What is Radical Discipleship? A Paean to the Second Festival of Radical Discipleship

Twenty-five years ago, BCM began helping build popular schools to nurture radical theological and social movement literacy. This vision arose from conversations with friend/mentor Bill Wylie-Kellermann, who shares a parallel “genealogy of faith” with me. Over  the next decade, the Word & World project curated spaces around the country for intersectional community, conspiracy and collaboration (below center: beloved co-animator, the late Nelson Johnson, at the Philadelphia W&W school, 2003).

In 2007, we inaugurated similar work locally in our watershed through Bartimaeus Institutes, renamed the Kinsler Institute in 2014 (after Gloria & Ross Kinsler). Last year, after completing our 28^th Institute (!),we decided it was time to hand this strategic work off to younger legs and arms. Kirkridge Retreat & Study Center in northeast PA seemed like a perfect candidate.

years ago, Word & World veteran Lydia Wylie Kellermann—Bill’s daughter, and also a trusted colleague and friend—became Kirkridge Director. She has built a talented team committed to bringing the next generation to “the Mountain.” When we discussed the prospect of carrying on this vision there, Lydia didn’t hesitate.

So later this week Chris, Elaine and I will head off to northeast PA to participate in a second “Festival of Radical Discipleship,” a decade after we inaugurated it here in Chumash territory. Chris, our board and Kirkridge staff have put enormous energy into organizing this collaboration, and the response has been deeply encouraging. This gathering will be the Center’s largest during Lydia’s tenure: over 150 participants, with a long waiting list!

If you are going to Kirkridge this weekend, we’ll see you there. If not, we’d appreciate your prayers for the gathering.  This blog is a bit longer than usual because I want to offer the edited and abbreviated version below of a “rant” I gave at the 2015 BKI Festival for Radical Discipleship here in Oak View, as a paeanto this work and to the vision of radical discipleship that animates our mission at BCM. May this tradition carry on!

What is Radical Discipleship?

dares use the word favorably–much less track any problem to its root. It is also curious and revealing that the notion of discipleship is so marginal in our churches. Curious, because discipleship is unarguably the central theme of the gospels. Revealing, because it shows how wide the gulf between seminary, sanctuary and streets has become in North America.
The prevailing expressions of faith among Protestant churches—evangelical decisionism, mainline denominationalism and fundamentalist dogmatism—are each problematic in a society that is mired in dysfunctional politics, delusional economics and a distractive culture. Faith as discipleship remains the “road rarely taken” here at the heart of empire. We have yet truly to reckon with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous warning, delivered under the shadow of fascism, that “cheap grace is grace without discipleship.” Radical Discipleship thus calls us to a double commitment: to reveal the roots of personal and political pathologies that continue to shape our imperial society, and to recover the roots of our biblical tradition: the messianic movement of rebellion and restoration, of repentance and renewal, and of a “Way out of no way” that has been going on since the dawn of resistance to the dusk of empire.
This Way was birthed when Creator scattered humans from centripetal Babel in centrifugal liberation. It continued when Abram and Sarai bailed out of Ur and Moses and Myriam busted out of Egypt, and when Jordan’s flooding waters stood up and Jericho’s walls came tumbling down. Though often beat down and always marginalized, this vision of truth-telling and reconciliation-dreaming was remembered when Elijah read the riot act to Ahab, and Isaiah sang a lovesong lament to the vineyard, and Jeremiah bought a field in the bear market of occupation, and Ezekiel saw the wheel within the wheel, way up in the middle of the air.

It animated John the Baptist to go feral, troubling Herod’s business-as-usual and then turbulating a certain Nazarene into Jordan’s waters, as the old Spirit of the Way hovered above like a condor. Jesus then rebooted the nonviolent insurrection, accompanied only by clueless fishermen and stubborn women, by demoniacs liberated from centurion possession and peasants armed only with palm branches. He faced down the Mammon system with loaves and fishes in the wilderness, remembering the old catechism of Manna; redirected our attention away from Temples and toward wildflowers and birds; raised up street beggars and brought down fatcats to co-inhabit the Jubilee common-and-level ground about which his mama had sung to him as a baby. The Nazarene’s movement ground to a halt on a Roman cross, on which the imperial bill for the cost of discipleship came due; only to re-open at an empty tomb from which the stone of impediment had been rolled away.
This uprising spawned a Pentecost insurrection of multicultural restoration and economic redistribution, a strange unleashing of tongues and pocketbooks that spilled from a safe house attic into the streets in a popular theater of protest and proclamation just a few blocks from where Jesus had been lynched. These shenanigans earned official backlash, which only spawned restorative payback: the murderous chief head of security—whose mission was to strangle this inconvenient Movement in its crib—broke down in the middle lane of Damascus Road, struck blind by visions of his victims. He changed his name and his life, defecting to the Movement he had sought to destroy, such that he had to be smuggled out of town in a basket like baby Moses, the hunter become the hunted. For the rest of his life, he and his fellow defectors spawned small ecclesial communities of nonconformity, bread-breaking and discipleship to Jesus throughout the empire. We know about all this only through tattered fragments of correspondence and liturgy and catechism that survive in a Second Testament, which is today every bit as misunderstood and abused as the First.

Then came martyrs who rendered to God everything and to Caesar not much at all, and monastics who returned to the wilderness in the waning days of a decadent Roman empire in order to rediscover the evangelical disciplines of fidelity and poverty. The Movement was re-membered by medieval Franciscan nuns and friars, who bound themselves to nature and society’s poorest; and by 14^th century communitarians who defied feudal canons of hierarchy and vengeance; and by 16^th century radical Anabaptists who refused to participate in the bloody religious wars of Christendom. Then by Baptist radicals, Methodist reformers, Quaker abolitionists and Anglican visionaries in Europe and the Americas against the grain of colonial plunder and genocide, and by 18^th century “Levelers” standing against the privatization of the Commons—“Since then this Jubilee, Sets all at Liberty, Let us be glad!”—and by Luddites resisting factory culture in early industrial England, and immigrant Wobbly and Jewish labor organizers a century later in Gilded Age America.
Above all, this Way was preserved for us all by 19^thcentury African slaves under American apartheid, who knew who Pharaoh was and where the Promised Land was, and who journeyed there on an underground railroad, singing:

“Go down, Moses, way down to Egypt land…” and
“I looked over Jordan, and what did I see…” and
“Nobody knows the trouble I seen…” and
“Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me…”

These old Jubilee anthems came alive again in 20^th century Civil Rights movements that reached from Selma to Soweto. Freedom songs birthed in Jim Crow jails were blown by the Spirit to cross-pollinate all the way to the Berlin Wall and Tiananmen Square and the streets of Manila: “Deep in our hearts, we do believe, that we shall overcome someday!!”

in California’s fields of wrath in 1968 to store-front Pentecostals in Appalachia sitting down in front of massive coal trucks during the Pittston coal miner’s strike in 1989, the church has been reborn time and again whenever it has remembered that it is first and foremost a movement for radical personal and political transformation accountable to God’s dream of justice and shaIom.
This is what we mean by “radical discipleship.” This conspiracy of life, hatched in a distant Sinai past, has ebbed and flowed ever since, right down to our time and place. It lives among gay bishops and lesbian evangelists; Peacemaker Teams accompanying those under occupation in Baghdad or Bethlehem and Catholic Workers sharing life with the homeless; immigrant rights organizers celebrating Posadas sin Fronteras at the US Mexico border and tree sitters defying pipelines. It is embodied by every addict who walks the Twelve Steps to recovery, by every sinner who makes that long and continuing march up to the altar of repentance, and by every activist who seeks to comfort the afflicted with gospel compassion and to afflict the comfortable with gospel justice. Because only those who know their captivity can carry on this Freedom story. So do we gather from the Four Directions at Bartimaeus Kinsler Institutes, to remember, celebrate, and incubate another round of thislong tradition of soul searching and struggle. “Since we are surrounded by so great a Cloud of Witnesses,” as the ancient writer put it, “let us lay aside every weight that restricts us, so that we too might run this race” (Heb 12:1).
For those of us of relative privilege and mobility, radical discipleship is a call that disrupts the chronos timetables of empire with a divine kairos opening for transformation. This summons from the undomesticated God originates outside of civilization, but also from deep within a groaning creation and weary communities of struggle. It challenges the entitlements and conveniences of the religion-industrial complex. And its disturbing, animating call is always before us—like Mark and Luke’s Risen Christ, who is always in disguise. So no matter how long we’ve been in this or at this, we should never presume to have “arrived,” or to be off the hook of its challenges, or to have “grown out of it”; we are ever invited to encounter Messiah afresh on the Way.

That’s why we need to convene as a community of conviction once in a while, as kindred spirits struggling to make this radical tradition flesh in our fraught time. Because this Movement-building is indivisibly relational, and no amount of social media sophistication can replace actual face-time. As my elders at Jonah House taught me in the 1970s, “the most apostolic duty of all is to keep one another’s courage up.” This is a space where radical Catholics and Anglicans and Baptists and Presbyterians and Anabaptist-curious and non-denoms and old and new monastics and seekers and refugees from toxic Christian institutions can find and embrace each other as family—and to BE church together.
As we work the margins of our native or adopted traditions, we are often demonized or tokenized, dismissed or invisible. Gathering helps us realize that we have more in common with each other than with our respective institutional affiliations (if any), and that we can be more than the sum of our diverse parts if we build common cause. Here in this circle, you can talk freely and without apology about Jesus and justice, inclusion and discipline, grace and hard work, prayer and politics. To inhabit the deep tradition of Radical Discipleship requires us to honor the past, to listen to elders and learn from their stories and histories and to encourage young folk just showing up. And let’s face it, we activist types do not celebrate enough as family.
So let us come together in joy—because as Mother Ruby Sales taught us, we are stepping into a River that has been flowing since the Exodus. And this ancient Movement will not be disappeared.