Disciple-making beyond the front door
In Matthew 28 Jesus tells His followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Disciples making disciples–this is what Jesus has sent us to do. As church leaders, it's what we're all about, right?
But it's easy to build the case that disciple-making is a neglected practice–at least in part. We have failed to see the multi-dimensional nature of the task and this singular focus on one aspect has led to widespread neglect of the others.
We are not called merely to bring people through the front door of faith and then circle back to gather more recruits. In the context of local church leadership, disciple-making is at least a threefold task.
Invitation
First, there is the invitation. We appear to have done a decent job at this one. But whether we've truly facilitated a lot of conversions or merely secured uninformed commitments is up for debate. (Diminishing numbers of people participating in the body life of a local church suggests that the latter is more likely the case.)
“The longer you look at Jesus, the more you will want to serve Him in this world," says N. T. Wright in his book Following Jesus. “That is, of course, if it's the real Jesus you're looking at."
Sometimes the Jesus we invite people to follow is one we've created in our own minds, one who makes few real demands of us, who makes us feel happy from time to time, but doesn't challenge us. The real Jesus was both demanding and challenging.
Our invitations to follow Jesus often fail to mention the potential for this following to cost something. This is a curious habit, considering it was something Jesus himself included in His invitations. He wasn't interested in fair-weather followers and He wasn't out to dupe would-be believers with bait, only to switch it out once they were hooked.
Take a long look at the Jesus you're inviting people to follow; if He looks different than the Jesus in the Gospels, He's probably not the real Jesus.
Care
The second component of disciple-making is caring for people after they have entered the family of faith. When the apostles Paul and John write to young believers they refer to them in affectionate, parental terms. They know that these are infants in the faith and that they will need to be treated as such at least for the initial phase of their new lives.
Often our disciple-making efforts birth new believers and then effectively leave an infant alone to care for itself. Caring for a human infant is time-consuming; it disrupts your pre-parental habits; it places enormous responsibility on your shoulders. Should we as spiritual parents expect any less from the spiritual infants around us?
To be blunt though, we don't worry much about this since there are precious few new believers in our midst to care for! While this is the case in many churches and an effort should be made to correct it, as a first step I would encourage you to discover how many people currently part of your congregation are in a state of spiritual infancy. There are probably more than you suspect.
Even when there is a transparent invitation and ongoing care is given, there will still be times when people lose their way.
Retrieval
The third component is retrieving people when they wander off. This aspect of discipleship is by far the easiest to ignore since the “out of sight, out mind" principle is at work.
But both Paul and James give us clear direction in this area. Paul instructs us to gently restore someone who is caught in a transgression; James offers similar guidance to his readers at the end of his letter.
These are no less a part of the discipleship process than ushering someone into the Kingdom or caring for them when they get there.
But why is this so difficult to practice? There are many reasons, among them that it's time-consuming and it can be messy, but by avoiding retrieval missions we give the impression that a “problem child" has left home and we're not all that worried about it. After all, there seems to be a lot less drama around the house these days.
When we fail to budget time for retrieval, the faith communities in which we labour may become wider but they are sure to become shallower at the same time. And of course not everyone who is pursued in this way will be reconciled, but this is no excuse to avoid a biblical command.
The full work of discipleship involves invitation, care and retrieval. While new community is formed with the making of new disciples, deeper community is found only as we continue to invite, and pursue the other two aspects of disciple-making.
Until we see these three as interdependent and essential elements of a greater whole, the depth of fellowship in our communities of faith will remain shallow.
The rhythm of life as a family of faith must be both inward and outward, unseen and visible, internal towards fellowship and external towards evangelism. If we are weak, neglectful or intentionally avoid one dimension, it weakens the whole.
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