 Hindsight offers remarkable clarity. And it is often only through such clarity that we can see how seemingly chance occurrences are actually formative experiences of the means of grace in our lives. Such is the story of my experience with Covenant Discipleship.
I admit I was confused during the fall of 1998 — my first year as a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School. I initially thought I was moving to Nashville to become a church historian and to pursue an academic career. But during that first year, things weren't turning out as planned.
My first semester was filled with personal struggle, as I began to wrestle with my sense of calling and vocation. This was new territory for me, and the uncertainty of it caused no small amount of anxiety.
Then, toward the end of the fall semester, a seemingly minor event happened that would turn out to have major consequences for my spiritual formation: I was
invited to join a Covenant Discipleship Group.
Taking a chance, I joined a CD Group that first year. What began as an awkward meeting of four students who didn't know one another well soon developed
into an important weekly touchstone where the four of us could grapple with spiritual issues while also living out our discipleship in concrete ways.
Covenant Discipleship offered me three lasting gifts during my time as a divinity student, which I consider gifts from God. They are:
- Grounding my study of the Christian faith with the practice of living out that faith through an active life of discipleship.
- Formation of close relationships with fellow pilgrims in the ministry of Jesus Christ, which served to nurture our common callings.
- Building a framework for my personal discipleship that has stayed with me to the present and that guides my understanding of living as a disciple every day.
I left Nashville in the spring of 2001, ready to begin my first appointment as a chaplain at United Methodist-related Lambuth University in Jackson, Tennessee. Among the many other discoveries about life and ministry that I would
make in those first few years after divinity school, I also learned that the mutual accountability of Covenant Discipleship would have a further, and sustaining, role to play in my spiritual formation.
••••
The Rev. Andrew C.Thompson is the Associate Pastor at First United
Methodist Church, Searcy, Arkansas.
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