Many churches have a clear path for discipleship. New believers take a foundations class. People join a small group, complete a study, become members and begin to serve. The path is thoughtful, and people move along it faithfully. Yet a leader can watch someone reach the end of it and sense that something is still unfinished, as if the person has done everything the church asked without yet becoming everything the church hoped.
That sense of incompleteness is worth listening to. Part of it is simply honest: the goal of discipleship is larger than any path a church can lay out, and no one reaches the end of it in this life. But part of it may point to something more specific. Discipleship can carry people through learning and participation, and then leave the hardest part, living what they have learned, largely to them.
The Goal Paul Kept in View
Paul knew what it was to watch believers he loved and feel that something was still unfinished in them. When the churches in Galatia were being drawn away from the gospel he had taught them, he wrote:
“Oh, my dear children! I feel as if I’m going through labor pains for you again, and they will continue until Christ is fully developed in your lives.”
Galatians 4:19, NLT
Paul had taught the Galatians himself. They had believed and been baptized. Yet he did not measure his work by what they had heard or done. He measured it by whether Christ was being formed in them, and until that was true, he felt it as a pastor’s ache.
That goal is God’s own. Paul writes elsewhere that God chose His people “to become like his Son” (Romans 8:29, NLT). Discipleship serves that purpose, and God is the one who brings it about. The aim of every class, group and study is a life that increasingly looks like Christ.
Two Kinds of Incomplete
Measured against that goal, some incompleteness belongs to the Christian life itself. God is still at work in every believer, and no church will ever see a disciple who is finished. That kind of incompleteness is the honest condition of people who are still being formed.
The other kind is more particular. Many discipleship paths are marked by things that can be finished: a class completed, a study worked through, a group joined. Those markers matter. They show that people are learning and taking part. But being formed into the likeness of Christ shows up somewhere else, in how a person responds to pressure, treats a difficult family member or handles a long-standing temptation. When discipleship gives careful attention to the markers and little to that part, people can complete the path while much of what they learned has not yet reached their lives.
That second kind of incompleteness is one a church can do something about. The path can stay. What it needs alongside it is the same care given to helping people live what the path teaches.
Naming What Feels Unfinished
For a leader, it helps to notice where the sense of incompleteness actually comes from. Often people know the truth and want to live it. What they have not yet found is a way to carry it into the particular situations where it needs to be lived, consistently and over time.
That distance between knowing biblical truth and living it is common among sincere, well-taught believers. The Gap is the name Renewing Your Mind Discipleship Ministry gives it, and its page explains why faithful Christians can live with that distance for years and how God works in His people as they respond to Him.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
