In our twenty-first century world we are used to judging whether an individual is ‘properly qualified’ by their academic successes, the number of letters they are entitled to put after their name, the impressiveness of their cv and the profile of the jobs they have already undertaken.

There are, however, growing numbers of individuals from all walks of life and all corners of the globe whose suitability for important and often sensitive national and international tasks cannot simply be measured by the traditional methods. These are the twenty-first century disciples whose most valuable training has taken place outside the mainstream, and therefore goes unrecognised. Their cv’s will rarely accurately represent the wide ranging understandings and skills they have at their disposal, as well as the deeply penetrating spiritual, global, historical and ‘big picture’ perspectives they bring to every situation. Our society is simply not trained to recognise mature and highly effectives disciples.

Perhaps this is understandable, for discipleship training (be it formal or as the result of life’s testing), with its resultant radical re-orientation of life purpose and widening perception, forms the deep, solid but invisible bedrock on which all outer structures are built. Genuine disciples will always commit to bring to bear all of their training and insights on every task they are given, but they have traditionally worked silently and without recognition in all areas of human endeavour promoting human progress and pushing humanity out of ignorance and inertia.

So how do we recognise the twenty-first century disciple? While they will differ in many ways from disciples of earlier periods (see the article A Reflection on Discipleship Training) and while we will no longer be able to recognise them by their formal religious affiliation, they too will be primarily known by their high ethical standards, their life orientation and intense sense of wider purpose, their commitment to act in alignment with Divine will, their global consciousness and the practical, loving and generous ‘fruit’, as Jesus described it, of their lives.