Growing up on the fringes of the Jesus movement in the 1980s, Mark Scandrette’s childhood was shaped by his parents’ radical faith. They moved to an urban neighborhood to embody Jesus’ teachings, creating an environment where faith permeated daily life.
As a teenager, Mark’s personal engagement with the New Testament deepened his spiritual journey. However, it also sparked questions about the disconnect between Jesus’ teachings and common church practices. “We follow a homeless rabbi from the first century,” Mark recalls wondering, “but how is getting dressed up for Sunday services actually helping us live his way?”
This tension between institutional Christianity and the “untamed way of Jesus” has driven Mark’s lifelong passion for discipleship. In a recent Pivot Podcast episode, he shared his journey of reimagining discipleship and offered fresh perspectives on following Jesus in the 21st century.
The “Jesus Dojo”: A New Approach to Discipleship
After attending seminary in Minnesota, Mark and his wife moved to San Francisco in the mid-aughts to start a new faith community. Before they launched, they took a posture of humble listening: instead of assuming they knew what would resonate in the post-Christian context of their new home, they went out and asked people what they needed.
What they heard was striking: people longed for practical ways to follow Jesus’ teachings, but balked at what they perceived institutional Christianity to be.
“We wanted to create an environment that would be highly relational with high trust and vulnerability, and action-oriented,” Mark says. A way he began to describe what he was hearing was that the people needed a “Jesus dojo.”
The term “dojo” comes from Japanese martial arts, referring to a place of practice. Mark saw parallels between learning a martial art and learning to follow Jesus. “Jesus’ way of making disciples is more like a karate studio than a college lecture hall or a typical congregational setting,” he says.
So he and his team decided to spend significant time in the Gospel of Luke.
Mark continues: “We just said, let’s notice every place where Jesus modeled something for his disciples, or gave an instruction to his disciples about what they might do. And we cataloged that, and then we sort of pondered what would it be like if we formed a community around trying to practice those teachings?”
This led to the creation of “learning labs”—six-week periods during which the community focused on a specific theme from Jesus’ teachings and engaged in practices related to that theme.
The result has been a shift from an information-based, event-driven approach to faith to one that is more holistic, experiential, and transformative. In so doing, it bridges the gap between hearing Jesus’ teachings and actually living them out in everyday life.
How might church leaders apply the insights from Mark’s experiments in their own contexts?
Shift from Information to Integration
Mark emphasizes that while many church leaders are experts at “slicing and dicing the Bible,” true transformation requires moving beyond information to integration. “If we really want to see whole life transformation, we have to move just from that information download to more of an integrative approach,” he advises.
Action step: Create opportunities for your congregation to practice and reflect on Jesus’ teachings, not just hear about them.
Embrace Risk and Vulnerability
Transformation happens when we step out of our comfort zones. Mark encourages leaders to be the first to take risks and invite others to follow. “I’m going to be a participant guide, meaning I’m saying, let’s do it. And I’m going to be the first to jump in the pool, the first to take the risk,” he explains.
Action step: Share your own spiritual journey and challenges with your congregation, inviting them into a more authentic faith experience.
Prioritize Small Group Discipleship
While Sunday gatherings are important, Mark suggests that the real transformation happens in smaller, more intimate settings. “Very rarely do I see a lead pastor or priest prioritize the small group aspects, but that’s where the transformation happens,” he notes.
Action step: Invest time and resources in developing strong small group ministries or one-on-one discipleship opportunities.
Address Real-Life Challenges
Mark’s approach focuses on addressing the “aches” people experience in their daily lives – stress, broken relationships, questions of meaning, and social justice issues. By connecting Jesus’ teachings to these real-life challenges, faith becomes more relevant and transformative.
Action step: Survey your congregation to identify their most pressing challenges, then create teachings and experiments that address these issues through the lens of Jesus’ teachings.
Embrace a New Leadership Paradigm
Rather than seeing themselves primarily as teachers or problem-solvers, Mark encourages church leaders to become “guides to exploration.” This shift allows leaders to grow alongside their congregants, creating a more dynamic and participatory faith community.
Action step: Reframe your leadership role, focusing more on facilitating experiences and guiding reflection rather than providing all the answers.
The Ninefold Path: A Framework for Transformation
Mark’s latest book, The Ninefold Path of Jesus: Hidden Wisdom of the Beatitudes, offers a structured approach to this experiential discipleship. The book guides readers through nine shifts based on the Beatitudes, each addressing a fundamental aspect of human experience and spiritual growth.
For example, the second Beatitude—”Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”—invites people to face their pain rather than avoid it. Mark’s approach includes practical exercises like abstaining from distractions, writing lament poems, and engaging with collective grief.
This framework provides a powerful tool for church leaders looking to deepen their congregation’s engagement with Jesus’ teachings and foster genuine spiritual transformation.
As we navigate the complexities of our rapidly changing world, Mark’s approach invites us to reimagine what it means to follow Jesus. It’s not just about believing the right things or attending the right services; it’s about embodying the way of Jesus in our daily lives, in community with others.
The challenge before us as church leaders and disciples is clear: How can we create spaces and practices that foster this kind of transformative, experiential faith? How might our churches look different if we prioritized “practice” as much as we do “preaching”?
Mark’s work reminds us that the teachings of Jesus are not mere historical artifacts or abstract principles, but a living, breathing invitation to a different way of being in the world. As we grapple with issues of social justice, personal spiritual growth, and community building, perhaps it’s time we all stepped into the “dojo” of Jesus’ teachings.
