What is discipleship care?
Discipleship care is a form of relating that connects soulful listening with pastoral care, always paying attention to what God might be up to. Some Christian traditions would use the phrase “spiritual direction” to describe this holy attentiveness.
Imagine a gardener caring for his vineyard. Among the rows of twisting vines, some branches hang low to the ground, are stepped on, and eventually break. Fractured and away from the life source, the branch attempts to root itself into the ground in an effort to survive and heal apart from the vine. But any fruit it bears this way will be sour at best.
An attentive gardener identifies this isolation, lowers his hands under the branches, and rips them from the ground. This can seem brutal and even painful, but he quickly reunites the branch with the vine through a grafting process. Gradually, the branch heals and reconnects to the source of life.
This is the difficult, sometimes confusing, but ultimately healthy journey of living united to the vine.
Discipleship care is about understanding our place in the vineyard, knowing the Father who is the Gardener and abiding in Christ who is the Vine. As the branches, we will bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit as we live our regular lives with him and for the sake of others (John 15:1-17).
“The focus of spiritual mentoring is to help people pay attention to what God is doing in their lives and to respond. It is not “directing” others in the sense of imposing an agenda on them and telling them what to do. Rather it is meant to be friends, who listen deeply, and who may point out what God is doing and help them discern God’s agenda.
In this busy and distracted world one of the oldest, most important, and most difficult spiritual disciplines is simply being attentive. Jesus told his followers to ‘give your full attention to what God is doing right now.’ (Matthew 6:33 in The Message) If the stress of being over-busy is one reason spiritual mentoring matters, the need for safety and security is another.”
A walk in the garden at La Foce, Tuscany