The Jesus Climb: Journeying from Student to Disciple

By Gary David Stratton

Is your spiritual imagination up to the task of following Jesus’s vision for healing our broken world?

“Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers . . . until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.” —George Mallory, 1924 Everest climbing expedition leader

The Jesus Climb crafts George Mallory’s quest to climb the world’s tallest mountain into a parable illustrating how Jesus trained his first students to summit the world’s greatest commandment. Like Mallory peering too low on the horizon to see Everest’s peak towering above him, the lack of Christlikeness in modern Christianity stems from our inability to imagine the impossible heights to which Jesus calls us.

The Jesus Climb draws upon the life and teachings of Jesus and the experiences of some of history’s greatest spiritual and physical mountaineers to map out eight “expedition camps” through which Jesus guides every student seeking to follow him.

We will never be able to join Jesus in his mission to heal our broken world until he transformed us into the kind of people who can love God and neighbor as he did—the kind of people he called “disciples.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
• Release date: Apr 9, 2024
• ISBN: 9781684268924

Gary David Stratton

Gary David Stratton is a leading expert in the spiritual formation of students in educational settings. A Senior Fellow for the Association of Biblical Higher Education, Gary cofounded the Future of Hope youth theology institute and the award-winning website TwoHandedWarriors.com. Gary and his wife, Dr. Sue Stratton, have served as church planters, youth pastors, campus ministers, and professors at twelve schools in the United States and China. Gary is currently Professor of Spiritual Formation and Cultural Leadership and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Johnson University.

Book preview

PREFACE FOR FACULTY AND CAMPUS LEADERS

This book began as a series of sermons first preached in response to a wave of student awakenings sweeping North America in 1995. At the time, I served as the dean of the chapel at Gordon College in Massachusetts. New England has a long memory. So as the revival spread to our campus, we knew from New England’s checkered history in America’s first two widespread revivals—the First Great Awakening (1740–42) and the Second Great Awakening (1795–ca. 1835)—that as helpful as an outpouring of the Spirit might be in promoting new or renewed religious commitment in students, revival does not automatically produce long-term spiritual growth in individuals nor change unjust structures in society. Without courageous spiritual leadership willing to call for personal and corporate repentance, times of refreshing . . . from the Lord (Acts 3:19) could easily lead to the wild enthusiasm and anti-intellectualism of a James Davenport.

We longed for the long-term fruitfulness in church and society achieved by the Second Great Awakening schools, like the intellectual revivalism of school’s such as the College of New Jersey at Princeton under Aaron Burr Sr. and Yale College under Timothy Dwight; the social reform revivalism of abolitionist schools, such as Oberlin College under Charles G. Finney; as well as the visible unity in Christ found in Barton Stone’s 20,000-participant multidenominational communion service at Cane Ridge, Kentucky.¹ In short, we sought to help direct our students from the short-term excitement of day-and-night revival meetings toward the long-term fruitfulness of loving God and neighbor with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength.

Building on my recent tutelage under Michael J. Wilkins—one of the world’s leading scholars on the meaning of disciple (mathetes) in the New Testament—I worked with newly formed faculty and student leadership chapel committees to reinforce the central theme of Wilkins’s scholarship: Discipleship is not a second step in the Christian life but rather is synonymous with the Christian life.² The resulting messages helped guide students toward embracing Jesus’s call to follow him from student to disciple by enduring on the long and costly journey of growing into a person of transforming love.

The seed of this message grew strong in the good soil of revived hearts. Participation in our voluntary service-learning programs and accountability groups skyrocketed. Increased student engagement in our required chapel services resulted in over 70 percent of our student body saying they agreed/strongly agreed with the statement, Chapel helps me grow in my relationship with God. (We had never broken 50 percent before.) Our voluntary Sunday evening student-led worship service, Catacombs, outgrew two smaller venues and packed the massive A. J. Gordon Memorial Chapel with Gordon students, as well as college and high school students from throughout the Boston area.

From a faculty perspective, the most encouraging development was the renewal’s impact on our academic programs. More than six months after the revival, both our provost and student body president reported to our president’s advisory council that they had never seen classroom morale so high. Not surprisingly, the renewal helped our admissions team secure years of record enrollment. Donors, inspired by what God was doing at Gordon, helped our president and advancement team secure funding for seven new buildings in eight years.

I continued developing these discipleship constructs in Evangelism and Discipleship classes at Gordon; team-taught classes with Mark Cannister and Gary Parrett at Crown College (MN), Bethel University (MN), and Act One: Hollywood; and numerous churches and conferences in between. However, it was not until 2019 that I seriously considered compiling them into a book. One of my Gordon College students, Dr. Kirk McClelland, now a professor of service learning at Johnson University (TN), approached me with an idea. Kirk had recently volunteered to oversee a rebuild of our struggling First-Year Seminar. To my surprise, Kirk insisted, These students need the message that changed my life at Gordon College. Would you be willing to write a book on discipleship we can use in the class? I wondered if I could pen a book that both faculty would want to teach and students would want to read, but I was willing to