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Whole of life discipleship

Posted: Mar 22, 2010 by Matt Newboult

When we started talking about Christ Church Derby one of the ideas that kept coming up was the idea that Christ is Lord of everything. As Jonty mentioned in the video for Christ Church, Abraham Kuyper famously said: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’” The thought that Christ is Lord of everything was what motivated our slogan “Church for people who don’t go to church.” It has a double meaning. For non-Christians we hope and pray that Christ Church will be a place to discover the gospel message but at the same time we also hope that for Christians Christ Church won’t just be about going to church but will be about being the church. Church isn’t a building, although we’re very aware that we need to borrow one of those at the moment! Neither is church a meeting, although there is something biblically significant about gathering together as believers regularly. Church is primarily our identity. And that identity should effect everything about us and change us at the deepest part of our beings. Our work lives, our marriages, our friendships are all for the glory of God. Everything belongs to Jesus.

The question is how? It sounds right to say that Jesus is Lord of everything, but what does that really mean? What does that look like? The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity was founded by John Stott and others “with the core belief that every part of our lives comes under the Lordship of Christ, and that all of life is a context for worship, mission, ministry and active Christian engagement.” I think the LICC do a great job at showing what Jesus being Lord of everything really means.

While surfing around the web, I found this great little pdf article that explains what they do and how they encourage what they call Whole-life Discipleship. The article explains what they mean by that and explains something of their passion, like Kuyper, for Christ’s Lordship over every area of our lives.

“We adopt a perspective which looks at the whole Bible. A theology and practice of whole-life discipleship not only needs to understand that the Bible makes sense of the whole of life, but needs to be based on the whole Bible. The Bible has lots of little details and small parts, but it has an identity given to it as a whole. It paints a big picture, and when we don’t read Scripture with the big picture in mind, we risk seeing the Bible as a series of unconnected fragments with no coherence. We are taught to read a text in the light of its literary context, but in this case we extend that context to Scripture as a whole, and so see how the whole Bible hangs together. So, this is the second suggestion: if we’re to have a worldview informed by Scripture, it needs to be informed by all of Scripture… a Christian worldview needs to be formed and informed by the ‘big story’ of Scripture. … So, to take an example, when it comes to marriage, husbands and wives need to recognise that the way they love each other should be shaped by the way the biblical story line portrays that commitment: from the creation of man and woman through the relationship between God and his people, and between Christ and his church, to the consummation with the marriage of the lamb and his bride.”