Sabbath Devotional :: Discipleship

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit St Martin’s, the oldest continuously operating Christian church in the English speaking world. It is a few miles from Canterbury Cathedral, which is different from St Martin’s in almost every conceivable way. The Cathedral is a magnificent example of architectural achievement, was a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of years, and has been the site of some pretty significant power struggles.

St Martin’s is none of those things. It is little, simple and straightforward. The small part in the back was built and established by the Romans in the late 400’s. But when the Romans left Britain, so did Christianity — until the first missionary brought it back to this church in 597. A few years later, he and his monks expanded the building a bit to accommodate a growing congregation. But still, I think it would be impossible to fit 100 people in — even if they tucked themselves into every available corner.

I sat down for a minute while we were there and thought about the thousands of souls who have worshipped at this church during the last 1,400+ years. Mostly they did that in small little groups, known only to each other and likely remembered by no one.

I thought of all the ways that they participated and tried to live up to the tenets of their faith (probably most of the time quite inadequately). I thought about the person who so many years ago thought to build the window so lepers could watch and participate in the Mass. All these people are forgotten, but collectively they helped keep the light of Christianity burning across generations.

A belief in Jesus Christ has been the guiding star of my life, and it was overwhelming to me to think about the gift that it has been to be able to live a life of faith, discipleship and hope — one that I am pretty sure I would have been hard pressed to come to on my own. I think that had I started my life without being surrounded by many witnesses, my natural skepticism and inherent selfishness might have made the soil of my soul too rocky. I am so grateful for the believers who have been good stewards of Christianity and made sure that it endured and was available to me.

That said, the older I get, the more I realize that I too am quite an inadequate disciple. I am observant, but while it is easy to mistake religious observance for discipleship, they are not the same. I can attend church every Sunday without having my heart filled with a spirit of reverence and worship. I can faithfully observe the Word of Wisdom and still live a life of indulgence. I can pay a full tithe and still live with no awareness of, or feelings of responsibility to the poor. And perhaps most dangerously, I can become complacent, believing that all the messages of change and repentance threaded through the scriptures are to be read as condemnations of the wider world and affirmations of my own (and my people’s) goodness.

Since my visit to St Martin’s I have been thinking a lot about the true quality of my discipleship. It is probably inadequate. I have asked myself if I am doing enough, What would it look like if I were to truly and fully live what I profess what I believe Christ asks us all to do?

Those questions intensified when I heard that Jimmy Carter had passed away. My first unbidden thought was a certainty that he had been welcomed into the arms of Jesus. It was readily apparent that he had lived a life of exemplary discipleship and that the two were well known to each other. This felt true and observable, even though I had never met President Carter, been a beneficiary of his service, or sat with him in the pews. And my next unbidden thought was “will that be the response of the people around me when it is my turn to go home?”

There is a difference between being a true disciple and being important, effective, observant or even just a good person. Discipleship has a whole different quality to it and it requires that we align our lives as much as possible with the way he has called us to be. I want to be a disciple — and I want to end my days on the good side of Matthew 25.

Like many of you, I am going into the new year with some apprehension, and in a time of uncertainty it feels natural to want to hunker down and turn inward. But the desire to have a better relationship with Christ, and to live a life that threads all my actions with purposeful belief is pushing me to look outward instead. Just like St Martin’s, I want my witness to be enduring, even if it is small.

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Jennifer Walker Thomas is a co-executive director at Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

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