Converts or Disciples?

In my last blog I posed a question that I have discovered many leaders across the Church at large are asking in this season. The question is simply “Are we actually making disciples”? In this post, I want to look behind the question to discover why large, growing churches and small neighborhood churches alike might be asking it.

When was the last time someone got saved in your church? Maybe it was last Sunday at the altar call. Maybe it was after your last baptismal service? Or at last year’s summer outreach? Maybe it was one person. Maybe it was dozens of people.

We celebrate when Father God rescues even one sinner who was lost. Every salvation should be celebrated. But I want to suggest that many in the Church today are waking up to the realization that bringing people to a point of “making a commitment” to give their lives to Jesus and “getting them saved” is not the same as making disciples.

Jesus did not command us to “go and make converts.” Of course, salvation is an intrinsic part of the process. He told stories to show the importance of lost things being found. He even declared that He had come to seek and save that which was lost. But that is only the beginning of discipleship. Jesus tells us to go and make disciples wherever we go.

I might contrast the difference in this way: Imagine the parents of a child thinking that after successfully giving birth to a baby, they are released of any other parental responsibilities to nurture and raise the child to become a healthy adult. A baby is not fully mature when he or she is born. In fact, the parents’ responsibilities to raise the child have only just begun. So in the Church we need to take our responsibility to raise mature disciples seriously.

Churches frequently count the number of “salvations” as an indicator of whether they are being successful. It is not a bad thing to measure how many salvations are happening, but it only tells you one thing. We keep count of this at our church. Why wouldn’t we—it’s very encouraging. But I’d like to propose that a different and perhaps more helpful measurement of the health and vitality in our church would be “how many people are we actively discipling?” Twelve months on, how many of the people who came forward to “invite Jesus into their heart” are now living committed to being His disciples, and how are we doing at being intentional about helping them with that?

Dallas Willard once suggested that there are two questions that all churches should answer: firstly, “Do we have a plan for making disciples?” and secondly, “Is it working?”

Now, you may be reading this and thinking, “Well, that’s the job of the pastors, isn’t it?” It’s a fair comment… but that question reveals a false dichotomy between professional clergy and laity (a subject for another blog). I’d like to propose that it is the job of every believer to be a disciple of Jesus, and implicit in being a disciple is the task of making disciples.

We’ll look a bit more at what it means to be a disciple of Jesus in my next blog. (If you want to hear someone else’s perspective, you can listen to Kris Vallotton from Bethel, Redding, tackling this same issue on his podcast here). 

For now, I simply want to leave you with this question: Do you make any distinction between describing yourself as a “Christian,” a “believer” or as a “disciple of Jesus”? If so, where did you learn to make that distinction?