The ICC believes that discipling is a non-negotiable command of God.

An extremely controversial core conviction of the International Christian Church is the belief that “discipling” is a divine mandate that must be practised in order to be faithful to the words of Jesus.

Just like every other key term commonly used by the ICC, discipling must be defined properly in order to understand what they mean.

According to the article Living in the Book of Acts, ICC Evangelist Mike Patterson writes:

A godly central leader and central leadership will call the churches to be completely sold-out to Jesus Christ. (Matthew 13:44-45) Every baptized disciple has given up everything in order to follow Jesus (Luke 14:25-33). After one is baptized, that new disciple is commanded to be taught to obey by another disiciple (Matthew 28:20).

There are around 59 “one another” verses in the Bible; love one another (John 13:34-35), confess your sins to one another (James 5:16), carry each other’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), etc. In order to obey Jesus’ command and fulfill the one another passages, the leadership of the SoldOut Movement has decided that every Christian will have a discipling partner to encourage them in their walk with God. Just as churches aren’t autonomous and need outside authority to help guide and encourage one another, so Christians need others to disciple them.

Based on this description, we see that the ICC has a particular understanding of discipleship. It is done in partnership with another individual (ie. a discipling partner) in the form of a teacher/student relationship. This is where sins are confessed, supposedly, to one-another and burdens are mutually shared. Moreover, there is also an expectation on the disciple to obey their “discipler”, based on the command Jesus gave in Matthew 28:20.

Therefore, you can picture this discipleship model as a pyramid, where ICC leader Kip McKean himself sits at the top.

What does the Bible teach?

So is “discipling” a biblical command of God? Well, yes and no – depending on what you mean by that.

Yes, it is true that Jesus’ famous great commission in Matthew 28:19 calls us to “make disciples (in Greek, the verb mathéteuó, which is derived from the noun for “disciple” mathétés) of all nations”.

But no, the Bible does NOT command the type of “top-down” organisational approach that the ICC has.

Taking the interpretation as infallible

Interestingly, the ICC is under no illusion that this model of discipleship can actually be found in the pages of the NT. It is merely an interpretation of those principles found in John 13:34-35, James 5:16 and Galatians 6:2.

This highlights the ICC’s tendency of taking the interpretation of a biblical concept, and packaging it to seem like an infallible biblical mandate.

Smuggling in new theology

Blink and you’ll miss it. But Patterson’s quoting of Matthew 28:20 to justify the disciple’s obedience to the discipler is a total misreading (or twisting) of Jesus’ words.

Jesus actually says, “… teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” In other words, discipleship is about obeying Jesus, not the discipler!

The pyramid model of discipleship is problematic

This most obvious problem with this model is this: Who, then, disciples Kip McKean?

Is McKean beyond growing in knowledge, wisdom and personal holiness that he doesn’t need his own discipler?

The only justification for the ICC to place McKean at the top is their problematic core belief that the Bible mandates “central leadership with a central leader at the top”. However, as I pointed out in my previous article, placing McKean as the central leader of the church is actually blasphemy against Jesus. Jesus is the rightful human leader and chief cornerstone of the church (Ephesians 2:19-21) who sits at the very top. We are to be obedient only to Him!

To be fair, McKean does allude to the fact that there is a discipleship group among the top leaders while he was at the helm of his former International Churches of Christ (ICOC) movement. He wrote:

In May, in a meeting with the World Sector Leaders, I went through a very challenging discipleship group where they confronted me on my pride, arrogance and anger. I was broken to the point of tears all that night and into the next morning. I am thankful for their true love. (Proverbs 27:6)

Revolution through Restoration III

However, it is not clear that such a “discipleship group” was regular, or simply put together last minute when criticism of McKean was mounting up in the ICOC.

Personally, I think it is the latter. If it was regular, why did it take the group so long in pointing out Kip’s sins? His sins were grievous enough that his leaders wanted him to take a sabbatical!

Conclusion

More can be said about the way McKean’s model of discipling has hurt A LOT of people throughout the history of the ICC and ICOC. You can read some of these testimonies by following the links on my Links page.

But in conclusion, it suffices to say that ICC has wrongly twisted a good biblical concept into one that is foreign to Scripture and founded on the false premise of central leadership.