3. Preach and model making disciples (not converts)

Friends, we preach Christ crucified. Make no mistake. As pastors and leaders in his Church, we guard the gospel; we preach and live it as faithfully as we can. We are serious about evangelism and seeing others come to Christ. We have programs in our churches year after year to reach out to people. How we go about evangelism is a key question, especially now that the socio-cultural context has significantly changed.

I want to confess a significant shift in my philosophy of ministry from several years ago. There I was as part of a team making everything we did contemporary, training our people in witness and encouraging them to build relationships with others and invite them to church. Be “seeker friendly”; “invest and invite”. But the shift for me came with a gradual realization. I was privileged to see men in their forties come to Christ, but then they became totally enveloped in church life and lost virtually all other relationships they once had. Converted, but converted to what – local church membership?

To focus on evangelism can lead only to making converts not disciples. The imperative in the great commission is to ‘make disciples’ – ‘go’, ‘teach’ and ‘baptize’ are supportive participles, meaning they are part of disciple-making. I confess that I once saw the command as “go” (outreach), but there is no division in the great commission into evangelism (read conversion) followed by teaching. If the Church has very few new Christians, it may be because our church members are not serious about being disciples.

We have been doing mission without making disciples. Making disciples is about shaping people to Christ-likeness; it’s about formation. Mission follows formation. Anyone who is passionately shaping their life to be like Jesus will be seeing life missionally and being missionally active, to use some recent terminology. If we focus on getting people into heaven, we miss the mark. Rather, as Dallas Willard says, we seek to get heaven into people. If we sow formation in our church, we will reap mission.

The elephant in the western Church is formation. We are about the Father’s ‘business’ of changing lives. Arguably, conversion may be the start we require, but inner transformation produces the fruit of the Spirit’s life-changing work in us. We only have to look in the mirror to know we can have a head-full of Bible knowledge and be strongly evangelistic, but if the ungodly attitudes, words and behaviours remain, we are not being formed into the mini-Christ that God desires us to be. His plan is to have mini-Christs serving Him, by loving others, all around the globe. Mini-Christs are the result of a formation focus, not head-knowledge and involvement in local church activities and programs. Transforming the world one person at a time starts with ‘me’.

A disciple is someone who wants to become like their master, not just believe and belong. The essence of discipleship is the journey to Christ-likeness; it is transformation. That is best done in community – Paul’s use of the term “you” is almost always in the plural. Those of us entrusted with congregational formation, must pay heed to our own inner journey to Christ-likeness, and invite others with us on that journey.