How Making an Apple Pie is Like Discipleship

The day after Thanksgiving, I baked an apple pie. As I worked, I contemplated how making an apple pie is like discipleship. Discipleship is the process of making disciples. It is a Christian term denoting “learners” or followers of Christ. Discipleship is the slow art of becoming like Christ.

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Watching

When I was a kid, I watched my mom and my grandmothers cook. Very rarely, they invited me into their process. Most of the time, I passively watched the cooking activities from the table.

Even though I had little actual experience cooking, there came a point in my life when I had to cook. I confidently assumed that I would be as skilled as my mothers just from watching.

As you may imagine, my first attempts at real cooking (not microwave soup cups in the dorm room) lacked the finesse of an experienced cook. In fact, I was in upstate New York as a summer missionary when I decided to make fresh creamed corn for the first time (or close to it).

Learning

That summer I lived in a home with six other people who at the beginning of the summer were strangers to me, but quickly became like family. My twenty-year-old self missed the labors of my grandparents’ gardens. I grew up eating fresh garden veggies all summer, and this particular summer was my first away from home. So when my missionary family brought fresh veggies home from the market, I offered to make the creamed corn I craved.

I laugh as I consider it today. The day that the fresh veggies came home, someone asked me to slice a tomato and quickly made fun of my abilities (or lack thereof). I had never cut a tomato a day in my life. As a wee one, my mouth broke out when I ate any citrus, so I never went near it. However, I was simply unpracticed with a knife. Yet, I still attempted the corn. Making creamed corn is quite a process if you’ve never done it. Corn cutting, scraping, and milking. I have a habit of overconfidence on the first try. It took so much longer than I anticipated!

The corn turned out decently with all the butter, milk, and pepper added. Despite that, I never forgot the tomato incident and about how, for the first time ever, my confidence did not equal my skill!

Doing

Years later, I made my first apple pie. I did not grow up eating a lot of apple pies, so I’d never, to my remembrance, watched one being made. I had in my head the idea that it was a lot like taking a Mrs. Edwards frozen pie out of the freezer and popping it in the oven, but with obviously, a little bit more work.

What took the most work, of course, was prepping the apples and making the crust. I did not anticipate that crust making could go awry nor the time it takes to cut and peel the apples. Accordingly, I underestimated the amount of time it would take me to make an apple pie from scratch.

The day after Thanksgiving, I used a store-bought crust. As a result, I knew that cutting the apples would be my biggest use of time in making the pie. It took me 30 minutes to peel and slice my apples. (I don’t have one of those handle dandy apple slicing devices.) Making things from scratch is slow work.

Fifteen years passed from that first apple pie making experience to this recent one, and my skill level increased every time I made another pie.

Becoming

I am, at this point my life, a decent cook and a relatively good baker. I can make a pie crust moderately well. Whenever possible and time permits, I make food from scratch, not from a mix or a store-bought something or another. I do it because I like it and because I believe in the process of making things from scratch, slowing down, and using my hands to endow love into the food I make.

Wonder how making an apple pie is like discipleship?

1. Discipleship is a slow art.

Jesus did not make disciples overnight, nor should we expect to do so. Discipleship takes time. Just like it took me years to learn to bake, cook, or really do anything worth doing, discipleship is a process. We are never as good at something when we start as we expect we will be. There is no microwave for discipleship. We should not expect ourselves or those we disciple to read the Bible, pray, and evangelize perfectly all at once. Jesus did not expect this of his disciples. Why do we?

Discipleship takes a lot of time in the short-term.

Just as cutting apples took me longer in the moment than I expected it to take, so does discipleship. Think of the time Jesus spent on disciple-making. He spent many hours telling stories to the broad crowd and even more time explaining his stories to his tight group of twelve.

Several factors go into the time it takes to teach and meet with disciples:

• the amount of knowledge and skill that needs to be passed on
• how much curiosity each disciple has
• the number of disciples you are discipling
• the age of your potential disciples (they may be your children)
• the personality and maturity of each disciple

Discipleship takes a lot of time in the long-term.

It took me many years to become skilled in the kitchen. If you read books on discipleship, many will suggest that you take on a group of disciples for 12 to 18 months. However, Jesus approximately had disciples for three years or so. With Christ, disciple-making was hands-on. He taught them about who He was and how to live as He did. We, in turn, study Scripture, to better know and love Christ and live like Him.

Many of the disciples were not ready to teach others until Jesus had left them alone and commanded that they make disciples. Looking at Jesus’s interactions with the disciples can teach us much about what we can expect from the disciples we are making. It is a slow process, and we will often leave them to it before we see any results (if any at times).

2. Discipleship requires patience and perseverance.

Learning to cook food from scratch requires a great deal of patience, stick-to-itiveness, and a lot of trying and failing and trying again. Discipleship is similar. Patience is required to lead well and to learn well.

Disciples need patience. Often disciples are corrected, challenged, and asked to do things far outside of our comfort zones. These things cause us to grow. Sometimes we won’t be good at the things we are asked to do, so we try again until we get better.

Discipleship leaders must be patient with those they disciple. We are looking for growth, not perfection. No one can do everything immediately. God’s pace is not the same pace as the world’s. Someone who is adept or experienced can do things faster than one who is learning. Remember to be a learner too.

There may be a discipleship leader, but he or she should still be under the leadership of Christ and the influence of other disciples. Christ continues discipling the leader as s/he disciples others. We simply do not become all that we should be overnight. Sanctification takes a lifetime of becoming.

3. Discipleship takes practice.

Just like I didn’t truly know how to do anything in the kitchen by simply watching, discipleship is active, not passive. I didn’t learn until I practiced what I saw. Each disciple must take responsibility for practicing what they are taught. One could argue that one is not really a disciple until he or she actively begins to practice the ways of Christ. Jesus taught his disciples what to do and how to live, and then he sent them out to do the things they’d practiced.

4. Discipleship endows love in a “with God” life.

Just as I endow love into each pie I make, love is endowed in discipleship. Discipleship is done because 1) God loves me, 2) I love God and want to obey, love, and serve Him, and 3) I love my sisters in Christ. Love only grows because a disciple walks with God, not alone.

As mentioned in #3 above, each disciple must take ownership of his or her active movement forward, yet disciples are accountable to one another.

Discipleship is not a sole or lone activity. It is done as a body, in community. Someone must teach. Someone must baptize. We are commanded to go, to make disciples. Jesus taught the masses, and yet, he selected a small group of men. At times, he sent them two by two.

We are to actively carry the burdens of one another while carrying our own load (paraphrase Galatians 6:2,5). At the end of the Great Commandment, he said, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” In the times that we are sent out seemingly alone, we are never alone. He is with us always. We must practice being with and for others as God is with and for us. This part of discipleship is oft forgotten.

5. Discipleship is fruitful.

The most obvious way that discipleship and apple pie are similar is that each one is fruitful. Ultimately, apple pies are meant to be shared and eaten. I labor in love to make a wonderful, delightful dish for the joy of those who eat it. So too, discipleship should make more and more disciples. It should feed others over the labor of love placed into it to the joy and delight of sharing it with others. This is the ultimate hope of discipleship – to multiply the Kingdom of God.

photo credits: photo 1: Jamie S. Harper (my own), photo 2: LearningLark Step 3: Roll out Your Crust via photopin (license), photo 3: LearningLark Step 1: Peel the Apples via photopin (license)