If you are in your 20s or 30s and a baby boomer is discipling you, write a book about it. Your experience is an anomaly. One universal characteristic of America’s first “me” generation is that they do not seem to disciple younger men. Ask a 25-year-old man in your church who is discipling him or ask a boomer man to name one younger man he is discipling and you will likely hear crickets.

In a recent conversation with an 80-year-old, well-respected, sage pastor in my denomination, he expressed disappointment that the men he had invested in during his 45-years of pastoral ministry had no “Timothys” of their own. This pastor told me that his own generation (the “Builders”) was deliberate in discipling and caring for their younger brothers in the church. Their efforts were integral to the development of so many of today’s strong and gifted boomer leaders. This retired pastor, shaking his head, looked up at me and said, “I can’t figure out what happened.”

A few months ago I had the privilege of attending a meeting of what some would call evangelical “movers and shakers” (primarily boomers). During the meeting there was a collective realization and lament that they had no disciples and that they had not invested in the younger men. I sat there in shock. If the all-stars had missed it for all those years, what hope was there that other boomer men discipled?

While I was in seminary in my early 20s, a group of us prayed that a few older men in the church would seek us out for discipleship. One of my friends even wept as we prayed. We made real attempts - but it never happened.

Churches, marriages, families, and communities continue to suffer because older men are not shepherding younger ones. Older men discipling younger men, life-on-life, is not just a good idea, it is commanded and modeled throughout the entire biblical story (1 Tim 5:1, Titus 2:6, 1 Peter 5:1-5, 1 John 2:13-15, Proverbs 27:17). Discipling is essential to the Kingdom (Matthew 28:19-20). What will it take for men discipling men, all of them, to become the ethos of our churches? This effort will not reduce to a pragmatic “program” or a “ministry” but a way of life.

In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain tells of visiting a cathedral in the Azores, and surveying the icons:

“…they have a swarm of rusty, dusty, battered apostles standing around the filagree work, some on one leg and some with one eye out but a gamey look in the other, and some with two or three fingers gone, and some with not enough nose left to blow–all of them crippled and discouraged, and fitter subjects for the hospital than the cathedral”

He meant it unkindly; Twain didn’t think well of the Portuguese (or most foreigners for that matter, being a prototype of the modern American), calling them “slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy,” and he thought little better of the Church, Catholic or otherwise.

One doesn’t have to mean well to be right, however, and it struck me, when I read this, that Twain had it right. This is what the path is, for many of God’s most ardent followers. They are worn down, beaten up, poured out, all for the sake of a set of truths that they can no more escape than an atheist can will himself into an obedience to the God he despises. It was little wonder, then, that Paul wrote of the Christian’s life as a race, and his task to persevere.

I don’t know about you, but some days I feel like I’m limping along, battered by doubt, fear, temptation, regret. I think sometimes we assume that a good Christian is one who is always cheerful, energetic, optimistic. Even at funerals, there is this odd effort to rejoice, as if mourning is not something Christ did. But when one reads Paul’s last letter, the worn-down quality comes through. Please come soon, he asks, more than once. Bring my cloak. Everyone deserted me. I am being poured out like a drink offering.

“But the Lord,” Paul wrote, “stood with me.” He stands with us, of course, precisely because we are worn down and broken. Where we are weak, after all, He is strong. And so I think of those battered apostolic icons Twain ridiculed, and think that the truth of the Gospels was there, right before his eyes, perhaps the only time in his life. We are those “rusty, dusty, battered apostles,” because that is what the world makes of many of us, and how it sees the rest of us. We are more fit for the hospital than the cathedral, and yet we are brought in regardless, wounded and unsightly, we battered saints.