Are we leaning on worldly methods over the sufficiency of Scripture in our discipleship?

Scott Aniol suggests many churches—despite knowing their mission to make disciples as commanded by Christ—often doubt the sufficiency of Scripture. This leads them to resort to worldly and pragmatic means and methodologies to disciple their congregations. The effectiveness of worldly methods, used in business or media to attract and engage people, can been enticing. This, however, reveals a lack of trust in the sufficiency of God’s Word.

The impact of these worldly ideologies is most apparent in a church’s worship. Despite understanding the importance of teaching people Scripture and applying it to their lives, the worship methodologies can contradict the discipleship taking place. The transformative power of a service should not lie solely in the preacher’s words, but in every aspect of the service—all working towards the common goal of maturing followers of Jesus Christ.

2 Peter 1:3 (NKJV): “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue.”

I think a lot of churches have a noble ambition to make disciples. They know that that is the mission that Christ has given them. But unfortunately, many times churches, at least implicitly and sometimes even explicitly, don't believe that the Scriptures are sufficient for that task. And so we end up looking to worldly means and worldly methodologies in order to disciple the people within our congregations. We end up being very pragmatic.

We see that there are methods and methodologies out in the world, in the business world, in the media world, and they seem to be very effective. They attract people, They get people engaged and excited about, you know, whatever product is being sold or whatever activity is being engaged in. And so we begin to think, boy, maybe we ought to be employing some of those methodologies as well in order to disciple people according to what Christ has given us in his word. But at the end of the day, what that really reveals is we're not trusting in the sufficiency of what God has given us. God has commanded us, Jesus Christ has commanded us to make disciples, And He has given us everything we need in order to do that in His sufficient Holy Word.

I think one of the most dominant ways that this often is problematic is in the Church's worship where we recognize we need to be teaching people scripture, that theology is important, and so we're doing that. We're teaching people the Word of God, strong biblical theology, we're even applying the scriptures to their lives. But then our worship methodologies have been so impacted by pragmatism and worldly ideologies that it ends up being that how we're worshiping in our worship services is actually contradicting the discipleship that's taking place in the preaching and teaching of God's Word. And the fact of the matter is when people leave a service and go home, we have to ask ourselves what was more powerfully transformative in their lives? What the preacher said from the pulpit or everything else about the service?

Well, we've got to add those are tough questions to ask and and really what we ought to be aiming for is that everything is working together toward that same goal. Our goal is mature followers of Jesus Christ. So we want teaching and preaching that will mature the congregation, But then everything else about the service ought to have that same objective. Whether it be the order of our service, how we comport ourselves in a service, the music of a service, everything that we do in corporate worship has to work together toward that goal of maturity. Mature followers of Jesus Christ is what we want in our discipleship.