life” approach toward more and more of a cognitive, what we believe, approach. Doctrine overtook praxis as the definitive marker of discipleship. We worried more about what we thought, than how we acted. We heard Jesus say, “love one another as I have loved you”, but turned that into a doctrine of loving your neighbor verses a way of life steeped in the practice of loving those who are our neighbor.