How Do You Make Disciples?
At eatJesus.com we have pointed out before that church culture has extremes — attenders and elitists. The tragedy is that neither may actually know Christ.
There are the attenders, we call them spooners, who never grow in their desire to know Jesus for themselves. The skill of devotion is ignored and spiritual responsibility abdicated. They rarely ever read the Bible themselves. They simply show up on Sundays and let their mouths hang open so that the preacher guy can fill them with information and mesmerize them for a while. Don’t get us wrong, we are not against effective preaching nor the gathering of Christ followers on a weekly basis — we are simply talking about disciple making here.
Then, there are the religious elite. They are serious about Bible knowledge and church function. They never miss a meeting and feel bad if they don’t memorize enough scripture and are constantly testing their abilities against those around them. Success is found in achievement and keeping up appearances is important. They are modern day pharisee’s, especially because they accuse others of being legalistic.
What can be done about this? How do you make disciples?
The church has been designed by God as the primary vehicle to produce mature believers. The saints (all Christians) are to be equipped through various giftings given to people within the Christian community (Eph 4). When we operate within the framework of what Christ is doing, he is the gift giver, then we have a structure for disciple making. What apostolic, prophetic, evangelistic, pastoral and teaching Christians are you currently being equipped by? If you are not being exposed to the equipping gifts of Christ then how do you plan on growing? Or, are you ignoring what Christ has given?
Training by people with these giftings is the key. Equipping is the answer to the problem. We need less information, classrooms and events. We need more contexts for the gifts to be relationally used. Handouts and videos will not help. We need people connecting with people. Trainers with trainee’s. Real life situations rather than academic environments. We need the gifts of Christ (people w/ Eph 4 gifts) to engage the saints in training.
Church culture has prized the teacher and pastor to the extent that teaching and pastoring now dominate our leadership. We need more apostolic, prophetic and evangelistic gifts (people) to off-set the imbalance. Many of these people have left church environments and joined parachurch ministries to fulfill and use their giftings. Being removed from a new testament style disciple making context is another reason we have created the spooner and elitists extremes.
Planting churches is one of the best ways to fix this problem. Start again, and again, and again. Start over and grow these gifts, attract them in, provide an environment to let them work together. If you want to make disciples then start a new church and let the gifts that Jesus has given to the church equip the people for ministry.
3 Comments
Matt Sweetman on October 16th, 2009
Andy, thanks for the comment. I think you’ve added a helpful balance to my post. I agree, ‘disciplers’ are not just people with Ephesians 4 giftings. Making disciples is the calling of every Christian no matter their level or type of gift. My focus in the post was to target and challenge those in leadership to allow Ephesians 4 gifts to equip the saints for ministry. I could have done a better job of making that clearer.
spooner on October 16th, 2009
ahhhh the irony.
no wonder the people you speak about exist. but hey, we need all kinds of people in the body…
thanks
Andy Back on October 13th, 2009
Matt, I entirely agree that we need to get past just being people who attend churches and remain unchanged, either because they swallow unthinkingly what is preached (spooners) or because they are trying to impress others or themselves – the ones you call modern-day pharisee’s (sic). You go on to suggest that people with Ephesians 4 ministries should be developing disciples, and once again I agree. But I feel there is a whole ‘middle ground’ of quality church folk who don’t feel their gifting is right up at the high bar of Ephesians 4, and yet they have lots to impart to younger or less experienced brothers and sisters.
My view is that the guys with Ephesians 4 gifting certainly do need to be gathering potential leaders for prayer, Bible Study and discipling activities. But while we emphasise this, perhaps a lot of anointed, gifted people will disqualify themselves from needing to consider discipling others simply because they don’t consider themselves to have these specific gifts. For example, how many of the Ephesians 4 gifts are regularly given to women? Some might argue that pastor, evangelist & prophet gifts may be imparted to those on the distaff side, but we are often rather slow to recognise this, and if we do, the occurrences are infrequent. This puts a huge burden on the few women acknowledged as ‘pastors’ to disciple all the other women.
No, I feel that to limit the qualification for ‘discipler’ to those with Ephesians 4 ministries is much too exclusive, and places an intolerable burden upon them, to the point that they will be distracted from exercising those ministries properly.
I’m not convinced that ‘discipling’ refers to those who are nearly ready for translation into heaven by means of fiery chariot… it’s about someone with a skill or gifting to impart passing it on, isn’t it? 2 Timothy 2:2 speaks of momentum (‘teach others also’) more than it does of perfection (the key word is ‘faithful’).
So let those with something to impart invite others to receive. My own experience in scripture memory, Bible study methods and learning how to speak in public don’t add up to Apostle by any stretch of the imagination, yet I feel I have a role to play in my local church in gathering a bunch of blokes for mutual encouragement, Bible study, scripture memorisation and preaching practice (and we also provide each other with a suitable forum for accountability, since we are all single men and have agreed to speak with honesty about the struggles and victories we encounter in that realm).
Let adults teach children, too. Let women with years of walking with Jesus train and disciple younger women, and let there be a flow of fellowship in both directions.
Discipling is a valuable, necessary, delightful opportunity, to be embraced (with some qualifications, I agree) by more or less anyone who is further down a particular road than another person.
It seems to me that you don’t have to be an Apostle yourself to impart apostolic gifting; you don’t have to be 100% fit and healthy to pray effectively for healing. It’s more about the giver of the gifts than the individual who is exercising boldness of faith. I think the same applies to discipling. I won’t wait until I’m close to perfection (or even until I’m recognised with a job title) before I take seriously the command to ‘go and make disciples’ (Matthew 28:19).