When a community gathered at Duke University to celebrate 25 years of Accountable Discipleship and the gifts David Lowes Watson has given the church, we established an endowment in David's honor so that his work will continue.

It has been my experience and the experience of others that Accountable Discipleship is an excellent way to extend the Wesleyan heritage of growing up in love, of going on to perfection. We who are called to be disciples of Jesus Christ are called to grow up, to mature in love of God and neighbor.

Our friend and teacher, David Watson, has helped the church see how to use Wesley's way to let that maturity develop. He has helped us focus on discipleship as a craft that Christians are called to practice and to perfect. He has urged us to live as accountable disciples, through the means of grace as taught by the Church of England and as practiced in the early Methodist class meetings.

Wesley believed that the power of the Holy Spirit is active in us through the means of grace. But he was quick to warn that participating in the means of grace does not earn our salvation. Salvation is God's work, and God gives us the means of grace as a way of living our salvation. There is neither power nor merit in using the means of grace because Christ is the only source of grace, but God has appointed meeting places where we may receive grace. The means of grace provide a disciplined life that frees us from our attachments so that we can love God and our neighbor more fully.

As a little girl in the Southern Baptist Church, I longed to know what to do after I had said "yes." I said yes to God's gift of the Christian way and was baptized at age 8. But now what? There was so much emphasis on my decision that I did not catch the concept of grace. Every Sunday night the pastor asked if we had sinned. I was not a brilliant child, but I knew, even at 8, that I had messed up. Thus, I walked the sawdust trail every week. I would probably still be doing so if my mom had not told me that I was embarrassing the family. I stopped the walking, but I was still unclear about the way.

I remember when I heard Dr. Watson speak about the means of grace and accountable discipleship. Already a United Methodist pastor, I embraced this life-transforming way of living in relationship to God and neighbor.

The means of grace offer us grace, power, and direction after we say yes. A small group can form a covenant and hold one another accountable to pray, study Scripture, attend worship, share in the sacraments, fast, conference, do good, and refrain from evil. Being accountable to God and one another and sharing in acts of devotion, worship, compassion, and justice, opens us to God's grace and power and enables us to grow as Jesus' disciples. The means of grace, practiced in accountable discipleship community, keep us in touch with God, the love that leads to life; the One who transforms us and gifts us with the capacity for love of God and neighbor.

I need to live in this kind of accountable community, and I have urged our pastors in Missouri to develop such a group in the local church and/or with clergy colleagues. When we live that way, I see signs of life and passion for the gospel, for ministry, and for justice. When we live isolated, undisciplined lives, I see us dry up and our ministries become perfunctory.

We live in this kind of accountable community in the Missouri Area cabinet and in the Council of Bishops. It is a path that leads to life. The author of Hebrews writes:

"And we want each one of you to show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end, so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises" (6:11-12, NRSV).

Alone, such excellence of discipleship is not possible. However, in accountable community with God and one another, we who have been gifted by God's grace with life-transforming love, we who long to grow up in love of God and neighbor, can be perfected in the craft of discipleship. We can live a life becoming the gospel, availing ourselves of the means of grace and living in community that keeps us accountable and faithful.

Ann Brookshire Sherer is Bishop of the Missouri Area, President of the Council for Accountable Discipleship, and a pioneer with David Lowes Watson in developing Covenant Discipleship.