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(Read Part 2 here)

Is making a new disciple something you feel you’re able to do? If so, how would you go about it? What does it take?

I ask that question because I get the sense not a lot of us in the Church feel very capable of making disciples. It seems we believe discipleship is something better left to professional clergy. After all, the clergy have been to Bible schools and seminaries, and they get paid for doing that sort of thing.

But did Jesus intend for disciple making to be left to an elite few? I’ll share some thoughts our church planting team is developing on this subject.

First, let me point out that I’m talking about the ‘simple way’ to make disciples, NOT the ‘easy way.’ There’s a big difference. Making a good disciple takes time and energy. There are no shortcuts.

Let’s look at Jesus’ command to make disciples – the Great Commission:

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Matthew 28:18-20

Here are a few things I would like to point out about that passage:

“…Jesus came to them and said…go and make disciples of all nations”

Jesus gave this command to his disciples. We who follow Him today are his disciples; therefore, He has commanded us to make disciples of all nations. (If you check out the Greek for all nations, by the way, it translates to all ethnic groups, not just political countries. There are 200 some odd political nations in the world – 238, if I remember – but there are around 16,000 ethnic groups.) Okay, so we know that each of us, the rank-and-file disciples, have been commanded to make other disciples. So what do we do?

Jesus commanded us to do two things:

1) “…baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…”

Baptism is an outward act whereby someone commits his/her life to Jesus Christ, demonstrating belief in Jesus and repentance of sins. This cannot happen until our disciple has come to some knowledge of the Truth. Of the two parts to Jesus’ command, I think we’re a little better at this one than the second one in the North American church. We have done a decent job of getting people to understand their responsibility to evangelize others and lead them to Christ. The second command is the one that gets a bit more problematic…

2) “…and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

This is where those of us who don’t feel like worthy disciple-makers start shirking our duty quickly. We’re usually quite content to tell the new believer they need to get plugged into a local church. Better yet, we invite them to our local church where they join a discipleship class for new believers. In this discipleship class, the well-educated teacher [sigh of relief] may proceed to spend a number of weeks or months expounding all the important and not-so-important doctrines of Christianity to our new disciple.

I see a couple of problems with that model:

1. It takes rank-and-file believers out of the game, because they don’t believe they have the necessary expertise to disciple a new Christian. In this case, it’s hard to feel confident about discipleship if I don’t feel ready to field questions about, say, the scriptural merits of pre-trib pre-millennialism versus amillennialism. Have you ever felt incapable of discipling someone else?
2. In many instances, the discipleship model I described above almost entirely boils down to head knowledge. Look carefully at Jesus’ words, though – He said to teach them to obey all that He has commanded us, not just to know all that He has commanded us. Commands are not mere doctrine; a command implies action!

(Note: I am certainly not trying to make a blanket statement about all discipleship in all North American churches, because there are many good things happening. The above problems do seem common, though.)

So discipleship, in its simplest form (and I do think the pattern in Matthew 28 is simple), means baptizing people and then teaching them to obey. Why is this difficult for many Christians to do? I would say because we make discipleship more complicated that it’s supposed to be.

One of the ways we overcomplicate discipleship is by emphasizing teaching vast amounts of doctrine in the early stages of discipleship. If you look at Jesus’ command, you see that He told us to teach them all that He commanded us. No more, no less. We need to figure out what things Jesus commanded His disciples, and then stick to that as our curriculum for discipleship. We often major in the Epistles and in doctrines supported by various Old Testament texts when teaching new believers, but all of Jesus’ commands are found in the Gospels. (Remember, when Jesus gave the Great Commission to his disciples, they didn’t have the New Testament available. In the first generation of the church, Jesus’ commands had to be passed along orally.) I’m certainly not saying it’s wrong to teach parts of the Bible other than the Gospels, but Jesus seemed to indicate that all the essential teachings were things that had come from His mouth.

In Part Two, I will discuss the specific commands Jesus gave us that we should be teaching our disciples to obey. Stay tuned…

(Read Part 2 here)

Every couple of weeks, a missionary friend named Rob comes and coaches our church planting team. He has provided a lot of great wisdom, insight, and ideas. Today, we were talking with him about how to effectively disciple a few new believers and pre-believers we’re working with. Here is what came out of that discussion:

Rob talked with us about what he calls the triangle of discipleship. This triangle involves three elements that need to be present in roughly equal proportions: a relationship between the discipler and the one being discipled, the Word of God, and a focus on task/obedience. These elements correspond with the three persons of the Trinity: relationship to the Father, the Word to the Son, and task/obedience to the Holy Spirit. Any time the balance between these three gets out of whack, discipleship suffers.

Our relationship with people we’re discipling needs to be cultivated somewhat independently of how things are going with the discipleship. In other words, we hang out with people because we value their friendship, not simply because we’re discipling them and things are going well. When discipling, we always have to be aware of how the relationship is doing. We have to continue to do things to build the friendship; we can’t just rest on the fact that the relationship has been good in the past.

When the relationship is strong, we can put a little more emphasis on the Word and obedience, without having to invest quite as much time in developing the friendship. We’re always keeping track of where the friendship stands, though.

Bringing the Word into discipleship can never be divorced from obedience. We must train our disciples to be doers of the Word, and not hearers only. Every time we study the Word with those we are discipling, we agree on what specific step(s) of obedience they will take in the coming week.

In the beginning, we should always assume we’re at fault if those we’re discipling aren’t following through with obedience. We may have asked them to do too much, or we may have suggested a step of obedience that doesn’t fit well in their culture. We have to figure out where people are with relationship to obeying Christ and suggest steps of obedience appropriate for them. Even if they are very baby steps in the beginning, that’s okay. Small obedience is something we can build on.

Rob challenged us with the idea that obedience happens best in community. If we can take some baby steps alongside our disciples, this can really help them. For example, if one of them wants to share their testimony with a friend, one of us could go along and gently encourage them.

After balancing the three elements of the triangle of discipleship and assuming we’re at fault and making changes if things aren’t progressing, we may still reach a point where the discipleship isn’t going anywhere. In that case, we would back the relationship off to a friendship. Friendships we have with people are always genuine; the amount of time we commit to different people is what varies. Rob suggested we limit the time invested in most friendships to one or two visits a week of 1-3 hours each. If we have a relationship with someone who is taking steps of obedience in response to the Word, we will invest more time in them.

No! We are the Church.

I recently read a great book by Daniel Sinclair on cross-cultural church planting, entitled A Vision of the Possible: Pioneer Church Planting in Teams. Here is an interesting excerpt that has challenged our church planting team lately:

A close friend of mine, who is an evangelist, advises all gospel workers to somehow bring up Jesus with every new acquaintance in the first thirty minutes of conversation. Why? Sociologists say that we share virtually all the things that are most important to us with a new relationship within the first half-hour of total talk time. In other words, if you speak to a neighbor six times for five minutes per conversation over the period of a month, you will have most likely told him most of what is most central in your life. (p.130)

Is this good advice that Sinclair shares? Have you ever experienced not saying anything about Jesus with a new friend, and then finding spiritual matters harder and harder to talk about the longer the relationship went on? I sure have. It seems that the earlier I bring Jesus into a relationship, the more freely I am able to share the gospel with someone. I was especially intrigued by Sinclair’s view when taking into account that his church planting work has been primarily in a Muslim context! Surely if he can apply this 30-minute principle in his work, then I can apply it in mine…

I explained in a recent post how our church planting team has been applying the parable of the soils. In that parable, the sower spreads the seed of the Word all over the place. We are now trying to do the same in our town by applying the 30-minute rule – bringing up Jesus in the first 30 minutes of conversation with a new friend.

In the past, we had been fairly timid about sharing the gospel with a new acquaintance, preferring to wait until we had spent a lot of time with them and built quite a bit of trust. There are some good cultural reasons for placing a lot of importance on earning trust, but the problem with waiting so long to talk about Jesus is twofold: 1) It makes the gospel harder to talk about later on, and 2) It takes a lot longer to discern whether someone might be “good soil” that is receptive to the seeds of the Word that are planted.

As of late, we have been a lot bolder about bringing Jesus into conversations sooner. The results so far have been good. Earlier on in relationships we know who to invest the most time in, because we see right away how open (or not) a person is to the gospel. Don’t get me wrong – we are still careful to develop good relationships with people, built on trust, and this takes time. It’s just that we bring the gospel into the relationship a lot sooner, which equals more seeds of the Word being sown, which equals more and better chances to find good soil, which equals us having a better idea of which relationships in which to invest the most time. This equals – we hope – more effective ministry in the long run.

What do you think? Do you agree with this philosophy? Have you ever experienced something similar? Do you have a counterexample? Leave a comment a share your thoughts!

(If you are interested in the book A Vision of the Possible, there is a good, chapter-by-chapter discussion of it going on right now on this blog.)