The Costs of Discipleship and Non-Discipleship

By D. Eric Schansberg  

When I was in grad school, my brother was in seminary. He recommended “a great book”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. I had probably heard of it, but his recommendation moved it to the top of my reading list. I enjoyed the book immensely and called him back to compare notes. To my utter surprise, he said, “Oh, I haven’t read it yet.” And I sputtered in reply: “You can’t say a book is great if you haven’t read it!” 

Still, I’m glad that his comment encouraged me to read Bonhoeffer’s classic work. But the book seems more often owned and quoted than read. Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy is in the same category. I’ve led a dozen small groups through it. And I always joke that the participants will read a book that many church leaders own but haven’t read.  

Willard and Bonhoeffer have this in common as well: They both thought it was important to describe “the cost of discipleship” and “the cost of non-discipleship.” Thanks to Bonhoeffer, the former is the more famous phrase. But ironically, it’s often misunderstood. And the latter is rarely considered—at least directly. What can Bonhoeffer and Willard teach us about these concepts?  

CHEAP GRACE / COSTLY GRACE 

Bonhoeffer gets to “the cost of discipleship” by describing “cheap grace” and contrasting it with “costly grace.” “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession. . . . Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”  

Cheap grace bears little if any direct costs in daily life. It is an incomplete version of God’s revelation to us. It misunderstands the benevolence of God in what he wants from us and for us. It diminishes the idea of redemption, reduces the Spirit to embrace Deism, and forgoes discipleship with Jesus.  

In contrast, “Costly grace . . . is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. . . . Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: ‘ye were bought at a price,’ and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us.” 

Grace was expensive for God, revealing our value to him and the consequences of our sins. But what was costly for God is free for us. Still, our obedience has costs. The easy and light yoke of grace is joined in the good news with the daily cross-bearing of sanctification. Will we pluck eyes and drop nets, as necessary, to follow Christ Jesus?  

Cheap grace sounds inexpensive, but it has costs as well. When we cheapen grace, we reduce or refuse the costs—and therefore the benefits—of discipleship with Jesus. This is the economists’ definition of “opportunity costs”: when we decide to do X with our time or money, we forgo all other opportunities and bear the cost of sacrificing those benefits.  

Willard cited two parables from Jesus that communicate the opportunity cost of cheapening grace. In Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus compares the kingdom to two things—a valuable item found in a field and a pearl. Willard noted: “Only with such images before us can we correctly assess the famous ‘cost of discipleship’ of which so much is made. Do you think the businessman who found the pearl was sweating over its cost? . . . The only thing these people were sweating about was whether they would ‘get the deal.’ Now, that is the soul of the disciple.” 

Economists warn against a cost-only or benefit-only assessment of personal decisions, business choices, and public policy. When we choose something based solely on what it costs or how it benefits, we’re ignoring the consequences of the decision.  With these levels of analysis, a person will make all sorts of mistakes. 

The same holds with religious belief and practice. When we don’t understand God well enough—when our theology is twisted away from trusting a benevolent and omniscient Father—it will be difficult to follow him wholeheartedly and properly consider his directives for life in the kingdom. Our failure to understand his goodness and competence will lead us into all sorts of sin and trouble. And if we use a thin theology to counsel others, we will probably cause trouble for them too.  

Willard continued: “One of the things that has most obstructed the path of discipleship in our Christian culture today is this idea that it will be a terribly difficult thing that will certainly ruin your life.”  

My pastor during grad school expressed the same idea this way—that devotion to God would likely result in being sent to the “buggiest, snakiest place in Africa.” But if God wants the best for us and knows what’s best for us, then obeying and following him is in fact the smartest thing we can do.  

Willard argued further that Jesus’ references to “counting the costs” (Luke 14:25-33) are not intended to sober the potential disciple—as much as to clarify the greatness of the offer, the net benefits of the bargain. Yes, there are costs—and make sure to count them—but the benefits are even greater. Bear the costs; it will be well worth it in the “divine economy.”  

Bonhoeffer also communicated this. He wrote that “costly grace” is “the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. . . . Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.” Bonhoeffer’s angle is different from Willard’s, but his understanding is the same.  

THE OPPORTUNITY COSTS OF NON-DISCIPLESHIP 

How is the church handling this aspect of the good news? Assuming relatively rigorous standards for what constitutes discipleship, the answer is somewhere between poorly and far short of what’s ideal. Willard again: “It is now understood to be a part of the ‘good news’ that one does not have to be a life student of Jesus in order to be a Christian and receive forgiveness of sins. This gives a precise meaning to the phrase ‘cheap grace,’ though it would be better described as ‘costly faithlessness’.” 

Willard turned the phrases on their ears. What seems cheap is actually more costly; what might seem more costly is actually the best way to go. “Opportunity costs” help to illustrate trade-offs within our choices: Given that a particular use of a resource precludes its use elsewhere, “value” is always best weighed by asking “compared to what?”   

As an example: After my dad died, my mom moved from a large house she owned to a smaller duplex for rent. One of the catalysts for her exodus: the opportunity cost of living in the house. She has insurance and maintenance costs. But the largest cost for her (by far) was the foregone money from investing her assets in higher rates of return elsewhere—which alone is more than the rent she pays for the duplex.  

The same is true with the costs of discipleship and non-discipleship. When we forsake the costs of discipleship, we forfeit the benefits as well. Peter reflected this understanding in his answer to Jesus’ question about whether the disciples would follow the crowds and leave: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life!” (John 6:68). It must have been tempting for them to leave Jesus, but they stayed after asking “compared to what?”  

Failure to disciple with Jesus is all too common—and often, not helped all that much by the local church. Church leaders long for enough volunteers to serve—or at the least, more faithful attenders. They want people to share their faith and to field queries from seekers. They lament a lack of tithing, the prevalence of divorce in the church, and children who go off to college and lose their “faith.” But the root issue for all of these is a lack of discipleship. If one is a disciple of Jesus, these things mostly take care of themselves.  

Willard argued: “Nondiscipleship is the elephant in the church. It is not the much-discussed moral failures, financial abuses, or the amazing general similarity between Christians and non-Christians. These are only effects of the underlying problem. The fundamental negative reality among Christian believers now is their failure to be constantly learning how to live their lives in The Kingdom Among Us. And it is an accepted reality.” 

Church leaders are often busy running their churches—preaching, administering, visiting the sick, etc. If much church work is akin to putting out fires and keeping up the firehouse, then a wiser—and more biblical—strategy is to invest considerable energy into training firefighters. Firefighters create fewer fires. More important, leaders will have more hands on deck to battle the inevitable brushfires and blazes of life in the local church.  

Why is this not done more often? For both disciples and disciplers, discipleship is rewarding, but its benefits usually develop over the longer run. In the meantime, discipleship is time-consuming, difficult, and messy. Or back to the prevalence of poor analysis: The benefits tend to be subtle and difficult to quantify, while the costs are more obvious.  

There can be other complications. Discipleship allows others to be involved, but then the leader may be uncomfortable with having less control. Maybe the understanding of “disciple” is watered-down and the preacher imagines that his Sunday morning efforts are mostly sufficient for discipleship. It takes a ton of time and energy—a difficult and messy work.  

The most common problems? Church leaders rarely have a biblical view of discipleship’s importance—and if they have that, they don’t have a coherent plan to achieve the goal. These sins of omission are ultimately based on the faulty accounting described by Willard and Bonhoeffer—about the costs of discipleship and non-discipleship.  

But we know that discipleship is a key aspect of God’s good news. We worship a good and omniscient God who wants great things from us and for us (Ephesians 2:10). We’ve read about Jesus’ ministry model of preeminently investing in his disciples. His Great Commission includes the injunction to “teach them to obey all that I have commanded” (Matthew 28:18-20, author’s paraphrase). In Ephesians 4:11-16, Paul lays out a charge for leaders to train all in the church. Peter talks about the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:5, 9). And so on.  

In a word, bearing the costs of discipleship is the best thing for us—as individuals, the local church, and the church—so that we might avoid the much larger costs of non-discipleship. Let us pursue this vision and bear these costs to enjoy abundant life and build up his kingdom.  

D. Eric Schansberg is professor of economics at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Ind., a longtime member of Southeast Christian Church (Louisville, Ky.), the author of The Word Diet, and co-author (with Kurt Sauder) of Enough Horses in the Barn: Thoroughly-Equipped Disciple-Makers and the Ministry of Jesus.