Are you living as a Christian every day of the week?

Territorial Whole-Life Discipleship Officer Captain Michael Hutchings calls us to be representatives of Jesus in all parts of our lives.

Where will you be on Monday morning? You might be at school, college, work, a job centre, a supermarket, a garden centre. Wherever you are, you’ll often be surrounded by people who don’t follow Jesus, and you may be the only Christian they know.

Do these places matter? In The Great Divide, Mark Greene notes the tragedy that many Christians believe that large parts of their lives don’t matter to God – that only ‘church’ roles and activities are ‘sacred’ and, therefore, important to God and his mission. 

Such thinking, that sacred-secular divide, denies the fact that God has a claim on every part and moment of our lives. It has a damaging impact on our understanding of church life, our discipleship and our mission.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Greene also notes that an estimated 98 per cent of Christians have been neither envisioned nor equipped for mission in the 95 per cent of life when they’re not involved in church-based activity. That alarming statistic shows there’s work to be done.

The time we spend as the gathered Church – on Sunday, in Bible studies, prayer groups, and other activities – has to impact our lives as the scattered Church from Monday to Saturday. And what we do in our scattered lives has to inform and shape the time spent when we gather as corps.

How can we live well for Jesus in our daily lives, as people who have been sent out of our corps to make disciples (see Matthew 28:19) and proclaim his lordship (see Colossians 1)? 

How do we approach every context with an awareness that we are Christ’s representatives, even in a slow moving supermarket queue?

Put simply, how do we live as whole-life disciples in the places where we live, work, rest and play?

In Scattered and Gathered, Neil Hudson describes a disciple as someone who is ‘learning to live the way of Jesus in their context at this moment’. In other words, disciples are learners, and their learning happens in the course of daily life – not just at a Tuesday night Bible study!

What role does your corps have to play in making whole-life disciples? At the Mission Conference this weekend, we are unpacking this question and considering the vital signs of a whole-life disciplemaking church, led by Steve Rouse, church team director at the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC).

How do we move beyond the ‘ABC’ (attendance, buildings and cash) of corps life and explore ‘DE’ – the tasks of discipleship and equipping? Two further streams this weekend are covering the potential impact of whole-life preaching and whole-life worship on our daily lives.

A key resource from the LICC is Vital Signs, a collection of tools including a brief online assessment, a short how-to book, and a series of next-step videos. Vital Signs is suitable for use by individuals, leadership teams and the wider corps community.

It’s designed to help embed the culture and practices of whole-life discipleship into the life of the Church, so that we can all grow and flourish as everyday disciples on the front lines where we live. Vital Signs could be just what your corps needs to become effective as a whole-life disciplemaking church.

Where will you be on Monday morning?

• Find out more about Vital Signs and becoming a whole-life disciplemaking church at licc.org.uk/vital-signs.