Two Key Reasons for Our Discipleship Problem

by John Whittaker

Can I be honest? I’ve sat through too many church leadership meetings that spent way too much time wrestling with this question: What is the mission of the church?

I think the motivation was good. They wanted to write out their mission statement so they could be effective in their ministry. But the answer to this question is no mystery. And churches actually aren’t free to come up with their own mission.

Jesus already gave us a mission and made it perfectly clear: “Go and make disciples…” (Matt. 28:19-20).

He even told us how to do it. According to Jesus, making disciples entails two things - baptizing people into Christ and teaching them to obey everything he commanded.

This is our mission.

Discipleship isn’t something we do; it’s everything we do!

Since the mission of the church is to make disciples, disciple making and discipleship cannot be one program among many in the church. Instead, every program, ministry, and activity ought to in some way help people become disciples of Jesus or grow as disciples of Jesus.

So, what is a disciple?

For Jesus and his first disciples, the answer to that question was clear and grew out of their cultural context. Young Jewish men would attach themselves to a particular rabbi as his talmid (=disciple) with the expressed goal of becoming like the rabbi. They would learn what the rabbi knew, and they would do what the rabbi did. This is what it meant to be a disciple.

So, a disciple of Jesus is someone who arranges their life to be with Jesus in order to become like Jesus.

The work of making disciples entails two parts, both seen in Matthew 28:19-20: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you.” First, we call people to attach themselves to Jesus. This is what is usually called evangelism, and it is embodied in baptism. Second, we help people become like Jesus by teaching them to do what Jesus taught.

Now here’s the thing…There’s a growing awareness among church leaders that we have a discipleship problem in the church today. We’ve done better at making converts and making church members rather than making disciples.

Why is that?

There’s probably a handful of factors, but I’d like to focus on two reasons that I think are at the heart of the issue.

Disciple making and the gospel go hand-in-hand. That is, the gospel you preach determines the disciples you make.

And we have been preaching something other than the gospel the apostles preached, and that’s one of the major reasons we’re not making disciples like they did.

Let me show you what I mean.

What is the gospel? Most of the ways the gospel has been summarized in the modern church sounds something like this: you’ve sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But God sent Jesus to die for your sins. If you believe in Jesus, he’ll forgive your sins, and you can go to heaven when you die.

Whether it’s the “Romans Road” or the “Four Spiritual Laws” or something else, typically the gospel we’ve been taught is something like that, some sort of plan of salvation.

When you pay attention to what the apostles preached in the book of Acts, however, it stands in stark contrast to that version of the gospel. Just to be clear, it’s not that the gospel doesn’t offer salvation; it does. It’s that in the preaching of the apostles, things like forgiveness and eternal life are benefits of the gospel, not the heart of it.

When the apostles preach the gospel in the book of Acts, the message they declare is that Jesus is King, risen from the dead. And the call to action is to repent and believe that gospel.

• In the first gospel sermon in Acts 2, Peter builds up to the announcement that God raised Jesus from the dead and seated him at his right hand (2:31-33) and then proclaims, “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified” (2:36). And then after he calls people to repent and be baptized. 

• In Acts 3, Peter quickly points out that God raised Jesus from the dead (3:15) and calls them to repent (3:19), showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of all their Old Testament hopes.

• When sharing the gospel with Cornelius and his relatives and close friends, the first gentile converts in Acts 10, Peter recounts the life of Jesus, how the Jews put him to death, but “God raised Him up on the third day” (10:40). He ends by telling Cornelius and the others gathered “that that through His name everyone who believes in Him receives forgiveness of sins” (10:43).

• The apostle Paul’s gospel message is the same. In Acts 13, his message culminates in Jesus risen from the dead (13-30-37) referring to it as “good news” (gospel, v. 32).

• Even when preaching the gospel to Greeks in Athens, Paul proclaimed that God raised Jesus from the dead (Acts 17:30-31).

You see, for the apostles and first followers of Jesus, the gospel was actually what the word means: good news! Not good advice. Not a new religion or even a plan of salvation, per se. It was news about what God had done through Jesus. It was announcing that God had installed his King on the throne by raising him from the dead.

The apostles actually learned the heart of the gospel from Jesus himself. When the gospel writers summarized the message Jesus preached, they did it like this: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). Notice that the gospel Jesus preached is that God’s kingdom is at hand. He is ushering in God’s reign and rule, his kingdom. That’s the gospel Jesus preached, and it’s what needs to be believed!

And the only appropriate response to both Jesus’ preaching of the gospel and the apostles’ preaching of it was to repent and submit to this King. 

So, we see that there are three different components we need to distinguish clearly:

A.     The content of the gospel - Jesus is King, risen from the dead.

B.     The response to the gospel - repent and believe

C.     The benefits of the gospel - forgiveness and eternal life

But here’s the important thing for the sake of making disciples: the gospel we have typically taught focuses on people getting their sins forgiven and going to heaven. The gospel the apostles preached focuses on Jesus and his kingship, and that gospel calls people to submit to him.

And submitting to Jesus’ royal authority leads directly to discipleship to Jesus.

So, it seems to me that if we want to fix our discipleship problem one key place to start would be correcting our gospel problem.

One of the things I’ve observed is that in our churches we have not made being a disciple who is becoming like Jesus crystal clear in the way we have communicated the goal of placing faith in Jesus. I had a young woman tell me recently that even though she’d been a Christian for almost a decade she never heard she was supposed to become like Jesus until recently. And sometimes - maybe often times - one result of this is that we’ve made good church members more than good disciples.

Good church members attend, serve, and give but are not necessarily becoming like Jesus from the inside out in their character and the mission of their life. I was preaching on these themes once and put on the screen a discipleship path that moved from new faith to mature faith. After service, a man stopped me and said, “John, I’ve been a Christian for 10 years now, but I’d put myself still in the new or young faith stage. All I knew I was supposed to do was go to church, serve, and give. So, I’ve been doing that faithfully. But I haven’t really become like Jesus!”

He was a great church member. He was faithful, involved, giving. All the things most pastors want from church members.

But he was stunted in his growth as a disciple, and when I asked him why, he said, “No one told me where I was supposed to go and how to get there.”

I don’t think he’s alone. I think a lot of our ways of thinking about and doing church have (unintentionally) made good church members rather than growing disciples.

So, a few thoughts from what I read in the New Testament:

• Churches are communities of the King. They are gatherings of people who have believed the gospel that Jesus is the King risen from the dead and have pledged their allegiance to him.

• Because of this, churches are colonies of heaven on earth in whatever city or town they are in. This is Paul’s point in Philippians 3:20. Christians are citizens of a new kingdom that embodies a new culture.

• Becoming part of the church leads to “re-socializing.” Re-socializing refers to teaching, modeling, and training people in new ways of doing life. People are called out of their former way of doing life into a new kingdom with a new set of values, priorities, ambitions, and practices. It’s a whole new culture…and learning a new culture is hard and takes time. But it only happens with intentionality; it doesn’t happen by accident.

I really do wonder what would happen if as churches we focused everything we do on the key task Jesus gave us — making disciples.

What if we preached the gospel the way the apostles did in Acts, announcing the news that Jesus is King and calling people to loyal submission to him?

What if rather than trying to manage or grow a religious organization known as a “church” we gave our best thinking, time, and energy into forming people who embody Christ? This is what changed the ancient Roman world. It might just change ours too.