Understanding Our Four Roles at Aldersgate

A glimpse of everyday community life at Aldersgate.

At Aldersgate UMC, our pastors have recently preached through a sermon series exploring our Four Roles.  In this article, I’ll briefly introduce those four roles, while providing a bit of the story behind our motivation and naming of those roles.

What are the four roles I’m talking about?  Witness, Friend, Servant, and Follower.  They name some particular ways we can describe a maturing disciple of Jesus Christ at Aldersgate UMC.  They’re not meant to exclude other roles we might take on as maturing disciples, but they at least depict some specific ways that can help us (carefully and prayerfully) indicate if we’re moving towards maturity over time.

Naming these four roles was a fairly recent development at Aldersgate.  Where did they come from?  In the first half of 2023, our Vision Team met to revisit two fundamental questions:  who are we, and where is God taking us?  “Revisit”, because other teams at Aldersgate have asked these questions throughout its relatively short history.  Through that process, we were able to articulate our church’s mission:  Each person is cultivating mature disciples in Christ.  A question provoked by that statement, however, is “When are we succeeding in that mission?”  In other words, what does success look like?  Are we actually helping cultivate mature disciple in Christ?  What is a “mature disciple”?

To answer those questions, we remembered that a disciple is a learner.  One who follows another, works towards attaining the same level of proficiency in their skill, and possibly assists in spreading their knowledge and teachings to others.  As Christian disciples, specifically, we learn and follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.  As we mature, we hope to see Christ formed in us, to respond and act as Jesus would act, and to do what Jesus would do.  And then ultimately “carry” Christ to others.

How did we land on this particular list of four?  We went to the source.  We read through the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and the book of Acts, looking for the characteristics and competencies of Jesus and his earliest disciples.  We also thought about the people we know, or have known, at Aldersgate UMC that we believe exhibit Jesus-like qualities that we’d like to emulate.  From those observations, we first created a longer list of possible roles, and then trimmed the list to four as a group.  We wanted to name the roles we thought were not only important and attainable, but ones that seemed to fit our Aldersgate community well.  Although some of Jesus’ important skills and characteristics didn’t make this very short list, we know that others like teacher and healer and preacher could have been other roles we could have named.

We’re now defining what we can do to cultivate these roles together, at Aldersgate.  Stay tuned!

By Cliff Whitmore