As a young fella I had a conversation with a heroin addict. Thinking I could educate him out of his self-destructive lifestyle (I was young, naïve and heroic, okay?), I bluntly stated. “You keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be dead before you’re thirty.” “I know.” He responded blankly. He didn’t need educating on the dangers of drug abuse. He needed a reason to live. He needed an answer to the question, ‘Why?’
Education and training seem to be the go-to solutions for what ails society. Yet education campaigns alone have been pretty ineffective in dealing with problems like obesity and domestic violence. Responding to a problem with education and training assumes the reason people are doing something harmful or not doing something desirable is their lack of understanding and skills.
When something isn’t happening in a church, the reflex action seems to be to run some training. Training is useful for equipping people with skills and processes required to effectively fulfil roles in the life of the church. Churches frequently offer training in disciple-making skills like sharing personal faith, sharing the gospel or helping people to develop devotional habits and spiritual disciplines.
Yet even if training is front-ended with a rationale or a biblical imperative, it will at best answer ‘Why?’ at a cerebral or subscription level, while primarily answering questions about ‘What?’ and ‘How?’ It equips those already motivated, but doesn’t motivate those who aren’t.
The deeper answer to ‘Why?’ usually comes wrapped in human flesh – Jesus came as incarnation, not information. Jesus appointed the apostles firstly to be with him. They followed him personally. Jesus made disciples by walking hundreds of miles with them as they tramped the roads between the towns and cities where he preached. While Jesus preached to thousands, in the upper room at Pentecost were 120 who had followed him.
The bottom line is that disciples make disciples. In writing to the Corinthian church, Paul appealed to his relationship with the church members, his way of life and his planned presence to encourage them to follow his example. The didactic teaching flows out of the relationship. Paul pleaded with them as their spiritual father, not their professor.
Courses and programs can be used by disciples to help make disciples, but the whole discipleship process, from ‘pre-evangelism’ through to leadership formation, is fundamentally a relational one, spread over months and perhaps years.
If a church is not making new disciples from among the unchurched, the primary problem is likely the poor discipleship of the congregation. They might know all the Sunday school answers, but no amount of ‘what’ and ‘how’ will turn a churchgoer into a disciple. The challenge for the pastor is to conceive of their role as predominantly that of a disciple maker, allocating a significant proportion of their time to life-on-life interaction both with key members of their congregation and with the unchurched. Not easy when there’s so much ‘what’ and ‘how’ to do.