I think the church in general misunderstands discipleship. We like programs where we go out and invite people to come to our building, tell them a cute Bible lesson, and then send them home. That way we don’t have to deal with them day in and day out. We can choose when we want to “minister” and when we don’t.
A couple of months ago I heard the news that a friend of mine became, in his words, “a child of God.” I never felt so excited!
While I wasn’t there for that experience, I had the privilege of walking with him through quite a bit in the last couple of years. You see, this friend was our fourteen year-old neighbor on Drew Street, a street in North Eastern Los Angeles notorious for crime and drug dealing.
We lived in a twenty-four unit apartment building. Ours was number seven on the south side. His was number nine.
Mitch, we’ll say his name was Mitch, lived with his Mom, Dad and sister. It wasn’t actually his Dad—his Dad died a few years earlier. Naturally, we hit it off pretty good when he found out my Mom had been killed.
First Year of Marriage
Newly married, Teresa and I looked all over an eight-mile radius of Northeast LA for an apartment to rent. We nearly closed on one, but everything fell through in the last-minute.
We ended up on Drew Street after dark one night because that was the cheapest deal we found for the space they proposed. One bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, dining room, and living room. We went with it. It was spacious and under eight hundred dollars a month: $795. A steal of a deal compared to everything else we saw.
We felt luxurious because our one bedroom apartment had a hall and a wall-sized closet in our bedroom. And space on top of the closet for décor and stuff like that to make the room look homier. That was Teresa’s dream. We never did get décor up there and I still feel bad about that. Instead, it held our suitcases and boxes that stored the few belongings we had. Our closet was full of clothes and a white, plastic shelf-thing I had that Teresa thought looked pitiful and wanted to keep out of sight. Honestly, it did look pitiful. We put her nice, wooden roll-top desk in sight and my plastic shelf-thing out of sight.
I remember that night we pulled up to the apartment for the first time. We barely found a parking spot between all the vehicles and red-curbs. As we stepped out of the car we were engulfed in a mixed smell of garbage and weed and children were playing in the street. The landlord told lame jokes and there was no electricity in the empty apartment. We walked through the rooms with a flashlight trying to figure out of this was the place we should rent or not.
When we saw the high ceiling with beams, and the nice living-room space and bedroom (with décor area on top of the closet), we felt pretty confident we’d rent it. But we told the landlord that we wanted to come back during the day so we could get a better idea of what it looked like. A couple days later we came back and began making arrangements to move in.
The apartment turned out alright. We miss that little place. Made lots of memories in it. But the cupboards in the kitchen were old and the place was infested with roaches. We don’t miss them.
The real reason we chose that apartment, though, is because it was trashy and there were children. Not because of the money deal or the high ceiling. We talked about it that night after seeing it for the first time. Both of us dreamed of living, at least for a while, on a street just like that. We didn’t know which street, but when we saw Drew Street, it looked like the one we had in our minds.
The day we moved in, Mitch was sitting on the stairs leading to our apartment. He was the first neighbor to greet us. Friendly, happy guy. After getting his name and some chit-chat, I asked if I could squeeze by. I think I was hauling my white, plastic shelf.
It was our first year of marriage and we wanted to spend lots of time together, but we had mixed feelings of spending time doing things just by ourselves. While we saw the value of taking time to invest in our relationship before having children, we also saw the value of learning to serve others together.
We were praying and dreaming of ways we could do that. You know, something kind of glorious. I was thinking about ways we could write books and make videos about the experiences we would have. I tend to think gloriously. Living a life for God’s glory somehow gets filtered through my brain as me getting glorified so I can give Him some. It took a while to learn what it truly meant.
Learning How to Serve
We didn’t see it then, in fact, we didn’t see it until after we moved, but it was our neighbors on Drew Street that taught us how to serve.
Mitch would come by every night and see if we could hang out. On occasions it wouldn’t suit and after we had our first child, we couldn’t hang out as late. But we spent a lot of time with Mitch in that first year. We’d talk about school, family, friends, girlfriends, Mom, weed, monsters, Jesus, angels and demons all while playing Uno on the rug in our living room.
Mitch was fascinated with monsters, angels and demons. His favorite actor was some guy who played a villain in every movie. I don’t keep up with movies so I already forget who he was.
Mitch also talked about how he remembered being inside his Mom’s womb. I think he was pulling our leg, but he acted serious. So we obliged him. He said it was dark, which I thought was rational. I really don’t remember, but I can’t imagine there’s too much light in there.
During summer vacation, I took him to work with me a couple of times. He had a way of getting every question answered from every possible angle. I wanted to get the work done quickly, but soon realized maybe there was more to this than work.
One night, Mitch was standing outside his door, which we walked by to get from our car to our apartment. We had just gotten back from eating out or shopping or something that obviously didn’t leave an eternal impact on me. He wanted to talk so we invited him over for ice cream. He loves ice cream. While Teresa put our son to bed, I talked with him for a few minutes.
At first he wanted to know about our evening. He was always friendly and enjoyed hearing about our day. But I sensed something deeper was on his mind. Finally, he said that he found out his Dad who died wasn’t his Dad at all. The way he was born was that one time there was this guy kinda laying on top of his mom and doing things with her and she didn’t know him. That’s how he came to be. He just found that out.
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t imagine finding out that who I thought was my Dad, wasn’t. And that I was not intentionally brought into this earth. It hit me that night like it did so many nights on Drew Street: everyone we look at and talk with have problems in their lives much bigger and more important than the problems I face. Every time I thought about that, I felt like crawling back to safe-city Midwest. Or at least into the closet with my white, plastic shelf-thing.
We spent a year and a half on Drew Street. While learning what it means to be married, we tried to also engage our neighbors through handing out holiday bundles, inviting them to kids clubs, having them over for meals, and so forth. Those who responded, we involved even more in our lives.
One night a drunk drove down our street crashing into three vehicles. That brought nearly everyone on the block out of their homes. Our next door neighbor’s van was damaged. Nobody wanted to help the guy and his pregnant wife. I was there and tried to do something, but felt so small, so young and so clean.
These people have rough lives. They don’t fit into our nice, Mennonite church fix-it kits.
God called us out of there to teach school in Thailand. I see it as part of greater training for whenever we’d enter back into a community like that. But when we left Drew Street, we weren’t sure if we had much effect in our time there. We had prayed, but we could have prayed more. We had reached out and shared our faith, but we could have done more. We could have learned Spanish, but the timing just never felt right to plug into that. When we left, few of the kids actually came to clubs and few of the families ever responded to our invitations.
Open Doors
In the five months since we left Los Angeles, our LA church has developed a kids club on Drew Street and more than twenty children come each night. Many of the kids from our apartment complex come and a couple of months ago, I found out Mitch chose to follow Christ.
I’m blown away by the doors that are opening on Drew Street. I’m humbled because I know it’s not because we perfectly following the formula. It’s was God’s work! I’m grateful because if people hadn’t continued it after we left, we would have missed the harvest.
Teresa and I have thought a lot of garbage-ridden, roach infested Drew Street. We miss the people. We miss the constant rubbing of shoulders with those who need to see Christ not just preached, but displayed. We know we’re right where God has called us for now, but we want to find a way to implement that same lifestyle here.
What I Learned about Discipleship
I come away from my experience on Drew Street convinced that discipleship is most effective when done in the context of vulnerability, not power. Even though we don’t necessarily face the same issues they do, if we don’t open up our lives to the people we’re discipling so they see our humanness and how God has transformed us, we don’t leave much of an impact.
This means regularly relating with them in ways that affect our weekly schedules. It means spending time with them in casual settings where you could accidentally not act like a Christian. Or where you act drastically different than they do that it surprises them, like not getting angry when someone messes up.
In the context of every-day life there are enormous opportunities to share Christ and involving unbelievers in your life to that degree is the most effective way to disciple.
Discipleship is not an option for the believer. You cannot separate following Christ and reaching out to the unsaved. “Making disciples” is not a spiritual gift that you just might not have. It is the responsibility of anyone who claims to love Jesus.
The Challenge
Find a way to use your gift and reach those who don’t know Him. It doesn’t have to be like we do it, it doesn’t have to be like Ray Comfort does it. But it should be.
There are people in our communities who will come to Christ if we are only willing to begin doing the simple, everyday work of involving them in our life. That’s discipleship. That’s following Christ.
Pray for Mitch, as you think about it. His journey with Christ is only beginning and there will be plenty of challenges along the way that will tempt him to give up. Pray he perseveres.
