Christian Discipleship for Citizens of the United States

I am an ordinary pastor with an ordinary understanding of the mission of the church. The church exists to make disciples of Jesus Christ, and as far as I can see, my approach to disciple-making is consistent with Paul's.

Like Paul, I start with the realities of regeneration and adoption and move from there into the ethical implications of a believer's new life in Christ. Like Paul, I also try to help Christians understand how to follow Christ in their various vocational roles. I want to help men be Christian men and women be Christian women, husbands be Christian husbands and wives be Christian wives, and so on down the line.

Who I am flows into what I do in the particular stations providence has assigned to me. When Paul moves from the identity of a Christian and into the household codes, he is running a play his readers would have recognized from Aristotle, though he runs it on a different field.

Many students of the Bible know that household codes were commonplace in Hellenistic literature. What is less often noticed is that those codes were rooted in the individual's place within the polis. For Aristotle, man is by nature a political animal, the household is the basic unit of the city, and ordering the home is part of forming the citizen. Paul's household codes pertain to actual households, to real husbands, wives, children and servants, yet they flow out of something deeper than the city. They flow out of our adoption into the household of God (Eph 2:19). Paul borrows a familiar form and reorders every relationship in it from inside the family of God, so that the earthly home now answers to the heavenly Father.

Put more simply, I am always asking how an individual follows Jesus according to the stations providence has assigned to him. When a person is regenerated in my church, I direct his discipleship through those roles: gender and the pursuit of biblical masculinity or femininity, vocation, marital and parental status, work, citizenship and the rest.

I find all of this a joy. J. I. Packer once suggested that Christianity is the true humanism, and I agree with him. When God removes our enmity with him, writes his law on the heart, fills the soul with his Spirit and fixes our eyes on the God-Man Jesus Christ, a man or woman finds that the whole person is being saved and reconstituted.

That salvation works its way out into the stations of a person's life. Gender is probably more ontological than vocational, but for the purposes of this article I will treat it as a kind of station. One of the joys of watching a person come to Christ is seeing that person begin to experience manhood or womanhood the way God created it to be experienced. The same holds for the roles of husband and wife, parent and worker. This is one reason the gospel moves so quickly through households (Acts 16:15, 31-34; 1 Pet 3:1). Everyone connected to Mom can see the difference Christ has made in her.

That is a long way of arriving at the title of this article. Most of the conversions in my ministry happen to people whom providence has made citizens of the United States of America, and that citizenship is one of the many stations they now need to inhabit with gospel life.

THE QUESTION

The question I have had to ask is how a pastor with a high view of the sufficiency of Scripture goes about discipling a citizen.

My first step has been to recognize that God treats civil authorities as real, whether nations, commonwealths, or empires, and holds them responsible for how they rule (Rom 13:1; Isa 13–23).

My second step has been to stipulate what Scripture plainly shows, that God holds rulers accountable for whether they protect the innocent by punishing the wicked (Ps 72:1–4; Isa 1:17, 23; Rom 13:3–4). Christians from nearly every tradition hold that conviction, and it is sufficient for frontline discipleship. Intramural disputes live at both of these levels, such as how a nation should be defined or what role the Mosaic law plays in God's expectations of rulers. I take them seriously, though I am not persuaded they must be settled before ordinary believers can be discipled as citizens. If I were discipling a newly converted senator, more of those questions would need answers, but that is a different task from the one I am describing.

My third step is to counsel the Christian on how to steward his citizenship in a way that pleases God. Part of that stewardship is working to move his nation toward what God expects of it. In counseling him about how, I give the most weight to tactics Scripture commands outright and appropriate weight to those inferred from biblical principles.

COMMANDED AND INFERRED

That last distinction deserves a closer look. Some tactics are commanded in so many words. Prayer is the most widely agreed upon, because Paul tells us to pray "for kings and all who are in high positions" (1 Tim 2:1-2). Other tactics require prudential wisdom anchored in a deduction from biblical principles. The Westminster Confession speaks of truths deduced from Scripture "by good and necessary consequence" (WCF 1.6) that should bind the conscience. The tactics I have in view are applications of that kind of wisdom to particular circumstances, so believers may reasonably differ on them and should hold them with a more open hand.

None of this is new to discipleship. When Paul tells the thief to stop stealing and to labor with his own hands (Eph 4:28), the church cannot shepherd that command faithfully without exercising a fair amount of prudential wisdom about the man's skills, the job market and the conditions on the ground. His local church has a responsibility to help him apply a biblical principle to the practical matter of finding work in a particular place and time.

The same is true of Titus 2, where the older women are charged with training the younger women to love their husbands and children and to submit to their own husbands. One reason the older women are given this work is that it takes seasoned wisdom to help each younger woman find her way to obedience in her own circumstances.

In neither case would anyone allege a departure from biblical fidelity because prudential wisdom entered the discipleship, provided the wisdom really was wisdom and was drawn from biblical principles.

Much of the discipleship of a citizen will depend on variables like the form of government he lives under. The apostles' silence on the particulars of civil godliness is the same kind of gap Paul leaves with the man who was stealing. If we walked into a church and found an ex-con sitting with his pastor, being counseled on how to build a LinkedIn profile, nobody would raise an eyebrow.

Every station providence assigns will require some degree of prudential wisdom drawn from biblical principles, since Scripture rarely supplies the particular prescription. Encouraging a husband to put down the video game controller and catch up on his honey-do list is well within the mission of the church, and so is helping a citizen steward his citizenship.

A PROPOSED LIST FOR DISCIPLING CITIZENS

I close with a partial list of practices for discipling citizens, grouped by category, each with brief scriptural support. Prayer, submission, and witness rest most directly on explicit commands. Participation and protection lean more on prudential inference. Relativizing and speech sit between the two.

Relativizing

Reject the state's claims to transcendence. The nations are as a drop from a bucket, and God's kingdom outlasts them all (Isa 40:15-17; Dan 2:44).
Teach the right order of loves, including a proper patriotism. Our citizenship is in heaven, and we still seek the welfare of the city where God has placed us (Phil 3:20; Jer 29:7).
Give believers a biblical theology of where governments tend to drift, toward taking more than they are given and toward corruption (1 Sam 8:10-18; Rev 13).
Resist the state's incursions into the domains of family, church, and education (Deut 6:6-7; Acts 5:29).
Lower anxiety, since hope does not rest on elections and the king's heart is in the Lord's hand (Ps 146:3; Prov 21:1).

Prayer

Pray for rulers and all in authority (1 Tim 2:1-2).
Pray the imprecatory psalms against the wicked who crush the weak (Ps 94; Rev 6:10).
Pray for justice for the oppressed (Ps 72:1-4).
Pray for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:9–13)

Submission

Pay taxes and render honor where honor is due (Rom 13:6-7; 1 Pet 2:17).
Obey lawful authority (Rom 13:5; Titus 3:1).
Know the limits of obedience, and when we must obey God rather than men (Exod 1:17; Dan 3; Acts 4:19).

Speech

Speak truth to rulers, as Nathan and John the Baptist did (2 Sam 12; Mark 6:18).
Open your mouth for those who cannot speak for themselves (Prov 31:8-9).
Speak of opponents without slander and with gracious speech (Titus 3:2; Col 4:6).

Participation

Vote and serve on juries as acts of stewardship, an inference from the ruler's charge to do justice (Deut 16:18-20; Rom 13:4).
Use the civil rights you have, as Paul used his Roman citizenship (Acts 16:37; 22:25).
Encourage gifted believers toward office and civil service, following Joseph, Daniel and Nehemiah.
Seek the welfare of your own city through school boards, councils and neighborhoods (Jer 29:7).
Wield designated power righteously as an act of neighbor love (Prov 29:2, see example of Esther also).

Protection

Defend the weak, including the unborn, the widow and the orphan (Isa 1:17; Prov 24:11-12).
Advocate for just laws and against unjust decrees (Isa 10:1-2; Amos 5:15).
Do mercy work that protects the vulnerable where the law fails them (Luke 10:25-37; Gal 6:10).

Witness

Live quietly and do good, so that slander is put to silence (1 Thess 4:11-12; 1 Pet 2:12-15).
Let the church display a just commonwealth to the watching city (Eph 3:10).
Act as salt and light in a world that needs God’s preserving and illuminating Word (Matt 5:13-16)

CONCLUSION

Similar lists could be produced for normative Christian husbanding, normative Christian mothering, or normative Christian working. And I think that's the main idea I'm trying to express in this article. Discipling Christians to honor Christ with their citizenship is, from my way of thinking, a requirement of a faithful shepherd and does not require a discipleship approach unique to this particular domain. We know how to do this. We already do it in many other areas of life. And we should not preclude this aspect of discipleship.