Written by Bruce A. Little |
Saturday, September 28, 2024
Like many young people I did not make the most of what was offered, but that was my fault. At that that time, nobody told me I should be ashamed of my whiteness or if I wanted to become a girl I could. We believed good and evil were objective categories. No one suggested that I deserved anything I had not worked for—well except for my birthday and Christmas, which were such special times. I was not told that my country was evil, and I learned that my happiness was not the first virtue in life.

The memories of my childhood in Nobleboro, Maine (mid coast) are a source of immeasurable delight. Life was not perfect, but it was good. My parents were part of what Tom Brokaw celebrated as “The Greatest Generation.” After World War II (my father fought in the Pacific), my parents settled in “the valley” when I was three years old and eventually started a small dairy farm where we worked alongside adults in the fields and in the barn. That provided the context for the next 15 years of my life. It was a wonderful life which I shared with my brother, who was three years my elder (a hero in the Vietnam war). When we were working on the farm, we spent hours playing outside using our imagination to make up worlds that allowed us to pretend to be adults. Spring and early summer evenings would find us playing baseball with neighborhood children until it was so dark you couldn’t see the ball. In the winter, wonderful hours were spent with the same children sliding down Reed hill where road conditions (early on it was a dirt road) and traffic volume were different in those days, so I do not suggest anyone try it today. It was a simple or should I say an uncomplicated life. Life was ordered according to the rhythms of nature where each season brought something different and enjoyable. Although I never liked weeding the garden, when the harvest was gathered in the fall it gave a wonderful sense of security. We were prepared for the winter. It is true we did not have all the electronic gadgets of today but as time has proven, all of that would not have made us better or happier.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, March 13, 2022
 To be a disciple is primarily to live and to have our course corrected by the Lord, often in the voice of disciples who are a little ahead of us. Which means we need to be receptive to ‘feedback,’ and we need to realise that means we need to be ready to repent.

We’re all in favour, and we’re very happy to call a lot of things ‘discipleship’, but what is it?
Maybe it’s easier to start with what it isn’t. It’s not going and having a coffee with a more mature Christian—though that can be a very helpful thing to do. It’s not attending a course or an event—though courses and events can be great. It’s not growing your church or in-depth Bible study or a midweek group that meets in a home or having fun with other Christians or making younger Christians into copies of yourself.
All of the above can be good things in the right context, all of them are sometimes called discipleship, and not one of them is.
Apprentices
The word disciple just means learner. I do wonder if shifting away from the religious term would help us. ‘Apprentice’ is probably closer in our normal use to how the word ‘disciple’ would have been used in the New Testament. I like the way John Mark Comer talks about being apprenticed to Jesus as a metaphor for the Christian life, it’s a more holistic vision than when discipleship means meeting someone for coffee once every six months.
I’ve designed apprenticeship programmes for leading Universities and an award-winning global graduate programme for Rolls-Royce. I know how these things work.
When most people hear “apprenticeship,” or perhaps even “discipleship,” they imagine training courses. Which explains the way that lots of big churches approach the Christian life, “let’s run a course,” we imagine very quickly that the correct way to treat discipleship is to create the right programme. We proliferate our programmes to treat every area of life because what we think we need is skills.
This model then infects smaller churches as well because we use the courses produced by these big churches. None of this is wrong, but often rests on two faulty assumptions, one theological and one methodological. Firstly, we assume that what we need is skills, when we need character, but secondly we assume that this is how learning works.
We think if we need to learn we should run a course. The training programmes I designed included very little by way of training courses. We worked to a learning model as a guide that suggested 10% of an apprentice’s learning would come from courses and that these would be specifically targeted at specific needs.
The vast majority of our learning comes from experience, with a sizeable chunk from feedback and reflection—our guide would have been 70% experience and 20% reflection and feedback.
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Our Lord, assigns us various “subordinate identities” under our primary identity as Christians…In a generation that likes to play dress-up with our own identities, we do well to regularly rehearse what our actual, objective identities are, rather than those that are aspirational, subjective, and not yet actual….He determines our nationalities, our families, our vocations, and the various “stations” in which we are placed.

Any big life updates? It’s a question that I ask old friends when we reconnect over the phone or at a conference or reunion. Taking a new job, moving to a new home, planting a church, getting married, having children—these are among the big life updates that we communicate in catch-you-up conversations and Christmas letters.
We live in especially mobile and transitory times. Now, in addition to the ageless major transitions of human life, many people regularly move from job to job, even town to town and church to church. Added to this complexity is the modern confusion about life’s givens and chosens. Our society has come to feign plasticity in precisely the places where we’re hardwired (such as biological sex) and to pretend hardwiring in the places where we’re actually plastic (desires and delights). We pretend that our desires are fixed while presuming that our stubborn, external worlds should adjust to the preferences of our inner self. In reality, the inverse is true. Our desires are far more plastic than we often assume, and the external world is far more fixed than we care to admit.
How, then, as Christians do we approach the big chosens in life, such as getting married or taking a new job? We want to live with Christ-honoring contentment in whatever station and season we find ourselves. How might we be content in Christ and yet move toward, and through, the various transitions in our lives?
Christ Assigns Our Stations
Before addressing the practical question, let’s first establish that Christ, our Lord, assigns us various “subordinate identities” under our primary identity as Christians, and let’s clarify what these secondary identities are. In a generation that likes to play dress-up with our own identities, we do well to regularly rehearse what our actual, objective identities are, rather than those that are aspirational, subjective, and not yet actual.
As Christians, we have our fundamental identity “in Christ,” servants of the Master, assigned to various stations in life. Paul’s orienting word to the Athenians in Acts 17:26 remains true for us today in all the complexities and confusion of the twenty-first century: God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.” You live when and where you do by God’s good providence and design. He determines our nationalities, our families, our vocations, and the various “stations” in which we are placed, however temporarily or indefinitely.
Writing to the Corinthians, and for all Christians, Paul says: “Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches” (1 Cor. 7:17). Paul does not mean that some aspects of our assignments never change (more on that below), but he cautions us against overlooking or minimizing the posts where God has stationed us at this moment. So what are the various identities and stations He assigns?
Humanly speaking, our first identities are those into which we are born, in our homes and families. We are born either male or female, a son or a daughter. Also, many of us were born as brothers or sisters or cousins. Then, while still growing up, we acquired other secondary identities: student, congregant, teammate, employee, voting citizen. Later came leaving mother and father and cleaving in marriage to establish a new home and family—and so we become husband or wife, and then father or mother. With age and maturity come other identities as well: teacher, employer, governor, coach.
Among these various subordinate identities are peer relationships, such as brother, sister, cousin, teammate, fellow student, and fellow worker. But other identities are ordered, or we might say complementary, even hierarchical: wife to husband, child to parent, student to teacher, employee to employer, player to coach. So, too, in church life we find both symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships: fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters in the faith (1 Tim. 5:1–2).
Many of us today are quite comfortable with peer relationships. We have learned a leveling, democratic instinct, and we expect profound (though not perfect) equality. At least in principle, we understand and appreciate largely symmetrical relationships among friends, brothers, sisters, cousins, and teammates, even as we acknowledge that among these, various small asymmetries are inevitable, depending on age, maturity, and other factors.
But many today struggle with the ordered, complementary, and asymmetrical identities. We have learned the leveling impulse so well. Our noses have been trained to sniff out inequalities in the more ordered and hierarchical relationships. These can make us uncomfortable, and in doing so, they reveal particular places in Scripture where we might freshly recalibrate our minds to be faithful to our callings.
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