The other day I was talking with someone who made the joke (I’ve heard this so many times and I cringe every time) that he is the head of his household and his wife is the neck, and she turns to show him where to look.
This is the popular bodily allegory for complementarianism in Christian gender-role thinking, and it’s ridiculous.
Many of us (presumably many readers of this blog) hold to a much more equalitarian view for family roles, with partners functioning as co-equals in their relationship.
Although we’re all still shaped by the gender roles we saw modeled growing up, and the culture around us still pushes us into those, nevertheless we at least aspire to equalitarianism.
All this gender role stuff ends up influencing a lot of the ways we approach theology and church practice. As a primary example, many churches have intentional “discipleship” practices. Many if not most of the churches that “disciple” do so in complementarian fashion rather than equalitarian.
That is to say, they assume that the one “discipling” has something to impart to the one “being discipled.”
For this reason among others, although I believe the concept of discipleship is a crucial one in Christianity, I steer away from the term in order to avoid sounding like we operate along the lines of the head/neck metaphor.
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This leads me to ask: Can we propose a version of discipleship that is truly mutual?
Let me hint at a couple of options. First of all, take the story of Jonah (which will serve as a lesson for worship this coming Sunday). God sends Jonah to preach repentance at Nineveh. Jonah, after attempting great lengths to avoid it, goes. He preaches one word, and the whole city repents. As a result, God changes God’s mind and does not destroy Nineveh.
Most biblical scholars believe Jonah is unique among the prophets, a text told at the level of myth. It’s a book of opposites, where everything that would happen in a traditional narrative of a prophet happens by way of opposite. Jonah avoids rather than accepts his call. The wrong-doers actually repent, rather than harden their hearts. The prophesied negative outcomes do not eventuate because the people repent. And then the prophet has to deal with the aftermath of his prophecy… actually working.
But what if?
What if we thought perhaps Jonah was a way the story could actually go, for real?
What if the act of calling a great city to repentance was a truly mutual enterprise between God and Jonah, and Jonah’s resistance and more actually influenced God, just as God’s call and challenges influenced Jonah?
What if God wasn’t a paternalistic power being dictating how everything would go, but actually was in mutual relationship and periodically surprised by humans being human?
Similarly in the gospels, although at first glance it may appear as if Jesus “disciples” the disciples, a closer look at the gospels indicates all the various ways in which their relationship is much more relational and communal. Mutual.
Jesus is only free to teach and heal in the ways he does because of the largesse of hosts who support him. When he gets around to instructing the disciples to go out he encourages them to go out two-by-two mutually discipling (not “you go train another person who needs discipling”). And perhaps most instructive, the “disciples” mostly don’t get it, thereby calling into question the effectiveness of the greatest “discipler” of all time. The story as it stands illustrates that by and large the discipling didn’t work (or it did work, but among those who take up less narrative space in the gospels, and were part of the wider equalitarian community forming as the Jesus movement).
I guess all I’m saying is that it’s worth a thought experiment (and even a practical experiment) to take this understanding of equalitarianism and mutual aid all the way up the chain, shattering the paternalistic models and structures that are in place, and instead heeding the texts in Scripture that indicate that we are “co-heirs with Christ.”
Or that famous line in the Psalms (82): I say, “You are gods,
children of the Most High, all of you.
Or Paul’s freeing claim in his letter to the Galatians: There is no longer slave nor free, male or female, Jew nor Greek, but all are one in Christ Jesus.
As if the “in” part of being in Christ (in God) is indeed mutual to the point of entire non-differentiating place-sharing.
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But then what is “equalitarian discipleship”?
I don’t want to belabor this point overly much, because I do believe “discipleship” is a concept we could just let go of for a while in order to release its pedantic power.
I’d say equalitarian discipleship, if we are going to define it, begins with some obvious insights. First, there’s the paradox that a) there are people who know more than us, in many disciples, and we do learn from them. In that sense there are people who can “disciple” others. That’s real.
But second, none of us really knows what we are doing. The more you know the more you know what you don’t know, and honestly those of us who do the church thing (or the writer thing, or…) tend to say we have no idea what we’re doing. Because we don’t.
All of that being said, there’s some comfort in knowing we’re all in this together not-knowing-what-we’re-doing. It means we can help each other.
The more radical point would be that God in Christ entered into this not-knowingness in some way.
What kind of community would it have been if God would have known all the time precisely how the disciples would be with Jesus… or even whether they’d accept the call to walk with him?
What kind of story would it have been like if God would have known the Ninevites would change their mind?
All of this is to say, in order for us to imagine “equalitarian discipleship,” we need to re-imagine… God. Do that together, and we’ll be more on our way.
I think that reading the Bible works very differently in community than alone. In this case, community is much better.
This ideal is a conclusion I have come to. I would only add communitarian to your description. As in the disciples learned best when they came back together after going out two by two.