Interview with Jenny McGill, author of Walk With Me

Meet my friend Jenny McGill (PhD, King’s College London), a pastor’s wife and university dean who loves to explore countries and cultures. She has a new book out that I endorsed—heartily!

Tell us a bit about the book and its intended audience.Written as a series of letters in a conversational tone, Walk with Me: Learning to Love and Follow Jesus is an interactive tool designed to help those in a spiritual mentoring relationship. It summarizes four areas in following Christ: the beliefs of a Christian, living like a Christian, habits of a Christian, and exploring the Bible. As a ministry leader and pastor's wife, I want to encourage and bolster women in their Christian faith, addressing some difficult subjects in a down-to-earth fashion. Walk with Me is a discipleship guide for all believers, no matter how long they have walked with Jesus.

Why a book on discipleship?Sadly, because I see few churches discipling their members in a systematic way. I was discipled through the Navigators and Cru, which are para-church ministries, but I believe it should ideally be emanating from the local church. Also, I wanted to give an overview of what discipleship entails. Many claim faith in Jesus; fewer are discipled. While not comprehensive, my book is a starting guide. Third, I wanted to write a simpler guide that is not too lofty in its descriptions to explain the essentials of our faith and translate it to everyday life.

How would you define discipleship?Discipleship refers a process of how we mature in Christ, how Christ is formed in us—in our thoughts, actions, and lives. Discipleship is a walking together for a period of time, discussing life’s challenges and God’s answers together, with accountability. Discipleship is not church attendance or Bible study or BFFing. Some folks who have gone to church their entire lives have never been discipled. Take me. I went to church for almost twenty years before I was actually discipled.

How did you come to arrange it as a series of letters?I was discipling a young woman, Annie, at the time and was struck with the thought of what would happen if we weren’t able to finish meeting. I decided to write her letters expressing the rest of what I would want her to know. After a year of writing, I realized I had a book and a unique Christmas gift for her.You can connect with Jenny at www.jennymcgill.com and @drjennymcgill 

Is Jesus Really a Friend to Women?

I received this question recently: If Jesus was so "for" women, why in Luke 14:25–27, when addressing the crowd (which obviously had women in it), did he basically exclude them or communicate they were not worth considering or addressing when he said "wife" and not "husband"?Great question. First, let's look at the text in question: Luke 14:25–27:^"Now large crowds were accompanying Jesus, and turning to them he said,  ^'If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not carry his own cross and follow me cannot be my disciple . . . ."The person who wrote the question wonders why Jesus, when speaking of the cost of following him, exhorts husbands to hate wives, but does not tell wives to hate husbands. Why are wives recipients of hatred, but not husbands? Why is it assumed Jesus' disciples will be men, not women?Now, notice the couplets here:father and motherwife and childrenbrothers and sistersJesus could have indeed said "spouse and children." And doing so would have demonstrated a sense of justice where women are concerned. But if he had done so, male/female equality would have become the focus of his emphasis. And the word on which he wanted to place emphasis was the shocker: hate.Allow me to explain:Let's suppose a person concerned with gays being bullied alters lyrics to emphasize God's love for all people by singing this: “Gay and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” Only one word changes, and the one change is the thing that gets emphasized. Point: God loves everybody, including gays.Someone hearing that might say, “What about people from Semitic backgrounds? If the person singing is so big on loving all people, why not also include “tan” for Arabs and Jews? Our answer would be that Jesus does indeed love all people, but the point of the one altering the lyric is not to stop and add all colors of the rainbow. If they sang, "Gay and yellow and tan and black and white, they are precious in his sight..." we would not know if the point of the change was to emphasize treatment of gays or address anti-Semitic sentiments.The one thing changed is the thing that contributes to the precise point being made . The creator sticks to the known words and alters only one thing for emphasis.In Luke's pericope Jesus is speaking of the cost of following him. And to to so, he uses the common Hebrew speech habit of coupling nouns—of pairing things. And most likely he is quoting a poetic coupling created by someone else from a strictly male point of view. His listeners were probably used to hearing, “love father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister,” so Jesus shocks them by saying to hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister in comparison to how much they love him. Doubtless that got their attention, just like it still grabs ours all these centuries later.Elsewhere he does something similar with love/hate, only flipping it the other way:  “You have heard, ‘Hate your enemies…’ (known expression), but I say” (Jesus’ spin on that expression), “‘Love your enemies.””In both sermons, he gets the attention of his listeners, and us by extension, with what he is doing with love and hate. Others hate their enemies and love the people close to them. Followers of Jesus are to love our enemies and hate anyone in comparison to how much we love our Lord.

Success By the Numbers?

Sometimes big numbers mean hollow people.  Kader Attia. Ghost. 2008. Aluminum Foil Collection of Centre Georges Pompidou Musée d’Art National, Paris. Photo: Sandra Glahn

Today I'm happy to welcome Jennifer Callaway, who served as my intern last semester. She now lives in Arizona. My loss. 

Subscribe to any ministry magazine or cultural engagement blog, and you will be inundated with articles that educate, encourage, exhort and admonish you with statistics and studies about why people leave the church, what makes them stay, and what they want in a church. These articles tend to focus on gender, age group, ethnicity or some other marker of a people group. But they all have one goal: bring more people in the door. After all, that is the measure of success, right? Wrong.

I am more and more convinced that our biggest problem in the North American church is head-counting. It's all about bringing in the big numbers; people and dollars. And a church that doesn't attract big numbers is deemed a failure, along with those who lead it.

American business philosophy is running the church. And if the goal is big numbers and big bucks, then it follows that efficiency and marketing to the "right" demographic becomes the strategy for the number-one call and purpose of the church—making disciples of Jesus Christ.

I recently constructed a discipleship strategy based solely on the way Jesus made disciples in the Gospels. His strategy, if you want to call it that, was to call the masses, then challenge them to deeper and deeper levels. If they left, he let them go. And he ended up with 12. Out of that 12 was birthed an even smaller group that went to the deepest level with him. And that small band of people changed the world. It just makes me wonder, how much could a much smaller, but much more committed church accomplish?

What has gone wrong? How have we shifted so dramatically in our focus? Think about it. Deep discipleship is hard. It is inefficient, time consuming, and uncomfortable. It requires focused time with a handful of people rather than a microphone and Power Point presentation. It means getting to know them well enough to not necessarily like them very much. In short, it means denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following. Every day of our lives.

How did Jesus measure success? Faithfulness, self-denial, sacrifice, and service. This paints a radically different picture than a parking lot full of cars, a rock-concert atmosphere, and a Disneyland approach that has something for everybody.

I think ministry leaders would benefit greatly from a reconstruction of their views about success.