They try to coordinate their print articles with spin-off online articles, and I contributed an article this month on radical discipleship based on an article on the topic by Jon Wasson. Here's an excerpt:
To be radical means to depart from tradition—the way things have always been or are always done—in some way, to be different. Because we know that the way our world works is broken, the idea of radical resonates with us as followers of Jesus. Deep down, we know that committing our lives to following Jesus of Nazareth is somehow supposed to make our lives look different. But how?
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Jesus himself instructs his followers to live out his teachings in specific, practical ways. How do you resist evil? By offering to carry an oppressing Roman soldier’s gear an extra mile (Matthew 5:41). What kind of person lives for Jesus? The kind who gives food to the hungry, gives a drink to the thirsty, welcomes a stranger, gives clothes to those who need them and cares for those who are sick or in prison (Matthew 25:31-40).
In fact, much of the instruction in the New Testament epistles involves how believers ought to follow Jesus in specific situations. One of the challenges of teaching and preaching to teenagers is faithfully articulating and contextualizing discipleship in a way that makes sense to their life situations. Sometimes this means giving students concrete examples of how to live out Jesus’ teaching in their own day-to-day lives.
The issue is not ideals themselves. The issue is that we replace following Jesus with following our own ideals (which, by the way, often don’t even represent Jesus’ teaching in the first place, as Wasson has pointed out). With this in mind, how exactly can we lead teenagers into radical lives of discipleship in ways that are faithful to discipleship that Jesus taught?
Read it all.
