Discipleship

The book of Acts provides us with a clear blueprint for reaching and discipling adults. If we will lead our classes to grow in health and attendance, we must:

In the previous blog, we noted that while it is easy to give lip service to the Great Commission as the mission of the local church, it is also easy to get distracted from it.

he Great Commission of Christ is to share the gospel and make disciples. Sometimes I paraphrase it, “go, win, baptize, teach.”

Discipleship is central to Christianity. In the words of my friend, Dave Hardy, “We are either making disciples, or we are making concessions.”

We should strive to make disciples, and that process of discipleship should begin at the doorway of the local church when someone desires to unite with the body of Christ.

One of the core ministries that God has greatly blessed in our church is the organized discipleship on Wednesday evenings. Not only are there new people continually being enrolled in discipleship and others completing the course, but the biblical grounding and personal mentoring that takes place during the weeks of discipleship continues to bear fruit in people’s lives years after they have finished.

If anyone had a valid excuse to drop the ball on “follow up” after an evangelistic event, it was the Apostle Paul. Between an itinerant lifestyle and the ongoing pain he must have lived with, Paul had every reason to simply focus on the city he was in, preach the gospel, and move on to the next, leaving the “decision cards” behind him.

Of course we all want every new believer to enroll in discipleship, but we also want to make sure they are committed to it. When a person who is not committed enrolls, it can cause the discipler to feel frustrated that he is being paired up with someone who does not want to put in the necessary work to finish what he started.

Throughout the years I have seen many Christians who possessed a great passion to share their faith in courageous ways. They would seize every opportunity the Lord would bring across their paths to be faithful witnesses for Him. I embrace this same passion wholeheartedly! What a thrill it is to share God’s wonderful message of salvation with someone and then see that person make a personal decision to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour. That one decision changes his life and eternity forever!

March 7, 2012—it was the beginning highlight for what would become the delight of my year. That evening, I had the joy to begin leading a young Christian through our church’s formal discipleship program.

One of the major factors among growing churches is an aggressive one-on-one discipleship ministry. When planting a church, the most important thing a church planter can do is to disciple new converts.

Servant leaders who encourage and equip others to share in ministry multiply their impact, and they multiply the effectiveness of the ministry itself. Actually, this is what discipleship is all about.

Largely through the planning and organization of one of my staff members, we recently developed a more comprehensive, five-part discipleship approach. We put the picture of each new family with whom we are working on a piece of paper and are able to track from that one sheet of paper in these five areas:

A hog and a hen sharing the same barnyard heard about a church’s program to feed the hungry. The hog and the hen discussed how they could help. The hen said, “I’ve got it! We’ll provide bacon and eggs for the church to feed the hungry.”

The next generation must be raised up and trained in our local churches. While we do the work of the ministry we must simultaneously be training others to duplicate our ministry.

The men whom Jesus chose to be His apostles found that if they would follow the teaching of their Master, they must recognize that His central teaching had to do with Who He is.

God has a plan for each one of His children. If His only goal was to simply take us to Heaven, He would do so the moment we trust Christ. The Bible makes it clear that God has saved us to serve.

It is very important to understand the difference between believing on Christ for salvation and following Him in discipleship.

Harvey Firestone once said, “It is only as we develop others that we permanently succeed.” This is true in every area, but it is especially true in the church.

The ministry, by definition, is about people. While it is true that we oftentimes (of necessity) get encumbered with details of work and administrative tasks, ultimately, the ministry is about people.