디사이플 13기 제자입니까 독후감 > 제자학교

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"Disciple: A Handbook for New Believers" challenges fellow Christians to reflect upon and act to change the current state of Christian life, basically to be in tune of how the body of Christ (the church) lived in the time of Acts and the Apostles: to serve instead of being served ("we are God's servants, act like it"), to focus on growth in the metrics of maturity instead of numbers ("go beyond 'milk' as spiritual food", and "growth in numbers is just 'fat'"), to break our man-made traditions within the church ("we don't know what to pray for because we pray with our eyes closed"), and to work in harmony with the other Christians ("denominations are more distracting than helpful at this point"). These are only some of the topics, and he backs all of this with Scripture.

There were many insightful points provided by this book; some memorable topics were on how churches focused only on increasing numbers as well as repeating the same message was "running an orphanage" instead of "raising a family", on what I am assuming to be early (pioneering?) concepts of how "small groups" have become standard in today's church, and various points of how Christians and the church today seem to be upside down in how we live (wanting to be served vs serving, democracy vs theocracy, Christians with more experience staying where they are vs moving out to spread the Gospel, etc.).

The book really gave me a better idea on how the ideal Christian society should operate, in a way providing a practical translation of how the early church in the time of Acts would look like in today's society. It challenged me when the book's description of current Christian (mis-)behavior aligned with how I am currently living my own life, and its visions of where the church should be gave me hope about how we can change in the days to come.

However, I feel like I am coming out of reading this book with more questions than answers. This book was written in the 1970's, but if this wasn't mentioned, I would have thought the book was describing Christian and church behavior today. It's been 50 years since the 1970's. Can things actually change? It feels "appropriate" to end this with a statement such as "I hope our church puts these into practice and become the seed of change in our local region and then the world", but at the moment, such statement feels a bit insincere when faced with reality. I definitely hope for it, but I feel that this book does all the "hoping" already; if we really want it, we need to act. For now, my takeaway is to be more attentive to God's calling through the Holy Spirit so that I may do my part in God's kingdom and His Will.