Robert Hendrickson joined Forward Movement in fall 2025 as Chief of Discipleship after nine years as Rector of St. Philip’s in the Hills in Tucson, AZ. Enabled by a grant from the J.C. Flowers Foundation, Robert and team will focus on transformational discipleship resources to help Episcopalians grow as followers of Jesus. RenewalWorks will be a part of those resources.

In our work with churches, RenewalWorks finds that it can be hard to define what discipleship means and even harder to live it in our everyday lives. We are honored to share Robert’s recent reflection on that subject below and look forward to continuing that conversation with you in 2026.  

I was talking with my son recently and we were talking about why I worry about AI and social media and every other thing that seems to be breaking our brains. I told him that it’s not that I didn’t trust him with these things but that I didn’t trust these things with him. 

And I don’t trust them with all of us.  

Discipleship is giving ourselves to Christ. Full stop. It is making a way for Christ to guide one step after the other in our journey. I trust Him with myself. I trust Him with my son. I trust Christ. That’s only the first step to being a disciple though. The next is reaching a place where we trust ourselves to follow. 

In that conversation about social media and AI I told my son something I’ve not told many people. I said, “I spent a lot of my young life thinking about dying. About how to kill myself.” That voice is quiet now, but it wasn’t when I was younger. It’s a voice I could never trust but have learned to tell to be still. 

My worry is that all the impersonal forces that dominate our days will bend the old, personal voices that are a part of each of us, toward shortening and darkening those same days. It’s kind of what they are built for. They are built to spend us for profit. 

As happens in moments like that there was a long quiet. Then my son asked why. So, I tried to be honest. I’m probably more honest with other people than I am with myself which is often the case in our lives. I said, “When my mother died and my sister died my love had nowhere to go.” It’s not an original thought but one that has stayed with me. 

But it found somewhere to go. It found the One who wept at the grave of Lazarus. It found the One who asked why His Father had forsaken Him. It found One who was Love’s source. It found One in whom I could put my trust again. 

So, I decided to try and be a disciple. Whatever that meant and however bad at it I’ve been, my will took a turn and so did my life. We’re putting our trust in lots of places now. We’re trusting our lives and our kids and our country to a lot of faceless, nameless forces who profit from the trust. 

But the place where we might yet find hope has a name and a face and it is Christ the Lord. 

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying now. I spend my time thinking about how to live. It’s the thing I want to pass on to my sons. Where can they put their hope. Where can they put their trust. That’s the first step. The next step is where discipleship really begins. How will we follow the trust. How will we follow the hope. 

How will we live. 

The promised light of Advent is showing the way to the Center where that purpose will be found. It is taking us along the disciple’s way. Will we dare to follow to the place, to the One, where true hope is yet to be found. 

That will be our journey of discipleship. One step after another. Listening as His voice calms the storms and the voices of our past and opens a future we cannot imagine and for which we’ve never dared to ask. 

That voice is hope and it’s how we will live.