Quick story: I’m at Hoover Park last Friday. A local park with handball court and beat-up workout bars by the entrance, the one John’s been working for months now, reading his Bible in the same spot, playing a few games, talking to whoever’s around. A few of our folks from out of town are with me that day, watching how this whole thing works.
A guy is working out using the equipment. I start talking to him. Somewhere in the middle of it I share the gospel.
Alex says yes to reading the Bible with us. Praise God.
That’s Friday.
Lost to Leader in a Weekend
Saturday he actually shows up, and John joins us this time. We go through a Story of Hope. Alex isn’t ready to follow yet. We don’t push it. We just keep going.
Then we get to the Great Commission and I lay it out plain sitting at the coffee shop we go to daily.
Does Jesus have authority in your life? (Yes/No)
Will you go where He leads you? (Yes/No)
Will you learn to make disciples? (Yes/No)
In all nations of the earth? (Yes/No)
Will you get baptized and baptize? (Yes/No)
Obey His commands? (Yes/No)
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
We baptize him right there that afternoon at my house and the same day we sit down and train him to reach his own network.
Lost to leader. One day. Not lost to convert. Lost to leader.
Without the pathway, John's still gathering. Alex is still waiting.
Two Half-True Things
Dave and I have both lived on either side of an argument that never really gets settled in movement circles. Make disciples, obey the Great Commission, and church happens on its own. Or, no, plant churches, that’s where the whole task actually lives, disciples get made along the way. You can find a verse for either one. You can find a movement that built its whole identity around either one.
Dave tells this on himself better than I can: Fifteen years ago, deep in that first wave of disciple-making books, he reads this article, sticks with him for years, the engine of the car is disciple-making, make disciples and you’ll always get to church. He believes it enough to build a whole season of ministry around it in Oklahoma City.
Church didn’t come.
Not because he’s bad at it. He’ll tell you that too, half joking, half not. One-on-one discipleship, even the real kind, can’t manufacture a leader out of nothing. A leader needs people to actually lead. Skip that and you get real change in somebody’s life and still no church at the end of it.
Guys who belong to everybody’s stewardship end up belonging to nobody. A hundred percent Jesus’s disciple. Zero percent anybody’s actual responsibility.
But if you go the other way and only focus on church there are different problems.
You end up with a room full of people who show up, confident guy up front, and underneath all that, thin. Fuzzy. Church exists. Nobody in the room could actually reproduce it somewhere else.
I don’t think either of those is a mistake exactly. I think they’re both half a true thing mistaken for the whole thing.
Somebody needs a small enough space to say what’s actually going on with them and get pushed on it. Not a room of fifty. Sometimes not even a room of five. And somebody needs a bigger space too, where they’re carrying something beyond just their own walk with God, because two guys getting coffee, no matter how good that conversation is, isn’t going to give them that on its own.
The Test You Can Run Tonight
You want to know honestly which side you lean toward? Forget what you’d say if I asked you outright.
The test: Go find whoever you’re discipling right now, next time you’re texting them about something else entirely, and just ask, almost as an aside, what do you think the goal is here. See what they say.
If you lean disciple-making, you already know what’s coming back. Something about following Jesus. Something real, probably. And then either silence or a shrug when it comes to church, because you never actually said the word out loud to them.
If you lean church, flip it. Ask somebody sitting in your gathering what it means to make a disciple. Not define the term, just, what would you actually do. You’ll get something about showing up, maybe leading a discussion. Not much about the guy at their job who doesn’t know Jesus yet.
Two things have to already exist before your version of Alex shows up on the bars.
One is an actual sequence, not a vibe, for taking someone from that first conversation to the point where you’d trust them with somebody else. John had it memorized, basically, by the time Saturday rolled around. Didn’t have to think about it.
The other is a version of what does church even require, stripped down to almost nothing. Who, what, where, when, why. Not the healthy version. The starting version. A disciple who can answer those five things badly can still help get something started.
Run both and you get Saturday on my porch. Run only one and you get half of something real. Guys who’ve changed but built nothing that outlasts them. Or rooms that gather every week and can’t reproduce a single thing that happened to get them there.
I don’t actually know what happens to Alex yet. Nobody does. John’s still texting him, still following up, still doing the unglamorous part where you find out if yes on a Saturday turns into anything six months out. That part doesn’t make it into the story you tell on a podcast. It’s the part that actually matters most.
You can agree with this article and still change nothing.
Our labs are for people who are ready to stop drifting and take one clear step.
Upcoming: “4 Questions to Get Started Making Disciples” (Wednesday, August 19th at 3PM ET). Use four simple questions to choose one person, start one conversation, and schedule one next step.
