06/05/2026
The Weekly Peace 6.5.26
Christ-Follower or Christian?
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.”
Matthew 9:9
Matthew’s life as a disciple began not with a statement of belief but with motion. When Jesus said, “Follow me,” Matthew chose to get up and follow.
Abram also began is life of faith not with a statement of belief but with motion. God’s first instructions to him were these
“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”
Genesis 12:1
It is time for Christians to upgrade our language. For too long, we have let our religion be defined by a set of beliefs or creeds that people are or are not willing to say. But what does it matter what you say if you don’t get up and do something about it? It was not until the night before he died that Jesus, speaking only to his closest followers in the Gospel of John, tells them to believe in him, to put their trust in him. In other words, we have the order all wrong. We think that the first step of a Christian is to say out loud that they accept Jesus as Lord, but it’s not the first step. The first step, for Matthew, for the disciples, for Abraham, was to follow.
When someone comes to me who doesn’t believe in God, I tell them to do stuff. I say, “try, for two months, sitting in silence for 20 minutes a day, reading the Bible and serving the poor face to face for at least one hour a week. Then come back to me and we will talk about what you believe.” I have found that it is in the following that they come to believe, not the other way around.
In his book, Discernment in the Early Church and Today, my good friend and Seminary classmate Rev Dr John Lewis writes, “I use the distinctive title ‘Christ-follower’ to characterize anyone involved in the early church…I don’t use the word ‘believer’…the word implies a mental conviction rather than an embodied response to their encounters with the risen Christ.” (p.17) In other words, the early Christians followed Jesus, they did what he did. They shared their belongings. They broke bread together. They prayed for one another. They served the less fortunate and they taught about God’s love.
There are many people today who identify as Christians but who are not following Jesus as he lived in the gospels. Jesus served the poor, he gave everything that he had, he taught of love and dined with sinners, and he responded to hatred with nothing but love. So maybe we need to upgrade our words. I don’t want to be just Christian, I want to follow Jesus. I want to be a Christ-follower, as hard and in fact impossible that is. I know that every day, I try to follow Jesus and I fail. I own a lot of nice stuff. I get mad and say stupid stuff, I don’t forgive enough, I don’t help those who are less fortunate as much as I could. But I want to follow and I am trying! I would much rather be a Christ follower who is running way behind Jesus than someone who says “I believe” but doesn’t even try to follow.
