Many churches have settled for something less than discipleship
When I look at that definition of a disciple, it seems a bit overwhelming. How do we make people like that? In most churches today, we have lowered the bar to something more manageable and realistic. Instead of making disciples, we focus on making decisions.
A powerful evangelistic initiative—but with sobering results
In 2007, I left Oklahoma and moved back to Texas to pastor a large church in the heart of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. When I arrived, one of the major evangelistic initiatives of the church involved a ministry to the local Hispanic community.
Every year, prior to Christmas, the church would host people on the church campus. Guests would sit through a brief service where the gospel was presented. Then they would file into another building where they could shop for new Christmas toys. Church members would then wrap the toys and the guests would leave with free Christmas gifts.
The church underwrote the project every year to the tune of over $100,000. My first year, I observed the finely-tuned machine. Our members were loving and serving each family that came onto the property. The next year, I suggested that an Hispanic evangelist present the gospel and we saw phenomenal results. Over 3,500 guests visited our campus, 250 made public professions of faith, and 40 were baptized on the spot!
The Baptist Press featured a story about our evangelistic success. Everything was great. The next week I went out with a small team to visit with those who had prayed to receive Christ. We walked the apartments and trailer parks on the outskirts of our community.
After days of knocking on doors and countless conversations, the results were in. There was not one person who had made a decision for Christ who wanted to continue their spiritual journey. We did not retain one person as a member of our church. We did not retain one person in a Bible study. We did not build one relationship that lasted. We did not retain one person for anything. Most said they prayed to receive Christ but had no interest in baptism or being involved in a church, period. We made lots of decisions, but no disciples.
The painful truth about decisions without discipleship
Be honest. How much money and effort have you put into making decisions that were wasted because there was no lasting fruit? This is the dirty little secret of many churches and denominations.
If you disagree, just ask yourself why so many churches post high baptism numbers, but their attendance remains flat or in decline. How can you be reaching people and not growing? In some cases, the back door to the church is as wide as the front door. But my hunch is that the front door isn’t as wide as we think because those who made decisions quickly faded away.
Jesus anticipated quick responses without true roots
Jesus said there would be many who claim to follow Jesus but just don’t. In the parable of the sower, Jesus said some seeds fell on the path and were quickly eaten up by the birds. Some seed fell on the rocky ground and sprouted quickly, but had no root.
In the heat of day, it withered and died. That describes many decisions. They hear the word, and they respond quickly without counting the cost. They raise their hand, check the box, walk the aisle, but in a few weeks they are nowhere to be found. They didn’t put down roots and their faith, when put to the test, didn’t stand.
The dangers of focusing on numbers over transformation
There is an inherent danger in focusing on making decisions over making disciples. When you focus on making decisions, you can easily manipulate people to inflate evangelistic numbers. We have all probably seen this to some degree in local churches and evangelistic meetings. Long, drawn out invitations. Emotional appeals.
One event I witnessed asked children to raise their hands if they wanted to be “Jesus’ forever friend,” then counted each hand as a decision for Christ. When you are just making decisions, the end justifies the means. When you focus on making disciples, the pressure is off for an immediate decision and the emphasis is on presenting the gospel clearly and helping each person come to Jesus in a genuine way.
Discipleship happens in relationship, not through impersonal methods
When you focus on making decisions, impersonal methods are used to boost numbers. Large gatherings, mass responses, herded decisions. Even one-on-one presentations of the gospel are more like cold call presentations to strangers rather than honest conversations between friends.
When you focus on making disciples, you work in the context of relationships, so you actually know the person you are seeking to reach and you stay in a relationship with them as they continue their spiritual journey.
Discipleship respects the Holy Spirit’s timing
When you focus on making decisions, you have a tendency to rush the process that the Holy Spirit has begun in that person’s life. Your goal is the decision.
When you focus on making disciples, you are willing to let people process the gospel until they are prepared to choose Christ in an authentic way.
When you focus on making decisions, you can develop a false sense of success. If the number of decisions is up, you can think you are truly winning people to Christ and even making disciples, even though the quality of the decision is suspect. When you focus on making disciples, you have a long-term perspective.
Real success is counted when those who make decisions are walking in community, growing in their faith, and able to lead others to Christ.
Real success is measured in long-term faithfulness
When you focus on making decisions, your job is over after the decision is made. People are often dropped quickly or even forgotten. When you focus on making disciples, your job just begins when a person crosses the line of faith. They are spiritual babes that need nurturing, care, and protection.
What I’m not saying
I’m not saying that all evangelism efforts are bad or a waste of time. As a pastor, I’m constantly stoking the fires of evangelism in our church. We are always working hard to reach as many people as we can with the message of life. I am not advocating taking the foot off the accelerator when it comes to sharing the gospel.
What I am saying is that evangelism is only the first step in the disciple-making process. Anytime that evangelism is wrenched out of the context of a larger disciple-making strategy, it can quickly deteriorate into manipulation, gimmicks, and scrounging for decisions that seldom last. True evangelism will always result in true disciples. Anything that doesn’t isn’t real evangelism.
It’s not evangelism or discipleship—it’s both
For generations, there has been a great divide between the “evangelism camp” and the “discipleship camp” in churches. Some focus primarily on winning the lost, even if it means abandoning the new believers to fend for themselves.
People have said to me, “I just win them, someone else can take care of them!” Others prefer deeper life teachings and focus primarily on spiritual formation and disciplines, even if it means that they seldom, if ever, share their faith. One woman plainly told me, “I’m not into evangelism, I just do discipleship.”
This problem isn’t only in our churches. Even many of our denominations are divided on the organizational chart into evangelism departments and discipleship departments. The two are viewed as polar opposites, even at times seen as competitors for resources and focus, but Jesus never drew this distinction.
Jesus wasn’t only about evangelism and he wasn’t only about discipleship. Jesus was only about making disciples. Making a disciple requires that you help people come to faith in Christ and train them to feed themselves and reproduce. It’s not either/or, it’s both.
We need a long-term strategy for generational discipleship
Now more than ever we need churches that are not fixated on short-term gimmicks to achieve explosive numerical growth. What we need are churches that are committed to a long-term strategy to make disciples who will make disciples to the third and fourth generation.
If you do that, the growth will take care of itself. I recently had the opportunity to sit down and visit with Pastor Peter Lord. Pastor Lord was born in Kingston, Jamaica, British West Indies. He later came to the United States for school and pastored Park Avenue Baptist Church in Titusville, Florida, for more than thirty years. Lord is a gifted speaker and author, best known for teaching people how to pray and hear God’s voice.
Today, Dr. Lord is retired and well into his 80s, and I wanted to hear words of wisdom from his life and ministry. We talked about a lot of things, his wit and sense of humor still sharp and surprising.
Words of wisdom from a seasoned disciple-maker
When I asked him about the condition of the local church today, he got serious. Leaning forward and locking in on my eyes, he said, “England had the greatest preachers, but now they have empty cathedrals. We must do more than preach, we must make disciples.”
When I asked him what he would do differently if he could do ministry all over again, he said simply, “In my day, ministry was all about making decisions for Christ, but if I were doing it all again, I would make more disciples.” Today Dr. Lord meets with people in his home and he trains them to walk with God, reach the lost, and invest in a few. He’s making disciples.
This blog features an excerpt from one of our books, Bold Moves.
