By Chris McRae, BCI Discipleship Team Leader,
Chris McRae
The church has often fallen for the temptation of trying to mass produce mature followers of Jesus Christ. This has rightly drawn criticism both from the culture around us and from those within our midst. Such a strategy has never and will never result in the consistent outcome of a growing corps of maturing, effective and productive followers of Jesus Christ.
Discipleship can and does look like a lot of different things. There are any numbers of books, studies, and conferences to attend on how to go about making disciples. These can be very helpful when used appropriately. Throughout the different ages of church life, across the many cultures in which the good news has taken root, and in disparate epochs of history, the discipling of followers of Jesus has taken many different forms. There is no one-size-fits-all way of doing discipling. The important issue is that authentic, biblical discipleship takes place. That’s the crux of the Great Commission.
It is my belief, born out of decades of experience and the guidance of wisdom from Scripture, that there is no substitute for a long-term transformational ministry than for an intentional leader to set out with a reproducible pattern in a relational environment and engage in the hard work of making disciples. This is a long, slow and sometimes tedious process. Jesus likened hasty effects to seed that fell on soil with an underlying layer of hard rock. The plant quickly sprouted from the good seed that was sown but the plant wasn’t able to get ongoing nourishment because it hadn’t put down good roots. It ended up wilting under the hot sun.
I personally am committed to working in ministry, not for flash-in-the-pan results, but rather, in working diligently for “fruit that remains.” Carrying the metaphor forward, it is my desire to invest in a field of good soil. I believe this is best done in church-centered small group life and through individual ministry to the few.
For the church to have an impact in society and on culture that Christ envisioned for her, intentional leaders must engage in the process of making disciples.
Practically speaking this entails a commitment to and follow-through on:
A BIBLICAL MATURITY – Personal Growth in the Transformational Principle of developing the Vision, Actions, Character, and Skill of a Disciple of Jesus Christ. Discipleship must be thoroughly grounded in Scripture. It begins with a clear understanding of what Jesus himself said was required for someone to be his follower.
A DISCIPLESHIP MINISTRY – Becoming an Intentional Leader of others by Identifying, Engaging and Training men and women to become Disciple Makers themselves. To borrow the title of a book by Walter A. Henrichsen, “Disciples are Made, Not Born.” The church has for too long simply hoped that disciples would be the result of our activity.
A PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT – Engaging in a Relational Environment to pass along the heart and life of a follower of Jesus Christ to the person you are discipling. This is where it gets difficult. Our culture demands that we multiply our efficiencies and so insists that we mass produce whatever commodity we’re offering. Discipleship rarely takes place in a classroom setting.
A PRACTICAL PROCESS – Practicing a Reproducible Pattern of making replicating disciples that can be transferred from one generation of believers to another. Students need to become teachers. Discipleship cannot be left to the experts. If what we do cannot be passed on easily to those we disciple in a way that they can teach others, we’ve failed the following generation.
The content of what a disciple needs to learn is important. Though it is not everything, nor is it the most important thing, without content it cannot be said that discipleship is taking place at all. Nor is discipleship some secret set of mystical practices and ethereal exercises. The root idea behind the term is discipline.
Discipline by its nature involves time, commitment, teaching, demonstration, training, encouragement, oversight, correcting, and reproducing. This happens as the discipler lives out his own story of spiritual growth in an open and honest way. That example is then caught by a young disciple and reproduced in his own life.
Over the following weeks there will be several articles that look at these issues one by one. I look forward to opening a dialogue with anyone about this subject. Contact me at cmcrae@bciowa.org or by phone (text me) at 515.505.0591
