An Article from Reality Magazine

Steve passed the two pages of the job description across the desk to his very first employee, a Christian. "Here they are" he said, "the two pages we spoke about. The first page describes the job and the second listing the characteristics of Christian faith and witness I am looking for. Remember the next person we employ will not be a believer and I want that person to know what a Christian worker is like -  through you. I want him or her to know what a Christian boss is like through me. They will be with us and watching us for 40 hours each week, I want them to see Jesus"

 

Steve had understood something very important about the proclamation of the gospel. It was a disciple making process and discipling started before salvation and would continue after any ‘moment of conversion.'  As Steve's business grew in the years that followed that first employing moment he never again employed a believer, rather he deliberately sought out non believers so that they might journey together with the believer(s) already on his payroll. Today after some years in business Steve has in excess of thirty employees all of whom have come into a knowledge of Christ through this very process.

Steve has actually tapped into a very real opportunity that we have under estimated in our desire to go into 'all the world', namely workplace discipleship. Robert Fraser in his book Marketplace Christianity ¹ links the concepts of discipleship to the more common marketplace language of mentoring.

"Mentoring and discipleship are a core mission for believers and for business. The best businesses recognize the importance of mentoring and devote significant internal resources to it. They usually call it "management" or "training." But church based discipleship programs, while helpful, are inherently limited. They can't effectively improve a person's life skills because there is not enough real life contact to encourage lasting change. Similarly, they can't effectively address character issues like self centeredness, dishonesty, irresponsibility, anger and laziness because these issues rarely surface in a church setting. But in business, these negative issues surface as a matter of course. Identifying them and developing remediation plans and accountability is standard management practice. Businesses, then, plays a unique supplementary role in people's spiritual health and character development." 

Fraser points out the opportunities of having young Christians working alongside older Christians for forty or more hours per week and contrasts this with the limited time a church environment offers. Today there are three areas of life that provide this ideal extended context for discipleship in the form of extended hours in hopefully Christian company, namely family, school and work. The family is probably more influential in the younger years of life, the school context and peers in the teenage years. Work provides an ‘adult life long' opportunity to disciple others.

Jesus discipled others by spending consistent time with them. His call to discipleship was not one of making a weekly appointment and looking at a study booklet together. It was in fact an invitation to walk together through a significant period of life. 

I have discovered I can be good in church. Church meetings do not in fact provide a lot of opportunity to not be good. Five days a week and eight hours per day, sharing exertion, sharing stressful times, sharing sorrows and joys reveals true character. Fraser does also point out that mentoring and discipleship do more than address negative issues. They "create opportunities, internships and apprenticeships, and they model success. This is stock in trade for businesses but is virtually impossible for a church to do except in the ministry arena. Ultimately, mentoring and discipleship are about helping members of the next generation find their individual callings."

The opportunities for those who hold authority and influence in a work context are clear. The Christian business owner, manager or even a team leader has much to offer those they already lead.  This role can be quite overt and understood between Christians and there are good reasons why Christians in such positions of influence should intentionally make this investment in God's purposes by discipling and mentoring younger Christians. Discipleship becomes a combination of modeling Christian living, explaining yourself and quietly influencing the thinking and behaviour of others and even of direct instruction and guidance. 

This discipleship relationship may never be formalized, we will probably not say to a colleague - ‘come follow me'. However as people we are instinctive in our modeling.  Colleagues do copy each other and they do model themselves on people whom they respect. It is commonly observed in the modern workplace that people acquire the values and behaviour patterns of both the places they work at and the people they work with. Here lies the possibility for effective discipleship with non believers. A Christian living a life that reveals in word and deed the presence of God should be a person of some curiosity, of some intrigue because they are a bit different. Like Jesus was.

It is an unhelpful feature of our faith that we have significantly separated evangelism from discipleship. In our modern paradigm discipleship is often seen as starting at conversion and tends to take the form of acquiring a set of propositional truths in the seven or eight weeks that follow. In the life of Jesus he called twelve men ‘disciples' nearly three years before they were converts. Discipling was also the evangelistic process. 

It is interesting to consider when the apostle Peter became a Christian. Was it when he knew his sinfulness in the presence of Jesus (Luke 5:8)? Matthew Chapter 16 tells us that it was not for some two and a half years after he began to follow Jesus as a disciple that he finally realized that Jesus was the Son of God and then it was by revelation from the Father rather than by Jesus own words. Was it when he saw the resurrected Jesus or at Pentecost. Which ever way we take such a discussion it is clear that Peter was an ‘unbelieving' disciple when he was first called a disciple. Jesus sent him on mission trips, he healed people in Jesus name, cast out demons preached and walked on water. In John 14 we see Philip sharing this same lack of knowledge. Thomas the doubter was still not there at the end of three years. We find in the life of Jesus a model for discipleship remarkably suited to our post modern world. A sharing of the journey, a high level of experiencing the life as part of that journey, a low emphasis on propositional truth without a ‘spirit initiated revelation' to give in language and truth, and a truth content that is allowed to become self evident.

The workplace provides all of this context. The opportunity of a Christian in leadership whether senior or junior, to develop a learning, developing, growing and maturing environment for younger Christians is a priceless opportunity to invest in God's kingdom. The freedom to work alongside a younger believer and reveal the faith in everyday life and see them grow as our disciples and with John the Baptist point them to Jesus is a calling. The opportunity to be with non believers and begin to disciple them before they even know His (Jesus) name is not to be missed. 

Peter, a business owner speaks of the joy he finds in matching young Christians on the building site with older more mature Christians and allowing ‘transfe'r to take place as they work and spend time together.

Foster writes "Often I would hire a young, directionless person into an entry level position. Once they were working, I could evaluate their gifting and callings and ultimately find a position that suited them perfectly. Even if I could not offer them a better position, I could give them a very clear sense of who they were and what I perceived God had placed in them. When I did have a position to offer them appropriate to their heart desires and gifting, I had the extreme pleasure of watching them discover their calling and begin to soar. That's the power of mentoring and discipleship in the marketplace." (p25) 

We learned who God was and is through the everyday lives of men and women as recorded in the scriptures. God was identified and revealed not in classrooms but in real life settings. Who God is continues to be clarified to us by historic and modern stories of men and women living out those eternal truths in real life and understanding them in the context of their lives. We too have that opportunity to live it and pass it on as we live and work amongst others. 

2 Robert Fraser Marketplace Christianity (New Grid Books 2004) Pg 24-25

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