Can the Church learn from the Party?

Writing in Mission Frontiers magazine, Dave Datema the director of Frontier Mission Fellowship cites a quote from British Communist-turned-Christian Douglas Hyde's classic book Dedication and Leadership:

Quite deliberately, and with good reason, the Party sends its new members, whenever possible, into some form of public activity before instruction begins. More specifically, it is designed to commit the recruit publicly to Communism. Quite often this will take the form of being sent out to stand at the side of the street or in some public place selling Communist papers, periodicals or pamphlets. This may appear to be a very simple, somewhat low-grade form of activity. It is in fact of profound psychological significance. Humble as the task may appear, to engage in it requires for many people a certain degree of moral courage. It requires another act of moral courage to remain in a fight for which, he by now realizes, he is not fully equipped. And moral courage is not a bad starting-point for future action.

It strikes me that what's being described here is discipleship. The Party knew that making committed Communists (making disciples) meant putting new members in situations where they were bound to suffer, even if it was only the benign suffering of publicly identifying with an unpopular cause. They were put in situations where they would feel acutely their minority status. What does this have to do with making Christian disciples? As Datema points out, enduring small sufferings well prepares an individual to endure the larger ones. Could it be that the Party's method of developing moral courage is a missing element in much Christian discipleship today? Maybe this is one reason why many Christians in the West are, to put it bluntly, soft. And why groups like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are growing like wildfire. Maybe they're doing a better job of making disciples than the church of Jesus Christ.

Paul says in Romans 5:3-5 that "suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame." May we be the kind of disciples that aren't put to shame when suffering comes!