My wife recently gave birth to our fourth child. After the delivery the doctor passed me a pair of scissors and asked if I’d like to cut the umbilical cord, a privilege I did not enjoy with my first three children. It occurred to me as I gripped those cold sterile scissors that this was only the first of many times that we would be ‘cutting the cord.’ As parents, we know that we must ‘cut the cord’ many times throughout our children’s lives: when they go to school, when they spend the night at a friend’s house for the first time, when they take the car for the first time, when they leave for college, I’m sure some of you with grown children can affirm that the cutting never really stops.
Spiritually we do the same thing, not only with our own children, but with every disciple that we nurture. Just as a woman’s body nurtures a life from conception to birth, there is a period of pre-discipleship in which we display the light of Christ and declare the gospel, bringing one toward new birth and cutting that initial cord of pre-discipleship. We then continue on through various phases of nurturing a new disciple. For example, we might read the Bible together with a new believer, teaching them how to meditate on God’s Word and pray, then we ‘cut the cord.’ We encourage them to nurture their own soul through self-feeding and independent intimacy with God. We take them along with us as we share the gospel with a new friend, demonstrating how to build a relationship with a lost friend and proclaim the gospel, and then we ‘cut the cord’ and challenge them to go and do the same.
In many ways cutting the discipleship cord is an act of sending and sending is a distinguishing component of effective discipleship; one that is too often overlooked. The objective of Christian parenting is to equip our children to independently live godly and successful lives. As parents we do this through repeatedly training and then ‘cutting’ loose and sending them on to confront the next challenge independently. Even so, effective disciple-makers are constantly equipping others to live godly lives and looking for the next appropriate time to ‘cut the cord’ and send those to whom we are ministering out to reproduce the ‘cord cutting’ pattern. What cord do you need to be soon cutting?