Twenty centuries of discipleship have the same skeleton

When we set out to design a discipleship pathway that any church could use, we expected to find that churches disagree about almost everything. They do disagree about a great deal. But when we read how the church has actually formed people, from the second century to the present, we found something more useful than agreement. We found that the forms differ in emphasis and not in parts.

A short tour

The catechumenate (second to fifth century). A person who wanted to be baptised was examined on arrival, vouched for by a sponsor, and then spent a long time as a "hearer", learning the faith and changing their life before the rite. The Apostolic Tradition prescribes 3 years. In the weeks before Easter came the scrutinies, a series of public examinations and prayers, then baptism at dawn on Easter Sunday, and then, importantly, more teaching afterward, in the weeks the church called mystagogy. The modern Catholic rite of initiation keeps the same four periods.

The desert (third to fifth century). A seeker travels to an abba or amma and asks: "give me a word." The elder gives a sentence, sometimes a single line, and the seeker lives on it for years. The deeper practice was the disclosure of thoughts, the inner life told to one trusted person.

Benedict (sixth century). A written rule for a whole community: fixed hours of prayer, work, reading, and the vow of stability, which is the promise to stay. The rule is short enough to read in an afternoon and has been kept for fifteen hundred years.

The soul friend (Celtic church, sixth to ninth century). The anamchara, a peer confessor. Brigid is remembered as saying that a person without a soul friend is a body without a head. Confession here is between equals.

Ignatius (sixteenth century). The Spiritual Exercises, a month under a director, and the daily examen, a short review of the day asking where God was noticed and where he was resisted. The director listens far more than teaches.

The catechisms (sixteenth century). Luther's, the Heidelberg, the Westminster Shorter: questions with answers, memorized at home, with the father as catechist and the pastor examining before admission to communion. Knowledge, in this tradition, is question-shaped.

Wesley (eighteenth century). Three sizes of gathering doing three different things. The society, in the hundreds, for preaching. The class, about twelve, mixed, weekly, where the leader asked each person "how does your soul prosper?" and reported on them. The band, five or six of the same sex and station, where five searching questions were asked every week in confidence. The sizes are almost exactly the layers that the anthropologist Robin Dunbar later found in human friendship: about five, about fifteen, about a hundred and fifty.

The twentieth century. The Navigators built everything on 2 Timothy 2:2 and one person teaching another. Cursillo invented the intensive weekend followed by a lifelong weekly "group reunion". Alcoholics Anonymous, which isn't Christian discipleship but is the most studied form of formation-by-fellowship of the century, gave the world the sponsor you can call, steps in order, and a token at each milestone. Base communities in Latin America and cell churches in Korea showed that the small circle could carry a whole church.

Now. The disciple-making movements in Asia and Africa run discovery groups around a text and 2 questions: what will you obey this week, and whom will you tell? Dallas Willard and Richard Foster brought the disciplines back to Protestants; John Mark Comer's Practicing the Way has made the rule of life ordinary again in a thousand churches.

The six parts

Lay those forms beside each other and the same skeleton shows through every one.

1. A circle of a known size. Twelve, five, a household, a cohort. Never the crowd.
2. A rhythm. Daily hours, weekly class, quarterly renewal, the church year.
3. A question asked regularly. The examen, the band's five, the catechism, "how does your soul prosper?", "what will you obey?"
4. Someone responsible for you. The sponsor, the abba, the class leader, the director, the soul friend.
5. A threshold crossed in public. Baptism, profession, admission to the table, commissioning, starting your own group.
6. A story told afterward. The Puritan conversion narrative before the congregation, the testimony at baptism, the word the elder gave that you still remember.

A church's pathway, whatever it calls itself, is a particular weighting of these six. The course-based church leans on the cohort and the threshold. The relational church leans on the person responsible and the question. The liturgical church leans on the threshold and the rhythm. The movement church leans on the circle and the question. None of them is missing a part they wouldn't recognize.

Why this matters for a piece of software

If the forms share a skeleton, then a tool only needs to hold the skeleton. A church should be able to say, in its own words, "everyone does Alpha, then joins a life group, leaders do a 6-week course, and we baptise 4 times a year," and have that sentence become circles, a cohort, a threshold and a rhythm without anybody learning our vocabulary. That is where we are heading: not a discipleship program, but a way for the software to hold yours. It isn't where we start. We start with the part every one of these forms shares and most software leaves out, one person walking with another, and the rest of the series says why.

Next week: the largest study of spiritual growth ever done, what it got right, and the mistake it warned every church software company not to make.

In EmmauOS now

All six parts now have a place in the software. Circles hold the known size and the people in it. A rule of life holds the rhythm. One question a week holds the question asked regularly. Walking with someone holds the person responsible for you. Stages and thresholds hold the public crossing. A person's story, in their own words, holds what is told afterward.

A church describes its own weighting of the six under Editing your pathway, and can start from its own paragraph.

Sources

• The Apostolic Tradition, attributed to Hippolytus, chapters 15 to 21; the 3-year catechumenate is chapter 17. Text at the Early Church Texts project.
• The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, periods and steps. Outline from the Liturgy Office of England and Wales.
• Burton-Christie, D., The Word in the Desert (Oxford, 1993), on "give me a word".
• The Rule of St Benedict, chapters 8 to 20 on the hours and chapter 58 on stability. Text.
• Watson, K., The Class Meeting (Seedbed, 2013) and The Band Meeting (Seedbed, 2017). A history of the class meeting.
• Dunbar, R., "The social brain hypothesis", Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (1998); and Friends (Little, Brown, 2021) on the 5, 15, 50, 150 layers.
• Trousdale, J., Miraculous Movements (Thomas Nelson, 2012); Smith, S. and Kai, Y., T4T (WIGTake, 2011). Mission Frontiers on the two approaches.
• Comer, J. M., Practicing the Way (WaterBrook, 2024).