A contextualization of the human-divine cooperation/partnership in evangelistic discipleship: 'Believing as you belong' within covenantal, vicarious, gathered and pragmatic discipleship

This research arose from my desire to better understand an unfamiliar URC congregation in order to minister to it more appropriately. I observed that many church members and adherents struggle with sharing their faith confidently. I also noticed that coming to faith or affirming one’s faith seemed incidental to becoming a member of the congregation. These observations were dissonant with my experience in another URC congregation. These local observations have echoes at the denominational level.

Wanting to explore how Jesus’ Spirit helps believers, I endeavoured to find out how Christians cooperate and partner with God in ways that nurture and make disciples. I saw discipleship as participation in and alongside the Trinity, who is the primary agent of mission (Missio Dei). I posited a framework whereby habitus is formed during practices and rituals such as the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The practical model of discipleship is Long, Stokes and Strickler’s (2009) ‘seven principles of the dynamic cooperation’ for ‘growing the church in the power of the Holy Spirit’.

This is a small-scale congregational study primarily using interpretivism, with Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as an auxiliary methodology. The epistemology is social constructivism. The research methods include a ministerial journal and semi-structured interviews, followed by an AI-framed focus group where participants were given the opportunity to scrutinize and validate the initial summary and interpretation of the data.

I found out that disciples are nurtured and made through a vicarious, covenantal, gathered, and pragmatic expression of their discipleship. The focus group revealed the importance of congregational singing and the formation of an evangelistic atmosphere, whereby participants shared their faith passionately although they struggle to unpack it in isolation. The critical reflection on the four features of the congregation’s discipleship made me realize that they intersect mostly in the dynamic I called ‘believing as you belong’. ‘Believing as you belong’ is influenced by congregants’ expression of love and the choreography of the human-Divine cooperation seen to resemble a ceilidh dance.