Mentoring Discipleship – How To Develop Fully Devoted Followers Of Jesus

INTRODUCTION – A Life Well Lived

I fell in love with Jesus when I was a troubled teenager while attending Topanga Community Church in California. One person stood out among all others, a silver-haired saint named Doris Shumate. She was an unassuming, kind, and gentle soul who always esteemed others more highly than herself and was desperately in love with Jesus. She was in her seventies but had the energy of someone half her age. I remember one time in particular, Doris wanted to ride motorcycles in the desert with some from the church and began to cry because she thought she was too old!

Doris had never been married and lived her entire life in service to Jesus and His Bride by teaching and discipling them in the faith. What I didn't know about her at the time was the extraordinary life she lived. Doris had been a flight officer in the Women's Army Air Corps during World War Two and for years afterward in the Civil Air Patrol. After the War, she worked until retirement for a major Hollywood studio as an accountant, intermingling daily with the rich and famous.

Doris chose to take me under her wing, along with a few other ragamuffins, and disciple us. For many months, Doris shared with me the person of Jesus through her words and actions. I remember going with her to a Bible Study where a 'big name' evangelist was speaking. Things were pretty uneventful until a series of comments were made that impugned the character and nature of Jesus by indirectly accusing Him of causing pain and suffering in His Bride to teach them a lesson in humility.

Meek and mild Doris strongly and forcibly called the speaker out on it in front of everyone there and he folded like a house of cards. Looking back, that moment was instrumental in establishing within me a burning desire to call out high-sounding spiritual nonsense, destructive, deceptive, and erroneous teaching in the church.

When I first entered formal Bible training, I discovered that much of what I had been taught by 'professional' Bible teachers was tainted by their confirmation bias rather than simple exegesis/explanation of God's Word. I vowed to become a "Watchman on the Wall" when I entered the ministry and never mislead anyone.

Doris was by no means a Bible Scholar, yet she showed me that God's love was fixed and unchanging. Through her simple stories and sincere love and concern, the merciful goodness and grace of God were burned into my core as she taught that nothing I had ever done, or could ever do, was so bad that it would lessen the magnitude of Jesus' great passionate love for me. I learned more from her than I ever had in all the years of formal Bible education. Doris was pivotal in forming the spiritual foundation that would later help me get through life's future challenges.

One day I came to Doris to confess serious wrongdoing. I expected to get a lecture, a chewing out, or, at the very least, a bunch of Bible verses to show me the error of my ways. Instead, she listened to me and went on teaching me about Jesus as if I hadn't said anything alarming! I was stunned.

I slowly (and unknowingly at first) began to stop focusing on my failures and instead began to focus on Jesus and His unconditional love for me. It wasn't too long afterward, while driving home from a Sunday service, that I said to my friend Greg, "You know, I think I'm falling in love with Jesus!"

The next morning while looking into the bathroom mirror, I suddenly realized I didn't hate the person I saw! I had been trying to do right in the eyes of God but was deeply distressed by consistently failing and falling far short of what I perceived to be the point at which I couldn't be forgiven. Up until then, I did not believe that God had forgiven me of all my sins, and there was nothing I could do to deserve it. I realized sometime later that by hating myself, I was actually putting myself in a position higher than God because I was despising a person whom Jesus loved!

Jesus had only been the invisible God who lived somewhere in the heavens. But now, with the encouragement and love from Doris and my friends, I saw that Jesus was a living, loving, and caring God who wanted a personal, intimate relationship with me! Jesus had become more real to me than ever before, and I learned that I could approach Him with my faults and failures without the fear of rejection which motivated me to do less 'bad' and more 'good.'

The mentoring discipleship of Doris taught me that the goal of ministry is to live by example to build up and lead people to maturity through experiencing daily a passionate relationship with Jesus and helping to make every church member a minister of the Gospel of Grace (see Ephesians 11-16).