Beyond the need/fulfillment-of-need trajectory

People with many needs came to Jesus to have the needs taken care of, but that does not summarize the life of discipleship. The relationship of the disciples to Jesus seems not to have been primarily characterized by this need/fulfillment-of-need trajectory. If we ask the question, what lays beyond that trajectory, then we stand with Jesus and the disciples as disciples. That is, as students of Jesus, learning and following.

It's my opinion that church leaders are far more likely to build their congregations by molding the church experience in terms of the need/fulfillment-of-need trajectory. And, furthermore, that it is the inclination of people (perhaps I should say "of the flesh") to remain, if they can, in that relational trajectory. In church life that will look like this: I get a need fulfilled, praise God, testify to the congregation that God is the great need-fulfiller, and then join the rest in pressing in all the more to have still more needs fulfilled. When this happens, it is considered "doing church" successfully.

This model is reflected in our prayer-life as well. It is, I believe, entrenched. And I am not here to say that the church instead ought to completely ignore people's needs, or to suggest that God is not in the business of healing and providing for his children in all sorts of ways. But I am saying that this is not the extent of his call upon those whom He has chosen.

And we all know that. It's one of the tenets of our mental "statement of faith." And yet, on the ground, we have built a church that has trouble bringing people beyond the need-trajectory to the walk of discipleship.

I consider it a pressing problem in the church, and I have been reading the New Testament this year with a particular eye toward understanding what Jesus meant when he said, "Follow me." Embodied in that command, "Follow me," is a vast array of implications for the church, but these implications are played out in the hearts and lives of individual believers.

What I mean by that is, at some level this is a very personal matter. If, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, the call of Jesus Christ is always a call to come and die, well, that dying is not something the church can build a program around. At the literal end of the day, just before bed, can I say with complete honesty before my God, "It was not I who lived today, but it was Christ who lived in me, and the life that I lived today in the flesh I lived through him who loved me and gave himself for me."

The answer to that question, my answer anyway, is no. It was no yesterday, and I suppose it will be no today. When we come to this point, the call of Jesus begins not so much to comfort us with a promise of healing and health (or whatever), as to haunt us with a sense that we have not truly been his "followers" in the New Testament sense of that word. To put it another way: we have not loved Him with our whole heart, nor our neighbors as ourselves.

That feeling is not the end of the story, but perhaps not a bad place to begin. It's the place where Jesus began, after all, when he first sat down with his disciples to teach them how to be his followers. That's when he said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."