Impact of Discipleship: Romeo Bagunu
/I met Alex Allen on the day I got saved. We passed each other on Walnut Street as I made my way from the high school ministry to main service. It was an awkward encounter for me if I am being honest. He vaguely remembered me, but I didn’t remember him at all.
You see, when I was a kid, my family in the KC Metro would get together and hang out all the time. My most distinct childhood memories are playing with my cousins at my grandma’s house. Every now and then, close family friends would join the party. I remembered Uncle Chuck, Alex’s dad, but I didn’t actually remember Alex. He was six years older than my cousins and me, so he was probably too cool to play with a bunch of snot-nosed kids anyway. He told me that one time we literally broke his ankles by hanging on to his legs while he was trying to get away from us. I can see why he might have avoided us thereafter.
“Success, in my mind, was a simple matter of gliding through the process and moving on to the next best thing”
But here we were again, a decade later. This wasn’t really our “first” encounter, but we both were entirely different by then‒not just by virtue of age and time, but because Jesus Christ had breathed new, everlasting life into us. Alex had gotten saved and had been following the Lord for a couple of years, while I had just been born again moments earlier. He was now a godly man and a ready minister of the gospel, and I was just a new-born babe in Christ.
The Lord knew I was dangerously immature and blissfully unaware. I was in desperate need of a spiritual father. By some strange act of providence, our paths crossed that Sunday morning, and several months later we got paired for discipleship.
After my salvation, I was overjoyed to discover my new life in Christ with my family at MBT. Sunday morning became the highlight of my week. Praise and worship always lifted my spirits, and the preaching of the word had me on the edge of my seat, furiously jotting down every cross-reference in a desperate attempt to capture every ounce of truth resounding from the pulpit. At first, I didn’t understand much at all. But if I knew anything, it was that I needed to follow Jesus Christ with my life, and discipleship was the next step for growing in my walk with him. Six months later, I graduated from high school and signed up for discipleship.
When we finally started the lessons, I was filled with zeal and eagerness. I came to the first lesson with dozens of verses scrawled across the pages in my favorite purple ink. There were elaborate chains of cross-references and notes about Old Testament pictures. At the time, I thought I already knew everything there was to know about the Christian life; mastering the doctrinal content from the lessons felt like a foregone conclusion. Success, in my mind, was a simple matter of gliding through the process and moving on to the next best thing.
“These religious routines became a veil for my rapidly decaying relationship with the Lord”
In short, I needed to be humbled. My childlike optimism was actually overconfidence. Pride, if you will. As it turns out, I had a lot of knowledge, but not a lot of virtue. Sure, I could tell you all about faith and repentance and judgment, but I hadn’t consecrated my life to sharing the gospel. I loved going to Bible study to learn new things and talk about this doctrine or that, but I tickled my ears with the academic exercise, and I even feigned genuine vulnerability. Yeah, I was starting to serve in ministry, but it wasn’t with the right heart. It was more out of a sense of obligation; a carnal passion for works and effort.
These religious routines became a veil for my rapidly decaying relationship with the Lord. I began to hide my sin, my doubts, and my murmurings in the darkness of my heart. Before long, I was leaving small group early to do homework and play video games. Soon thereafter, I started skipping church to pick up extra shifts at work. Most of my free time was consumed by entertainment or hanging out with other friends that I knew didn’t care about whether or not I was following Christ with my whole life. I built a separate life for myself‒one that was set apart and compartmentalized from my life at MBT.
Pride spoiled any chance of me having a very close relationship with Alex throughout this time. We kept working through the lessons, but I kept to myself as much as I could. I knew he was the one most acquainted with my spiritual life, and I knew that he genuinely cared, and I knew he could see right through me. But in spite of all of this, I didn’t want to confront how miserable I was becoming. We grew apart, and I preferred the distance.
About ten months into discipleship, an idea planted itself in the corner of my mind. I realized that I could leave at any time. I could, if I wanted to, just run away from the church, from the ministry, from my friends, and from anything to do with my walk with Christ. I could disappear, and everyone would have to move on eventually like I had never even been there. All of this could become a distant memory.
“Alex had reassured me that there was still hope of turning away from my sinful, selfish instability ”
So I ran. I fled my life and my family at MBT, and I tried my best to shut the door behind me without looking back. I blocked dozens of numbers, kept my phone on airplane mode, and isolated myself as much as possible. That summer, I established a mundane routine of waking up, going to work, coming home, and going to sleep. It was devoid of purpose. Every now and then I would hop in my car and drive to a random place in the city, hoping I wouldn’t run into anybody I knew. I would wander around for hours and sometimes just fall asleep in parking lots, indifferent to making it home. For months, I had sown the seeds of bitterness, disappointment, and sin, and so now I reaped the same. To get over the guilt, I told myself that it made no difference that I was gone. It was during this time that old thoughts of suicide resurfaced.
One day, I was at my grandma’s house trying my best to avoid conversations. One of my cousins handed me their phone and pleaded with me to pick it up. It was Alex. I didn’t know what to say, so we decided to get lunch later.
We ended up sitting at McAlister’s for a couple of hours. There was an awkward silence at the beginning and then some light small talk. Eventually, I couldn’t hold myself together. I’m really disgusting when I cry, so the table became a mountain of snotty napkins, and I could hardly put together my words. Every now and then the waitress would awkwardly stop by and check to see if we were “doing okay.” By the time we left that deli, I was still struggling and emotional, but Alex had reassured me that there was still hope of turning away from my sinful, selfish instability and back towards the unconditional, immutable love of Christ.
Alex said something to me that day that I’m never going to forget: “The best part about discipleship is getting to show your disciple grace exactly when they don’t expect it.”
When we started discipleship those many months ago, I thought it was all about the knowledge and the lessons. I was so focused on being religious that I abandoned the simple truths of a relationship with Christ. Salvation is a gift that could never be earned, only given. I would never be good enough to deserve forgiveness for my sins or to merit eternal life. Salvation is by grace and unmerited favor, predicated only upon faith in the finished work of Christ. Once I was saved, nothing could separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Like the prodigal son, I had strayed from my heavenly Father, squandering the riches of his grace on an empty fantasy. And when I came running home, broken by my own wickedness, he welcomed me with open arms and abundant mercy. There would be no condemnation if I repented from my self-destructive imaginations and came back home.
“I have begun to understand the grace of God‒and that’s discipleship”
We don’t deserve God’s grace, and we never will. Though I came to Alex feeling guilty and ashamed, and though I expected disappointment or even anger, he was only there to comfort me and to counsel me and to reassure me that he would always be there for me. Through everything, he had a father’s care for my wayward soul. To him, discipleship had never been about the teaching, the instruction, or the program. It was about the grace and truth of Christ. It was about growing in grace and in the knowledge of Christ, not about fulfilling a religious obligation. So on the day of my deepest misery and regret, he was predetermined to welcome me home with the endless love, compassion, patience, and the joy of Christ.
In the weeks that followed, I kept coming to Alex, broken over my mistakes, and emotionally all over the place. Even after I decided to follow him and come back to Midtown, I ended up making even more mistakes and felt miserable all over again. I still come to Alex when I’m confused and uncertain and insecure and unsteady; he always directs me back to the grace of Christ and reminds me to anchor myself in the truth. I don’t deserve that, and I’ll never feel like I’ve paid him back for all the times he’s saved me from myself. Without discipleship, I wouldn’t be here. If our paths had never crossed, I don’t know what would’ve happened. For all my intellectual pride, I’ll never actually know everything. But now, at least, I have begun to understand the grace of God‒and that’s discipleship.
Romeo Bagunu is a member at Midtown Baptist Temple and is a part of C&YA. He is on the AV Team, Tuesday Night Meal Team, and serves in Kidtown. He is also involved in one of the UMKC men’s Bible studies.