Impact of Discipleship: Michaela Creer
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“I felt fairly confident that I knew how to navigate a church and the Christian life ”
There have been a few times for me so far where God brings something into my life that has a far-reaching, continuing impact. Discipleship still has this impact on me to this day, and I’m just beginning to realize it. At the end of the Cost of Discipleship class, I thought I had a fairly good idea of what to expect. Looking back now, I just smile and think, “I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”
When I started attending Midtown Baptist Temple in April 2018, I felt fairly confident that I knew how to navigate a church and the Christian life in general. I had grown up with parents who loved me and taught me about God, been involved in several Christian ministries since I was a teenager, and had been leading Bible studies for 8th-grade girls at my previous job at an after-school teen center. I was more than confident; I was complacent and even stagnant. I had been going to a church since my childhood where I knew that very few people were truly pursuing God and his word. I was constantly being called upon to serve and give but never actually felt like I was being challenged and encouraged in the word. I was stagnant in my faith but was not willing to admit that to myself.
Moving to Kansas City in 2018 and attending MBT was not as easy as I thought it would be. For one thing, the pastor truly preached through every part of the Bible and challenged us to live it in our lives. Part of the challenge was to be involved in the discipleship process. I signed up for it, simply because I knew every church has their “promotional program” and discipleship seemed to be the one MBT wanted everyone to do. I looked through the book after I bought it and decided that everything was going to be a review for me, but I might as well just finish the program.
I was then paired with Rachel White and Mercy Mugeche. The first meeting in August of 2018 involved us simply meeting up to talk and get to know one another. I was caught off guard by how they genuinely wanted to get to know more about my personal and spiritual life. Little did I know that this was just the beginning.
It was truly God’s perfect timing that I started discipleship that year because he taught me two important things. First, that without him I am nothing, as in literal dirt, and trying to do things on my own would always fail. Discipleship started right as I began my first year of teaching. I felt so hopeful every morning and then every night I would go home dead tired and discouraged. It was an incredibly difficult year, but Mercy and Rachel were right there with me. As I saw how they truly cared for me, I began to share more and they consistently prayed for and encouraged me.
“God answered my prayers by changing my heart”
God also began to do another work within me. Rachel and Mercy were doing so much to invest in me, and I could feel myself resisting. It didn’t make sense because all they had shown me was love. I realized that I was resisting because I felt like I could not trust them and even more so felt like I could not trust God. During discipleship, my constant prayer request was my job. My thought was, how can I trust God when he keeps putting me through failure over and over again?
This all came to a head when I went to my first Mission Focus Conference. I remember Mercy asking me, “What are you trusting God for this coming year?” At the time, I told her to see a coworker come to Christ, but God wanted so much more from me. God convicted me of my “me first” attitude that was so easily the hidden centerpiece of my Christian life. Mission Focus was the final push of what discipleship had been consistently pointing out. I was afraid to trust God with my life because of what he would require. Would it be my family? My future? My health? I asked God to forgive me for not trusting him and was now willing to trust him no matter what he called me to do. I knew he was calling me to do that specifically in sharing the gospel at work.
I thought God was done working in my life during discipleship until we came to the liberty in Christ lesson. In this lesson, I was once again confronted with trusting God. Psalms 40:8 says, “I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my heart.” This scripture convicted me because doing God’s will was not usually my delight. It usually felt like something I had to do, a duty. Rachel explained that lordship is yielding my will to God’s will. If I am being honest, I hate yielding anything. I hate admitting when I’m wrong or when I’ve lost a game. If I was going to yield my will to God and delight in it, I realized that this also required a close relationship with him.
When someone has a close relationship with someone, even if they do not always understand them, they love doing things for them and with them. Throughout discipleship, God was showing me that he wanted me to have a deeper and more intimate relationship with him. I was pushed toward him in ways I had never been before. As I shared with my disciplers my prayer requests for boldness in sharing the gospel as a way to yield to God’s will, they held me accountable. They prayed for me and with me and even texted me. Through their encouragement, I was able to begin sharing my faith at work, which was something I had never even tried before. The funny thing was I did not even realize how God was answering these prayers until Rachel pointed it out to me. It was so humbling to be able to see that God answered my prayers by changing my heart.
“I truly did not want out time to be brought to a close”
It is kind of crazy to think that at the beginning, I thought discipleship was just a program. In the end, I truly did not want our time to be brought to a close. God worked in my heart in more ways than just the lessons in the discipleship book. Throughout discipleship, God showed me how to trust him more and have a closer relationship with him, which I am forever grateful for.
Michaela Creer is a member at Midtown Baptist Temple and is a part of C&YA. She serves in the jail ministry and is also involved in the Grandview women’s Bible study.