“Christian”? “Believer”? Follower”? Or Something Else?

What should we call ourselves? What word best reflects how we think of ourselves? I left out one option—“Churchgoer”—because, though it needn’t, it can slightly smack of a Sunday-attendance focus rather than a heart focus; what’s more, it would no longer embrace the increasingly significant numbers who have become disillusioned by organised evangelical religion and stepped away from in-person involvement.

This blog is not about the phenomenon of the ex-vangelical, aka post-evangelical, but we can’t exclude from the question those who are sincere in saying they love Jesus but are no longer in love with the church that aims to represent him (perhaps you know some). The reasons will be various, but it usually comes down to attitudes and behaviours they’ve witnessed that, in their eyes, fail to reflect the Jesus they see in the Gospels; the Jesus of the Beatitudes (in fact, it’s quite the opposite). It’s not simply the attitudes and behaviours of the occasional individual, that we will always come across, but those apparently institutionalised in church organisations of which they’ve been part. Perhaps I will write a blog solely about that sometime.              

So what name is appropriate? I guess the most obvious would be the first one, “Christian.” It works as a noun, but what would that be as a verb—as a “doing” word? How does someone “Christian,” day to day? It needs something further to define it, you would think. The problem is, that we don’t find a definition in Scripture. The New Testament Greek word christianos appears only three times—twice in Acts and once in 1 Peter—and it is likely intended as derogatory in the first two instances. NB an NIV word search on Biblegateway.com will produce four more results, but those are all in sub-headings added by the publishers, which are not part of the original manuscripts (my advice is always to ignore or disable sub-headings—read and decide for yourself what a passage is about).    

Speaking of Scripture, we can easily find a proof text to affirm “believer.” Words from the “believe” word group appear hundreds of times. For example, in Acts 1:15, we read that “Peter stood up among the believers” to speak. In Acts 5:14, “More and more men and women believed in the Lord.” And perhaps most pertinently, there are verses such as Acts 16:31, which seems straightforward enough: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”

So is that it? Is that enough? To “believe in” Jesus? Park your answer while we look at the next possibility, which is equally scripturally-backed.

This one is from the mouth of Jesus himself. Whether we should ascribe greater weight to it for that reason is another matter—so-called “red letter Bibles, which have the words of Jesus in red, would seem to suggest so. In any event, the invitation that Jesus extends on multiple occasions, from the very beginning with Peter and Andrew (Matthew 4:19), is “Follow me.”

But here’s the thing. Both “believe in” and “follow” may have clear scriptural precedents, but the question we have to ask ourselves is whether the meaning of those English words as they’re used today conveys what their New Testament Greek equivalents had in mind. For example, I’m often told by social media platforms that “so-and-so is now following you.” Actually, not that often, but sometimes … And yet, I don’t think what social media has in mind is what Jesus had in mind.

For example, concerning Peter and Andrew in Matthew 4, we read, “At once they left their nets and followed him.” Similarly with James and John, a couple of verses further on: “They immediately followed him, leaving the boat and their father behind.” I think we can safely assume that in both instances Matthew intends there to be a significance in his characterisation (and indeed, repetition) of what’s happening here as a “leaving behind,” with a personal cost involved. Further reinforcing that is Peter saying to Jesus in Matthew 19:27, “We’ve given up everything to follow you.” What does “everything” mean here? Probably what Jesus references in reply: “Everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or property, for my sake, will receive a hundred times as much in return and will inherit eternal life.” Hmmm—who says there is no heavenly reward for what we do in this life? As an aside, we should not read this as Jesus saying they had to abandon their families; still less, that that should be normative for his followers.     

But the point is that Jesus saying “follow me” is a far greater lifestyle challenge than the social media invitation that it might come across as today. This seems clear in Jesus’ challenge to his disciples in Matthew 16:24, which seems to add some further definition to just “following”: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” It appears to mean a great deal more than just recognising Jesus as an influencer, keeping up with what he’s saying and doing in case it’s something that we, too, might want to identify with.

What, then, of the equally scriptural notion of being “a believer”? My own view, which I think is well-supported by Scripture, is that we cannot separate “believing” from “doing.” In other words, what we believe is shown by what we do in practice, rather than what’s going on in our personal thought world. My most recent blog article talks about this a bit: https://www.steveburnhope.com/blog/are-good-works-a-good-thing-or-a-bad-thing-nbsp. In chapter 2 of the New Testament letter bearing his name, James speaks of it in no uncertain terms: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?” and “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that …” If being “a believer” on its lonesome isn’t enough to save demons, then it’s unlikely to be enough to save anyone else.

This is not suggesting that Acts 16:31 is wrong (“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved”) but rather that we cannot take an individual verse, out of its context, and build (flawed) theological conclusions on that one verse alone. If we “allow Scripture to interpret Scripture” (which is the correct approach) then we will take account of what all relevant verses have to say about (in this case) what “believe” means, not just one or two isolated ones. The context will undoubtedly also have something to say (a short and simple phrase, such as Acts 16:31 here, is rarely if ever intending to be offering a self-contained theological teaching).        

So, we’ve seen the limitations in the terms “Christian,” “believer,” and “follower.” But all is not lost, because we have one more to consider, that we saw Jesus use a moment ago, in the context of his challenge not simply to “follow” him but to “deny themselves and take up their cross and follow him.” He introduced it with “Whoever wants to be my disciple” must embrace these things.

The Greek word usually translated “disciple” appears over 250 times in the four Gospels and Acts (though curiously, perhaps, it doesn’t appear in any of the letters). It’s initially used to speak of Jesus’ disciples in the sense of The Twelve, as they’re called—the Apostles—but it’s also used throughout Acts to speak of Jesus’ followers more widely. What might “disciple” have to say to us?

The first characteristic of a disciple is that it embraces being both a believer and a follower, in the senses that we’ve been exploring. But it goes further. A disciple is “an apprentice.” The goal of a disciple’s “believing in” and “following” is to increasingly become like the one they are apprenticed to (or, “discipled” by), as they learn from watching them and being with them. That’s why there’s reference to “denying ourselves” and “taking up our cross,” which are patently what Jesus modelled. “Copying” Jesus is not too strong a word, but it means imitating in the sense of emulating and reproducing, rather than simulating or pretending.      

The goal of a Christian, a believer, or a follower of Jesus (pick your term), is not to get to heaven when we die (avoiding eternal conscious torment in hell). The so-called “Sinner’s Prayer” has a lot to answer for in implying that’s what it’s all about. Rather, the goal is to be Christ-like now—and ever-increasingly so—until one day we pass through physical death into resurrection life. The goal is “to be” in this world “as Jesus was” in this world (1 John 4:17). It’s to identify with Jesus not just in some vaguely philosophical sense of sharing culturally conservative values (most conservative Christians assume Jesus shares their values, and hence feel emboldened to promote them on his behalf) but to identify with him in copying his lifestyle of servanthood, self-denial, compassion, generosity, personal cost, loving enemies as well as friends, and shunning world-inspired ways towards people in favour of Jesus-inspired ways.