Discipleship From the Home by Nick and Marjorie Allan

Discipleship from the home

Excerpt from The XYZ of Discipleship: Understanding and Reaching Generations Y & Z by Nick & Marjorie Allan (published 2020) available from www.xyzdiscipleship.com and all online retailers

Generation Y (born between c.1981-96) and Generation Z (c.1996-2014) are sometimes called the ‘missing generation’ from the UK Church, yet they are thriving and expanding their influence within the rest of society. Can we bridge the gap? Can we understand the cultural landscape they inhabit and work out how best to reach them with the gospel, helping them to become disciples, that is, followers of Jesus?

In these days of Covid restrictions, life in the home has become our focal point. It also presents a fantastic opportunity for discipleship from the home or even the kitchen table.

The younger generations may apparently be connected to hundreds of people and may have 24/7 contact with others in this digital age and yet be the loneliest generation to date because of the lack of contexts in which they have meaningful relationships. Since Covid and lockdowns, loneliness and a raft of mental health issues are undoubtedly worse.

Today’s culture is the most information-connected, yet the least relationallyconnected ever to be formed. In today’s urban culture it is possible to spend an entire day surrounded by people – and speak to nobody. This is because connection and community are two totally different realities. You can be connected to hundreds of people and still have no meaningful relationships. There is a big difference between friendship and authentic community. Only fifty years ago in Britain we benefited from a richness of community life that has virtually disappeared. It has supposedly become virtual, but it has, in fact, become a thing of the past. This is where the Church has such an opportunity! We are part of something beyond ourselves. It is not an organisation, it is an organism, a movement, circulating the planet over the last 2,000 years. Movements attract people. The worldwide Church is a community of people with a cause beyond themselves. And it is permanently open to newcomers. Within any average local church community there are tremendously powerful connections. Connections more real than our

contemporary digital culture could ever dream of. True conversion to Christ means you have one faith and are baptised into the one family, as the apostle Paul writes in the New Testament (Ephesians 4:5-6). Community life requires us to give of our time, our tables, our pockets. People’s lives can be broken and require our time, our attention and compassion. Yet it is through sharing our personal lives that the kingdom life often flows most powerfully. Growing up in Dublin in the 1970 and 80s, hospitality was central to our family’s culture: life revolved around the kitchen table. The sense of local community was very strong. We knew our neighbours, most families attended the church up the road, schooling was local. Nobody had a lot of spare cash, a lot of life was shared. Ireland was all about people. People’s news, people’s families, people’s tragedies and triumphs. Looking back, I realise that what I experienced and have sought to replicate during my adult life wasn’t simply about being Irish. These dayto-day practices were rooted in my parents’ deeply held Christian principles forming a rhythm which allowed the kingdom of heaven to break out on earth. Many tears were shed around my mother’s table, dreams were conceived, and relationships mended. Stories of the past were retold and faith grew. Big prayers were spontaneously prayed and hope rekindled. New introductions were made and relationships blossomed, lessons were taught and hearts were healed. There is no other context quite like community around a table. The first church was a meal around a table. Jesus ate with His disciples, ate with those closest, ate with sinners and the lost. The most intimate conversations happened around the table, eating together, including Jesus’ final instructions to His disciples on what was about to follow (Matthew 26:17-30). The Church at its core is a community around the Lord’s table.

This is where the Church can be a solution and play a fundamental role. Eating together is central to our faith and heritage, however foreign it is to British culture today. In our own home we have found that an opentable culture where we regularly include young people is hugely attractive to young adults. It helped us to make a practical decision. For several years pre-Covid, and slowly beginning again in 2022, the Allan family had a regular rhythm of ‘Tuesday tea’ where others will eat with us. We invite single people who might otherwise eat alone on other occasions to enjoy the blessing of banter and a loud table of teenagers! We invite teenage friends of our children with working parents, many of whom will rock up several times a week. We invite people who have appeared at our church and are new to the city, and therefore know no one. Urban life can be so lonely. We have found that opening up our home to others has enriched our family. We are never selfsufficient. We also deliberately invite young adults and students that we are keen to have in our orbit. Those who might benefit from being introduced to ‘family’. Those who God is asking us to deliberately spend time with. Leaders of the future and/ or ones who might benefit from homely love and our occasional wisdom.

Some of our very best discipleship happens around our range cooker and our kitchen sink.

Because this generation longs for a sense of family, whether they are Christians or not, they will often create support networks of pseudo families that offer the sort of social and emotional support they desire. How wonderful that at the heart of the Christian faith is ‘a Father to the fatherless’ (Ps. 68:5) and an invitation to ‘come home’.

We are so grateful to the families who opened up their homes to us when we were in our twenties. Around those kitchen tables we processed our theology, our callings, who we would marry, who we would vote for, how to avoid having an affair and those grown-up things of life that we otherwise did not have a natural context to speak about. There has not been a better time for the Church to provide a place of belonging for all those that yearn for it, a place that mirrors that first community of believers in Acts 2. As society redefines family, I think it’s time for the Church to rediscover it.