One of the great challenges that we face in our churches today is maintaining a clear focus on the mission that Jesus gave us when he left. In simplest terms it was to make disciples who will make disciples. I believe that it would help us to evaluate what we are doing by asking ourselves whether or not we are intentionally trying to do this, and if what we are doing is working. Jesus was a genius. His teaching and example provide a model for us to follow in order to accomplish this task. Jesus poured his life into a few men who in turn, changed the world by discipling others, who went on to disciple others.
We are all familiar with the Great Commission, in which Jesus calls us to go and make disciples promising his presence as we give ourselves to this work. The Apostle Paul further defined this process in 2 Timothy 2:2: and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. We know that we should be doing this, but a lack of clear definition concerning the process of disciple making has left us with a vague sense that this is something that we are engaged in by the various ministries that we are involved with in the church. But the truth is that we are not doing a very good job of making disciples who make disciples.
We have unwittingly fallen into a methodology built on the dynamics of addition instead of multiplication. From the very beginning God instituted the Cultural Commission on the basis of multiplication by instructing Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply (Gen 1:28). Jesus’ Great Commission calls us to multiply in the same way spiritually by making disciples who will in turn obey the great commission by making disciples. Consider this illustration from Greg Ogden’s book Transforming Discipleship, where he presents a contrast between someone personally seeing one person come to the Lord every day for a year, as compared to investing in one other person for an entire year. Things start slow for the intensive one on one guy compared to the daily conversions of the evangelist. But at the end of 16 years the evangelist has almost 6000 converts, but the discipleship guy has over 65,000 disciples.
The reason for pointing this out is not to suggest that the problem in the church today is merely one of wrong headed methodology, but rather to remind us that Jesus’ strategy for building his church is part and parcel of what it means to take his word seriously and obey it. As Dietrich Bonheoffer said in his classic book, The Cost of Discipleship: “Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.”
I think that Robby Gallaty is right in his book, Growing Up: How to Be a Disciple Who Makes Disciples: “When the church becomes an end in itself, it ends. When Sunday school, as great as it is, becomes an end in itself, it ends. When small groups ministry becomes an end in itself, it ends. When the worship service becomes an end in itself, it ends. What we need is for discipleship to become the goal, and then the process never ends.”
I think that Robby Gallaty is right in his book, Growing Up: How to Be a Disciple Who Makes Disciples: “When the church becomes an end in itself, it ends. When Sunday school, as great as it is, becomes an end in itself, it ends. When small groups ministry becomes an end in itself, it ends. When the worship service becomes an end in itself, it ends. What we need is for discipleship to become the goal, and then the process never ends.”
