The keynote speaker at General Assembly 2010 describes himself as someone who has spent 35 years making disciples.
Auckland-based Mick Duncan has lived in a Manila slum for nine years, pastored churches, written books and gained renown on the international speaking circuit.
He says his own discipleship journey was strongly influenced by Murray Robertson in the 1970s. Murray, a long-serving minister at Christchurch’s Spreydon Baptist, “had a profound influence on the kind of Christ-follower I became,” Mick says.
“The thing that I really liked about what Murray Robertson did with me was that he poured his life into me… instead of me being poured into a programme.”
Mick says he’s uneasy about our contemporary “fixation” with programmes, which make discipling “someone else’s responsibility”.
Discipling is about communication between one person and another “at a profoundly intimate level,” Mick says. It’s “incredibly labour and time intensive, and because of that, people shy away from it”.
“Without wanting to be unkind,” Mick says, he suspects that many people in churches have lost the ability to develop effective relationships with people in need.
“I do think we are kind of relationally retarded.”
This isn’t because we lack compassion, he says, but because the opportunities and skills to cross relational barriers are becoming less common. People who are “different and difficult” often become the responsibility of medical or social-work professionals, and we are taught from a young age to mistrust strangers.
“We increasingly feel excused from walking towards the stranger in our midst.”
He says at Assembly he’ll be encouraging people to recognise that person in their existing world “who they can get alongside in such a way that that other person does end up a disciple-making disciple”.
“People like to say, ‘I love the poor and the lost and the lonely’. We’ve got to concretise this; to put a face to that kind of statement: it’s a particular lost and lonely person in our world.
“What does it mean to get alongside that person so that we walk with them and they walk with us?”
People inside the church easily become insulated from the torment that those living without God can face, he says.
This can be because they’ve been brought up in Christian homes, or because after being converted they become “very quickly enmeshed” with church culture and “lose the sharpness of that memory”.
“These two groups have got to do more time with lost and lonely people in our society.”
Seeing Jesus as “some kind of life coach” also raises Mick’s ire.
“We take to him our [life] script and we say, ‘Jesus this is our script, your job is to make a better script. Make me a better person so I can live a fulfilled life’.
“But he rips it up. Then he says, ‘let’s write a new script: this will not necessarily be about you; it will be about others, the stranger in your midst’.”
Living in the slums of Manila, with the organisation Servants for Asia’s Urban Poor, was one way Mick sought to live out this calling.
After nine years, Mick and his family left the slums and returned to New Zealand. He says one reason was due to feeling “burnt out as a person” and becoming a poor decision maker as a result. He’d become an adrenaline junkie, living off the stress caused by the slum’s constant challenges.
“In the end that’s going to fry your nerve endings and your immune system is going to suffer. It took me a number of years to recover.”
“I had to go on a learning curve”, he says, and find out how he could keep following his calling.
His experiences in the slum didn’t mean he dismisses New Zealanders’ sufferings as less valid.
“The pain and the suffering that middle New Zealand feels is different from the pain and suffering that the absolute poor face, but the pain is just as real.
“Why is it that people think that learning how to love the poor is sexier than learning how to love the middle class? My learning how to love the middle class has been more difficult and more costly than learning how to love the poor in the slums.”
*General Assembly 2010 is being held at St Andrew’s College in Christchurch from 30 September to 3 October. Find out more at www.presbyterian.org.nz/ga10
By Amanda Wells