O’Loughlin, Thomas | Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches

Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches
Thomas O’Loughlin

Paperback: James Clarke & Co, 2022, 154pp.

Introduction

Despite the irony of the reference in its title to the earliest era of church history, Thomas O’Loughlin’s new book Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches, is a striking meditation on what it means to follow Jesus in the twenty-first century. In the book’s introduction, O’Loughlin notes that although in our late-modern world Christianity is becoming largely irrelevant, some of the most vibrant churches “often express their vision of what it is to be a Christian not in terms of conforming to ecclesial pattern or membership of a club – both common ways of expressing a serious engagement with Christianity in the past – but in terms of being a disciple: discipleship, moving along a way as one committed to following Jesus, captures their sense of commitment, of engagement with the world around them, and their desire for a distinct set of relationships” (2). Using the lens of discipleship, honed from the witness of the early Christian communities, the author challenges us to rethink crucial facets of our practice of faith in the twenty-first century. As such, it is an important work on living faithfully to the way of Jesus by being a disciple and by making disciples.

Active Disciple-Making

With its emphasis on discipleship as the primary means to understand and participate in the Christian faith, Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches is an especially helpful resource for understanding the practice of active disciple-making. Disciple-making, as O’Loughlin understands it from the witness of the early churches, stands in sharp contrast to the sort of mass-production that has become familiar after the modern Industrial Revolution. “One can make good soldiers, one can train good paleographers, and can produce good computer experts,” O’Loughlin notes, “but ‘making disciples’ is a far more complex task. This is because discipleship touches the whole of our lives and each of us is different, our situations are as diverse as we are, and these are changing. Discipleship is up and down, calling for this, then calling for that, and it cannot be reduced to a package of skilled responses to a defined set of situations'' (15). Disciple-making thus requires attention not only to the particularities of the time and place in which this work is being done, but also to the unique personality and giftedness of the one being discipled. 

Discipleship (and disciple-making) O’Loughlin emphasizes, is always a work in progress. There is no golden age of the church to which we can look for easily replicable solutions to the challenges of making disciples. Similarly, there are no experts (of history or of our day) who can definitively guide us on how to make disciples. We certainly can, and should, learn from the wisdom of other Christians and churches, but this wisdom must always be sifted through the sieve of discernment and squared against the particular realities of our own context. Our hope and our light is in the Holy Spirit alone, the presence of God-with-us who shows us – to the extent that we are attentive – what it means to follow Jesus in our particular time and place. “Christian faith,” O’Loughlin writes, “is that God is with the world now, loves each of us, and in every situation can offer us the light we need for our path. This confidence in the moment is not some simple optimism but is founded upon the living source of all discipleship: it is the Holy Spirit who dwells within us that lights our path forward” (134). Active disciple-making is fundamentally about learning to discern God’s presence with us in the Holy Spirit, how God is guiding us personally and collectively in the Spirit to take the next steps of faithfulness in the journey of learning to mature into “the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13 NRSV).

Participatory Worship

One of the most striking chapters in Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches is the chapter on service, in which O’Loughlin emphatically drives home the point that Jesus taught his disciples that his kingdom was ordered by “a complete inversion of social values'' (101). Drawing our attention to Mark 9, O’Loughlin highlights these words of Jesus: “So Jesus called them together and said, ‘You know that those regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their superiors exercise authority over them. But it shall not be this way among you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many ’” (102). “The inversion of power,” O’Loughlin goes on, “is not simply an idea, but the idea about disciples’ behavior” (102, emphasis in original).

O’Loughlin explores the implications of this inversion of social power that Jesus proclaimed. “What then is the most basic element of ministry? … The fundamental ministry is that of helping the other along the path of life. Service is all the practical tasks set out in Matthew’s preaching as feeding, clothing, visiting” (106).  This fundamental ministry is one in which all disciples participate together. We worship and bring glory to God, first and foremost of all, O’Loughlin notes, by caring for one another and for our neighbors. How can we love God whom we have not seen, if we don’t love our sister or brother who is right here with us every day (to paraphrase I John 4:20)? And this work of caring for one another is not just the work of the religious specialist or social services professional, but rather is essential to the discipleship of all followers of Jesus.

Table Fellowship

O’Loughlin also identifies table fellowship as a significant part of the life of discipleship, and devotes a chapter at the heart of the book to it.  He notes the prominence of meals in the Gospels and that table fellowship was central to the life of discipleship into which he invited his disciples. “The early [Christian] communities,” he goes on, “did not just talk about the meals the first disciples had with Jesus, they themselves gathered for real meals and saw this as a regular, indeed weekly, aspect of the following” (82). Table fellowship placed a crucial role in tightening the bonds among disciples who came from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds that apart from their discipleship would likely never eat together. “A basic element of any meal whose participants come from a wider network than a nuclear family,” O’Loughlin writes, “is that the meal not only witnesses to common bonds, but creates these bonds, restores them, and strengthens them” (84).  The common meal is a space in which the community of disciples learns justice, inclusion, and gratitude in practical everyday ways.

Thomas O’Loughlin’s Discipleship and Society in the Early Churches offers us a compelling picture of Christian discipleship, of what it means to follow Jesus and live the Word in the twenty-first century.

Book summarized by C. Christopher Smith