[DISCIPLESHIP] 2. The Medium is the Message

Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their conversation about discipleship, looking at active vs. passive posture in discipleship, and how Jesus discipled the 12.

"Marshall McLuhan famously said, 'The medium is the message,' calling attention to the shaping power that our method of communicating has over the content of the message. If the sermon sits at the center of our imagination for discipleship, we risk having an overly passive view of growing as a disciple. This isn’t a critique on the sermon – listening to sermons is an important way to grow. But we want to get our imagination for discipleship from how Jesus does this work…"

"The heart of Jesus’s ministry is mentoring the twelve."

"Jesus often takes as much time in an incident or interaction as he does in interpreting the incident for others. Sometimes he goes through two layers of people, interpreting for the larger group of people, and then again specifically for the smaller. This slows him down a lot, but he's doing Christ formation with his disciples. He's not just on a healing ministry; he’s pivoting between a healing ministry, a teaching ministry, a discipling ministry, and his own prayer time. This pattern is all through the gospels. The discipleship of the 12 is the organizing structure of his day-to-day life."