Introduction

It was the worst moment of my life. The worst day. The worst week. The worst month.

The call came in a little before 7 am east coast time—just 3 am Alaska time—on an early January day. My brother’s voice was shaky. His words few. He could barely bring himself to speak them before he hung up the phone. His son Brad, my nephew, a few weeks shy of his thirty-first birthday, had just been killed in a car accident in his home city of Anchorage.

The news was surreal and hard to fathom. I kept hoping to wake up and find it out it had been a nightmare, or a mistake. How could this happen? How could this happen to Brad? How could this happen to my brother and his family? What do we do now? How do we go on?

A few details were known. Others emerged slowly over the next few months. Brad had gone on a short errand to the grocery store a couple of miles from his house, and was heading back home, driving past our favorite Anchorage coffee shop, just a few hundred yards from turning off the busy four-lane road onto the relative safety of his quiet side street. Another car going in the opposite direction swerved all the way across the highway straight into oncoming traffic, hitting my nephew head-on and killing both drivers instantly. As we would later learn, the other driver had already side-swiped another car some distance back the road, and was fleeing from that accident. According to some witnesses, he had turned off his headlights, perhaps to avoid being followed. Brad, in his Subaru wagon, was traveling behind a truck with a plow. The truck swerved out of the way just in time to avoid the oncoming vehicle, so Brad probably never saw it coming. When the toxicology report was released several months later, it confirmed what we had already guessed: the other driver was high on meth.

None of those details mattered much. When they came out, one by one, they couldn’t have made the grief much worse than it already was any more than they could have brought any real comfort. Certainly they didn’t matter at the time. Only one detail mattered. We had lost Brad. Suddenly a big emptiness took his place in the lives of his parents, his brother, the woman whom he planned to marry likely later that same year. In my life also. I wept for days.

Brad had gone to Middlebury College, where I teach. Since his family lived in Alaska at the time, and regular travel home was not feasible for him, he spent a lot of time at our house during those four years. We’d been close already, but we drew even closer then. After his graduation, when Brad was living in Anchorage, I visited Alaska almost every summer, and several autumns as well. We had all sorts of outdoor adventures together: fishing, sea-kayaking, day hikes into the local passes, longer backpacking and camping trips, berry-picking excursions, and also explorations of local restaurants, ice cream shops, and cafes. But it wasn’t my own loss I thought of most during those weeks and months; it was the loss suffered by my brother and sister-in-law, Ted and Susie; by my nephew Michael, Brad’s brother; and by Ivy, his long-time girlfriend and the woman he had planned to marry, who’d felt like part of our family for years—who was part of our family.

As I pondered all that loss, many thoughts ran through my mind. The central thought was how unfair it seemed. My brother and sister-in-law were more than just faithful churchgoers; they had been active in church ministry all their lives, in small groups, and as youth leaders. Prior to his move to Alaska, Ted had served for years as an architect with an international missions agency, raising his own support and living on missionary wages. Ivy, in addition to being a delightful, kind, loving, fun young woman, was also very giving: a school teacher whose passion for helping kids had her working in one of the most challenging schools in the city. Michael had already had a year of hard setbacks with some of his life aspirations, and had been very close to Brad, sharing a house with him long after both had graduated from college. And Brad himself, in addition to being a creative, hard-working entrepreneur juggling three different start-up businesses, was one of the kindest and most generous thirty-year-old men I knew, always ready to help out those in need. My wife, Deborah,was especially fond of Brad, remembering his college-student days when he’d come over to our house not to play outdoors with his uncle and male cousins, sledding or shooting guns or chopping wood, but just to hang out with Deborah over a meal or cup of tea. How could this happen to that family? I asked that question repeatedly in the days that followed that horrible news.

And in pondering that question, I began to realize something about myself. Though I would never have articulated this as a belief—indeed, theologically speaking I would have argued strongly against it—I had come to feel that somehow because of the Christian faith of our family, of Ted’s and Susie’s family, that we could expect some amount of safety, protection, and even material gifts from God. Sure, I expected opposition to the gospel I believed in and sought to live by; I not only understood that as a Christian I would suffer some hardship and persecution for my faith, but I had experienced some of that opposition and hostility over the course of my life. And even if the opposition I experienced living in an affluent country with significant freedom of religion did not produce much in the way of real suffering, I knew that in many times and places around the world, Christians suffered tremendous persecution including imprisonment, torture, and death. I expected that to be a reality of our world, and to some extent accepted why God might allow it.

Yet when it came to the sort of unjust and seemingly random loss we had experienced with Brad’s death as a result of a driver high on meth, deep down I expected that sort of suffering wouldn’t hit our family. Even the passing of my mother six months before Brad hadn’t hit me in the same way. My mother had died of cancer, which in some ways is every bit as random and meaningless as getting hit by a drunk or high driver. Except my mother lived into her mid-eighties, which in most moments of world history would have been considered an extraordinarily long life. Plus, when she’d been diagnosed with cancer, the doctor had said she might live five years with a constant regimen of chemotherapy; she’d gone on to survive twelve years! Though I grieved at the death of my mother and in many ways I still miss her, I could look at her situation and instead of complaining of the unfairness of her cancer, I could say that God had somehow blessed her (and all of her family) with more than double the life expectancy of a typical multiple myeloma patient. Maybe that was true. But I saw absolutely nothing in Brad’s sudden death other than loss, tragedy, and unfairness. Nothing in it communicated to me any sort of blessing.

It still doesn’t.

In modern parlance, though I didn’t consciously or rationally think this, in some way I felt it: that as Christians we could expect some sort of blessing of health and wealth. Tragic deaths were things that happened to other people’s families.

To be very clear: I believe this thinking is a lie. I did then. I do now. It is part of the so-called prosperity gospel, which is not only bad theology, but also destructive. The prosperity gospel, sometimes called the health-and-wealth gospel, teaches that those who have enough faith in God can expect God to provide them with extra material benefits, and also to protect them from harm, and heal all of their illnesses: a sort of reward system for faith: a quid pro quo. In short, it promises a life of comfort as a reward for faith—or, perhaps more to the point, a life of comfort in exchange for church attendance and financial giving. The propagandists of this false teaching often benefit greatly by calling their followers to prove their faith by contributing generously to the coffers controlled by none other than the propagandists themselves.

This teaching, however, is contrary to the teachings of the Bible. I had argued against the prosperity gospel for years. Yet I have also grown up in middle class America, of one of the most prosperous nations on earth. I have listened to countless advertisements telling me how I deserved this and that: a good job, a happy family, a nice car, a shampoo that made my hair shiny and luscious, a vacation, a good meal from McDonald’s. I grew up in a nation far more enamored with rights than with responsibilities. The framers of our Constitution made a collection of these rights the first and most important addendums to their newly formed government. Anybody living in my country can make a long list of things we are supposed to have a right to: free education, free speech, a job, voting privileges, the bearing of arms, good health care, a fair trial. So it shouldn’t be surprising that while my theology and conscious thinking spoke one truth to me, in some subtle ways my feelings had partly been shaped by my culture, which fed me a deceit that went against all that. And when that horrible news of my nephew’s death slammed into me one early January morning, the subtle ways my feelings had been shaped by that deceit boiled to the surface.

All of this happened when I was about halfway through writing this book: a book about disciple making as an aspect of Christian discipleship that actually addressed some of the fallacies of the prosperity gospel. As those questions bubbled up, I brought them to God, over and over again over several days and weeks.

A few months before Brad’s death, the great writer and spiritual theologian Eugene Peterson passed away. After Peterson’s death, I remember watching a short film documentary and interview on YouTube about Peterson’s relationship with Bono, the singer-songwriter with the band U2. The piece is titled, simply, Bono and Eugene Peterson: The Psalms, and much of it is simply a recorded conversation between Bono and Peterson, about the Psalms, which is also a conversation about prayer. Peterson makes the astute and important comment that the Psalms are not about being nice to God, but about being honest with God. Our prayers and our art should be the same: honest.

In bringing before God those questions about Brad’s death—not just questions, but also a certain amount of anger and a sense of loss and even hopelessness—I was at least being honest with God. That honesty helped lead to the realization of how, despite all my protestations about its falseness, I had nonetheless been influenced by one of the most prevalent and harmful American heresies: the false teaching that if we have enough faith in God and in Jesus, or perhaps if we live good lives and go to church and give money to the church (or, more specifically, to the peddlers of this false gospel) that we will be guaranteed wealth, health, and comfort. Though the false message might be vaguely supported by focusing on a few passages from the Bible taken out of context, while ignoring many others, the overall weight of Scripture—including especially the teachings of Jesus and Paul and also the examples of countless saints—strongly refutes it. Though not the main subject of this book, that point kept arising in the central passages that are the main focus. Moreover, those false ideas don’t just stay in our heads; they impact how we live: they lead to a pursuit of comfort as a right, and a pursuit of power as a means. Indirectly, the false ideas also result in fear.

Those false ideas get in the way of our being disciples of Christ, and they get in the way of our work of making disciples. Yet there they were, taking root in me, even while I intentionally argued against them. What was not yet complete in me—what will not be complete until Christ returns—was God’s transforming work in me: shaping my thoughts and life. Our thoughts are shaped by rational doctrine, but also by experience, and most importantly by the work of the Holy Spirit. How does that happen? Through spiritual renewal. Through transformation. Through discipleship.

This book is about all of that, but especially about the work of disciple making: about not just God’s transforming work in our lives, but his working through us in the transformation of other lives. It is, as the title indicates, about disciple making in a culture of power, comfort, and fear. The book is centered on two passages. The first is the book of 2 Timothy, the Apostle Paul’s final surviving epistle: a letter written to his close friend, and a sort of sermon on disciple making. Outside of the Gospels, 2 Timothy 2:1–6 is my favorite New Testament passage. It has been since 1986 when I spent the summer on a missions project to eastern Europe—to a country closed to the gospel—and spent the whole summer memorizing and in close study of the epistle. In the intervening decades, I have led numerous studies on the book (mostly with college students) and spoken on it several times in churches.

The second passage is a much shorter one: 1 John 2:16. It contains what might be described as a threefold pattern of temptation, or perhaps a threefold categorization of sin. In this passage, John, a disciple of Jesus, writes of the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life—a pattern that can also be seen in the temptation scenes recorded in Genesis 3:1–6 and in Luke 4:1–13.

At first, I saw these two passages—the epistle of 2 Timothy and that passage from 1 John—as exploring two distinct topics, without much close connection. Yet the more I worked on this book, the more I began to see overlapping principles between the topics of disciple making and temptation, especially around themes of obedience, spiritual discipline, and suffering. Just as discipleship has obedience at its core, sin has a lack of obedience as its definition. Or we might say that discipleship is centered on faith, and sin is (or is a result of) a lack of faith. Both passages also warn about living in fear and pursuing power. Thus the more I wrote, and the more close relationships I became aware of, the more it seemed like a single cohesive topic rather than two.

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Disciples as Disciple Makers (and the Importance of Lenses)

Seeing through the Lenses of Cameras and Sunglasses

Several months before I began writing this book, I attended a presentation from a nationally recognized digital forensics expert who specialized in the authenticity and reliability of photographic evidence. He spoke about his work examining digital photographs to determine whether they had been altered. One basic enabling principle of his work is surprising but simple: all camera lenses distort. Not only do lenses distort, but different lenses distort in different unique and predictable ways. They distort shape. They also handle different spectrums of light in different ways in different parts of an image.

Some distortion comes from the environment. Smudges or water drops on a lens distort an image. I have a whole digital photo album of blurred images from a day of steelhead fishing on the Olympic Peninsula, the rainiest region of the continental United States, because I failed to keep my lenses dry that day. If you’ve ever tried to take a photo through a thick airplane window, or even the curved window of a car, you have likely noticed distortions in the photos. I’ve been on a small plane in Alaska taking wildlife photos and tried to avoid windshield blur by opening the window and leaning out of the plane, but found that my terror was nearly as great an impediment to good photos as the distortion caused by the window. If the distortion is the result of a poor-quality lens, however, there isn’t much you can do. Moreover, some distortion is not merely a result of cheaper lenses; although better lenses distort less than poor quality ones, some distortion is inherent in all camera lens—which is one reason the digital forensics techniques are so effective.

Distortion of shape is most obvious in a wide-angle lens, such as a fish-eye. As an avid angler and fishing writer, I use a wide-angle lens and get as close as possible when taking fish photos. This makes the fish appear bigger. It’s more than merely having the fish fill the frame, which could be accomplished with a telephoto lens from