28. Practitioner's Podcast: How Quickly Will Disciple Making Scale?
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the practitioners podcast, where we're applying Jesus style. Disciple-making to everyday. This episode and all of our episodes are powered by navigators church ministries, which focuses on helping churches, make disciples who can make disciples for more information, check out navigators, church ministries, or Justin.
How are you? My friend, I'm doing pretty good. How are you Tony? Better than I deserve. It's a Monday morning. It's dreary here in Ohio. I hope you've got a good random question about. I do. And you don't even know what it is. So this random question is what late night television show did you love to watch growing up or was your favorite?
Maybe you didn't love it, but your favorite oh, So true confession. I, late night for me is like 10 o'clock. Even as a teenager, you're turning in a 10. Yeah. Well, I was up early, man. I just, I was army. I was army through and through, so I didn't really do that much, but I would say, so if I was going to watch anything, it would be Arsenio Hall.
Let's go.
Yeah, that was mine. Yes, it actually was. I used to record that on, on a VCR and watch the rest of it when I wasn't able to stay up like school nights or whatever. So that's how into Arsenio hall. I was. Holy smokes. You and I are just we're. So we're so much alike. We're basically twins. It is nuts. Yep. So Tony, we were talking before we started, because we thought about titling this something different and we were thinking about titling it, will it float?
from the Dave Letterman sketch, which you weren't familiar with. So I wasn't familiar with Willett float at all, but apparently it was a game that Dave used to play where he would drop things into an aquarium and see if it, if it floated right. And it was a thing, and I'm confident most people listening to this are familiar.
So we'll probably never know that. That's right. But its goal here, right? The goal of the episode is to talk about the idea of disciple-making and scaling, right. And, and this idea of how quickly will disciple-making scale in your church or in your community. And, and Justin, I'm wondering if you could kind of kick us off.
Why do you think. So many church leaders struggle with this idea of a will disciple-making scale. Yeah. Yeah. I think for church leaders, one of the big things, and for many pastors, they get into ministry thinking about reaching the masses. I think of a friend of mine who, who told me 20 years ago that he wanted to be the next Billy Graham and the big was on his heart, on his mind.
And. Disciple-making doesn't start that way. And so when you start with a framework of, I want to reach everybody with the gospel and then somebody comes along and says, Hey, why don't you just start working with one or two people? There's this dissonance that occurs within people that they're like, well, no, that cannot be right.
That cannot be the way to reach everybody. If you're just asking me to work with one or two people, how do you process it? Yeah, I think the hard part is, is that, cultural American church is built on success is oftentimes built on how many people are in your programs. Right? So how, how many people are in your.
your pews, how many people are in your Sunday school? How many people are using your building? How many, how many, how many? And so when you start with a posture of how many disciple-making immediately becomes a really difficult thing. Cause it's, it's arduous. You know, we all know this it's arduous, it's long it's, it's full of.
Progressions and a step backwards that like that you just, it's not a straight line. It's much more relational than that. And so it's hard. And when you're a pastor, one of the things that I have wrestled with in my own life, and I'm sure I'm not alone is I oftentimes feel judged success or failure by how many people show up to what we're.
Yeah. And, and in disciple-making one that's done privately, so nobody really sees it. And two, there's just not many people there. So like, what do you do with all that? How does it, how do you look at it? How do you measure it? When you go to your board of elders or your parish council, what do you tell them?
Ah, I spent. You know, if you think about it, right. Well, on average we spend about 90 minutes for every disciple-making meeting is kind of the pattern that you and I use. so I spent 90 minutes with four people each, right? That's a, that's a fairly large investment of time and a 40 to 50 hour work week.
And what do I have to show for it? Well, nothing right now. Just, just wait and like, Hey, what's the, how do we measure success? Well, they're reading scripture, they're doing scripture memory. Like, those are all really great things, but that's not like that's not putting butts in the seat. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a question that, you know, honestly, pastors and church leaders probably struggle with more. because of the nature of the church and the nature of their work. And some of those things you just mentioned about, being asked questions of others, but I think at some level to, that everyday believers starts to think about, well, is it, is this really gonna make a difference?
Right. Cause there's so many, I mean, we have. hundreds of people perhaps in, in the church and I'm just working with one, or maybe they already have a heart for disciple-making and they're trying to get the attention of the pastor or whoever else is in charge of, of moving things forward in the church.
And they think, well, it seems like I can never make a difference here because I'm only one person. What am I going to do? Meet with one or two people. You know, nobody's going to care about that. And I think the question that we're engaging today, Tony is so important on both sides, right? It's important for the pastor.
It's important for that everyday believer so that both sides can see, no, this is something that is extremely, extremely powerful, but we have to step back and think about it for a little bit before we can grasp or really appreciate the power that it has. Yeah, I think the other thing is, is for the, the non pastor non church leader is like, Hey, can I, if I invest this much time over this extended period of time, will it really change anything?
Will one person change anything? And I think that brings us to one of our, our keys and understanding how quickly will disciple-making scale. So. Disciple-making we'll scale at the level of our faithfulness and its faithfulness to disciple-making and into the Lord in disciple-making. Now remember one of the things that we are very passionate about is defining this term disciple-making and the ultimate measure of a mature disciple is spiritual reproduction.
And so when we talk about scale, When it comes to disciple-making when it comes to what you're doing to, to lean into someone else, the vision is always multiplication and not addition. Right? So as disciple makers, we strive for multiplication, not addition, Justin, can you kind of tell us the difference between the two.
Yeah, I want to illustrate the difference and there's going to be some math involved and I try not to do math publicly. but we're going to try it today anyway. let's just imagine that Tony, your son Connor, decides that he's going to start preaching the gospel. Yeah. And so he goes, and he begins preaching and he he's just really anointed of God.
And 10,000 people are coming to know Jesus every time he preaches. Oh, wow. Yeah, he's filling up stadiums of people just coming to listen to him. and he's, you know, a young guy, he's got a lot of energy, a lot of stamina. And so he does this not every day, but 300 days a year for 34 years, roughly the length of Jesus's life, right.
34 years. And imagine the things that would happen as a result of him doing this 10,000 people 300 days a year. He would be world famous really quickly, right? He would be on covers of magazines. Books would be written about him. He would be the thing. There probably wouldn't be anyone in America, for sure.
And maybe in the world really in the world that didn't know his name and who he was and what he was about. And at the end of that, 34 years, Tony, 102 million people would have been added to the. Isn't that awesome. Yeah, that's all. That would be, that's a prayer from your lips to God's ears, right? That would just fire the imagination.
As we, as we think about that, all the things that would come from one person, whether it's your sound or somebody else that that was doing that and the God was using it now. But now let's, let's pretend that your other son, Caleb, he says, you know, I'm not, I'm not like Connor. I could never do that. instead of, instead of preaching, I'm just going to try and, and when one person a year to the Lord, I'm going to share the gospel and just one a year.
And after they become a Christian, I'm going to start discipling them. And so at the end of that year, I want them to be able to start helping somebody else and to share their faith with somebody else. So at the end of year one, it was just Caleb and one other at the end of year two, they both did the same thing.
And so now there's four people. The end of year three, there'd be eight people. And at the end of the same 34 years, you know, a member Connor had hundred and 2 million, the end of 34 years, Kayla would have been a part of influencing and bringing into the kingdom 6 billion people. Wow. And so nobody would know him, right?
First of all, I mean, nobody would know they done that. Nobody would, but that illustrates the difference between one strategy of addition, 10,000 people a day, the other strategy of multiplication, I'm just working with one or two and I'm going to help them to get to the place where they're doing the same thing with us.
And so it's that power of multiplication. It's the power of what we sometimes think of in investing right. Of, of compounding interest. And this has really compounding influence, throughout the world and throughout, individuals that were helping them to become, not just knowing Jesus, but disciple makers for Jesus.
Yeah. I think one of the things that I heard, as you said, that is an important lesson to pull out here, which is as a disciple maker, we're not trying to, do all of the work ourselves. Right. Instead, what we're trying to do is we're trying to, to give. authority, the authority that we have in Christ.
Jesus, we're trying to give that to someone else. So oftentimes when we get into this kind of idea about multiplication versus addition, we're thinking about all the things that I can do, right. I can do this. I can do that. But when you think about disciple-making, what we're really trying to wrestle with is what can Jesus.
What can Jesus do through the person that I'm discipling? Cause I'm not discipling someone in my image. I'm discipling someone in Jesus's image. So again, I, and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the Connor approach. I'm going to call it that or the, or what some people call the Billy Graham approach evangelism to the masses is great.
There's nothing wrong with that. But when someone who's got the gifts and anointing of Billy Graham dies, so does that mean. and we've seen that, you know, and there's, again, there's, there's no shame in that. There's no shade in that either. Right? I'm not Billy Graham was an incredible, witness to the faith, but the problem is, is not everyone can be Billy Graham, but everyone can make it.
Yup. Yup. No, that's really good because even Billy Graham recognize, and in the midst of his ministry, he recognized that if all he was doing was making converts it, wasn't what God desired. And so he began really some robust efforts and asked people to come help who had more expertise in disciple-making so that after he left a place, there was work that was ongoing with those people who express faith in him.
Right now there's something else here, Tony, that we need to, we need to factor in. We need to consider, you know, the difference between making a new disciple and working with what we sometimes refer to as orphan. So those disciples who are infants or, child believers who have never reproduced, but they've been in church for decades.
You know, what, what do we need to think about in terms of those different types of people in, in the way that we disciple and the way that scaling happens? Well, I think that there's some important clarifications that as we dive into this next part of this idea about scalability is, is obviously our goal is to reach new believers.
Right. So we're trying to bring people to Christ and teach them how to teach other people to follow Christ. Right. So spiritual reproduction. So one of the things that tends to happen in churches specifically, or communities of believers, where everyone is already of like mind, is that when the disciple-making vision is given to the, to the community, what will happen is they'll share it amongst each.
So, let me give you a really practical example. I was pastoring a church and I, then went in and discipled someone who went to the church, let's call him Greg. So I discipled Greg and Greg was in the church and he was a long-time member of the church. And Greg caught the vision of disciple-making. So we know that good disciple-making, it's intentional, relational and reproducible.
And I share all those things with. And it was great. Greg has now got the vision of disciple-making he's on fire for disciple-making. And then what Greg decides to do is the same thing that I did. And he goes, and he decides to disciple grant. Well, so grant then is also in the church and he's been in the church for a really long time.
What will eventually happen? Is everyone in the church? Well only disciple. The other people who are in the church. That's not real multiplication. As a matter of fact, that's not even real edition. What that is, is lip service to reaching the community. Right. So, so we're not really reaching out. What we're really doing is just staying in.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. So we're, we're reaching in, but we're also reaching down, right? So we're developing depth and the people who are already there. And I love what you said that if we're not reaching out, if it doesn't get to the community, it's not Jesus style. Disciple-making right. Right.
And that's what we're all about here on this podcast is we're figuring out, well, how did Jesus do it and what was his priority and why did he do it that way? And what he did and his heart was. The nations, his heart was the lost, his heart was moving towards those who were far away from God. And so if we only disciple people who are in the church, we are not.
We're not practicing geo style discipling. I mean, there's no other way to say that. no clearer way to say it. And so it's not bad to work with those who are in the church. Right? We don't want you to hear that. That's not what we're saying, but we're saying is we have to be clear on why we're doing what we're doing.
We are making disciples not to make other Christians who are more mature. We're making disciples so that more mature Christians can go and reach. Right. And so if we aren't doing that ourselves, then we're not modeling well for those that we're discipling in the church, but we also can't expect those that were discipling to go do something that we're not doing to begin with.
Yeah. I think this also goes back to the point that you can't. You can't spiritual reproduce with people who are already born the, you know what I mean? So if we, if we think about that sense, right? I'm trying to reach people who don't yet know Christ and, and raise them into maturity. now I think as a disciple maker, who is in both worlds, I have non-Christian friends and I have Christian friends.
I try to be intentional about splitting those relationships equally. Right. So when I do. What I ended up doing is I have intentional relationships with people who are outside of the church and intentional relationships with the people that are inside the church. And I do my best work when I'm doing, that in both places.
So. I would just tell you as a disciple maker, as you think about this, I know it can sound a little overwhelming, but honestly, all it requires is for you to put yourself in a position where there are nonbelievers around you. And that's sometimes in the, the north American church that we don't do well, but will bear much fruit.
As we think about multiplication over the. Yeah, and that's really good because the other part is if we are only working with existing disciples, a lot of our tools are aimed for people who are new in the faith, who. You know, are just beginning their walk with him. And those, those people come from the outside, they come from those who don't know Jesus right now.
And so then we're just passing tools along that that don't apply to anyone that we're actually working with. They PR they apply most directly to people that, you know, we hope to work with. Right. And that, that doesn't really happen. if we don't reach a loss. So, I think what we're saying, Tony is that, that it scales, but it scales best when we multiply and it scales best when we're out there reaching the loss, because that's how, that's the intent of all of it.
Right? So that's where those two methods of the message. Edition of preaching and trying to reach the loss means you can. And the method of one or two, they come together and the masses are reached only when those one or two, start to, to reach one or two. Right. And so as we're reaching, then we're scaling.
I love it. I love it. Let me go ahead and take us out of here with our takeaway and action step. We covered a lot of ground today, but this is an important idea. And so your takeaway disciple-making will always scale to the level of our faithfulness. Disciple-making will always scale. To the level of our faithfulness.
And so the action step then is to evaluate your faithfulness in disciple-making are you're multiplying or just adding, right. Are you multiplying or just adding, are you talking to orphans or are you talking to new believers and what does the intentionality look like at both? There's a lot of work to be done here, but what I know and what I've seen in my own life, and I know Justin will attest to this as well, is that when we step out faithful, The Lord meets us there in a way that he won't in any other environment.
It's beautiful, it's meaningful, and it it'll help us reach, reach for the masses. So thank you guys so much. Hey, if this episode was valuable to do for you, do me a favor, hit that subscribe button, wherever you listen to podcasts, leave a rating or review on iTunes or Spotify. And Hey, the biggest comment you can give us, share this episode with a friend, maybe somebody you're discipling, maybe a pastor, maybe somebody you want to start discipling.
Thank you guys so much. And we look forward to connecting with you real soon