Jesus Was a Disciple Maker and a Movement Builder
Jesus was a disciple maker and a movement builder. He was able to do both at the same time. To the casual observer, Jesus might have appeared not to do much. Some think Jesus just went from village to village preaching and performing miracles with little thought of developing his leaders. However, when you dive deeper, you find that Jesus was very intentional in his actions.
He was intentional to develop men who could make disciples after he was gone. He was also intentional to develop leaders to lead the movement.
For your ministry to be healthy, you must accomplish both things simultaneously. You must fixate your thoughts on both making disciples who can multiply and developing leaders who can multiply a movement.
It’s slow work. Arduous and painstaking at times. There is no quick fix. Even after Jesus had worked consistently for over three years, he still had only 120 leaders in an upper room waiting for the Spirit to come. In modern terms, that doesn’t look like success. However, those 120 leaders—because they were disciple-making leaders who had been trained and prepared—were the ones to ignite a movement that quickly swept the world.
Most Churches Fixate on the Platform More Than the People
Most churches fixate on the platform more than they do people. Most are enamored with the personality of the key leader or the worship experience more than working on an intentional process for making disciples and developing qualified leaders to grow the movement.
So how do you do both? What does it look like to make disciples and develop disciple-making leaders? This is where the pathway and the pipeline come together.
The Disciple-Making Pathway
My passion over the past twenty-five years of ministry has been to lead our church to follow Jesus’ model. It hasn’t been easy work, but it has been incredibly rewarding. Over the years, I’ve discovered some reasons that following Jesus’ pathway is the best way to lead your church and fulfill your ministry.
1. It Focuses Your Ministry on the Priority of Multiplication
This pathway focuses your ministry on the priority of making disciples who make disciples. As I speak to church leaders across the country, most do not have a clear definition of a disciple. They are not sure if they have made any disciples, and many would be hard-pressed to point out any disciples who have reproduced. It is sad, but true.
Most churches just seem to run programs and offer worship services, hoping disciples will be made. We can do better. Following this pathway allows you to be extremely intentional in setting the direction of your church and measuring the effectiveness of your ministry.
2. It Aligns Your Programming
A friend once conducted a survey of hundred churches and asked them to label their programming along the disciple-making pathway. They categorized their programming based on whether it was engaging spiritual explorers, connecting believers, growing disciples, or multiplying disciple makers.
Once the data was in, the results were shocking. According to the survey, 87 percent of the churches had all their programming in the “connecting believers” stage. All of it. That means no programming had been created for engaging spiritual explorers or growing disciples or multiplying disciple makers.
Leadership Pipeline: Building Leaders Who Multiply
Without new leaders, you are stuck. Without new leaders, you can never multiply. If every person has a given capacity, then there is a certain capacity for your existing leadership team, and they cannot move past that capacity to new levels of growth without new leaders.
You must raise up new leaders, and the best way to do that is through a leadership pipeline.
This pipeline identifies at least five levels of leadership:
- The Self-Leader
- The Team Leader
- The Leader of Leaders
- The Department Leader
- The Organization Leader
Developing this pipeline is essential for your church and ministry growth. After all, if you need more leaders to grow, then somehow you must develop them.
Pathway + Pipeline = Synergy
We see synergy in many ways. In business, often companies will forge a partnership or merger because they are stronger together than they are independently.
The same is true with making disciples and developing leaders—the pathway and the pipeline work together to create synergy, resulting in a disciple-making leader.
Jesus understood this. He moved people along the pathway but simultaneously elevated leadership up the pipeline. He knew disciple making and movement building had to be done together.
Divergent Paths: When Pathway and Pipeline Are Misaligned
- The Leader Who Is Not a Disciple Maker
This is the person who comes to Christ or was maybe raised in the church. He feels a call to ministry, so he goes to a Bible college, then to seminary, and quickly moves up the leadership ladder. He’s a brilliant leader and preacher—but no one ever personally discipled him.
His relationship with Jesus is understood in terms of what he does for Jesus. Most of the pastors today who struggle with depression, burnout, or hidden sin issues have done so because the demands of ministry strangled their personal walk with God.
- The Disciple Maker Who Is Not a Leader
This is the leader who moves along the disciple-making path but never rises to leadership. Sometimes this happens because they are not given the opportunity. Other times, they choose to stay outside leadership because of disillusionment with the institutional church.
If that’s you, be reminded: ministry has never been a solo activity.
Multiplication Is the Measure
At the core of a disciple-making leader is the intrinsic drive to multiply.
Superstar pastors fixate on attraction and retention. The disciple-making pastor is different. He is more concerned with investment and release. He thinks, How can I invest in more leaders and release them to multiply more churches and expand God’s kingdom?
A Personal Story of Multiplication
It was a miracle when my girls were born. After seasons of loss, God gave us two beautiful daughters. Watching them grow—seeing traits of both Liz and me in them—was a miracle of multiplication.
And the same is true in our spiritual lives. Healthy things reproduce.
A Warning From the Fig Tree
Jesus told a parable about a barren fig tree—one that had not borne fruit for three years. The owner wanted to cut it down, but the worker asked for one more year to cultivate it.
What does Jesus expect of a leader? He expects multiplication. Not just appearance of success. Not just shade or beauty. But fruit.
Success in Jesus’ eyes is all about multiplication.
Final Thoughts: Made to Multiply
The life well lived is the invested life. It’s not the life of celebrity, not the life of comfort. It is the life that consistently invests in others and teaches them to do the same.
This is the work of Jesus. This is what matters most.
And it matters most, not because our contribution is that great, but because we serve a great God who has promised that when we multiply our lives for his movement, he will use us in greater ways than we can possibly imagine.
This blog features an excerpt from one of our books, The Disciple-Making Leader.
