Disciples Who Disciple

“Go and make disciples.” Jesus commanded it. We have given our lives to it. Yet much is made these days about how to actually do it. Many who grew up in the Western church have little to no actually experience of being discipled into the way of Jesus. We don’t really know how to live out everything He commanded us to do. We have heard lots of sermons, sat through many teachings and small groups, but time has shown that these methodologies do more to disciple us to a particular way of doing church rather than becoming like Christ and learning his ways. We need something more than our programs and processes have given us.

I noticed this lack of experience with disciplemaking with our church planters as well. In our church planting training, we focus on creating a movement of disciplemaking discipleship. We want there to be transferable initial disciplemaking processes for new believers to learn the foundations of the faith as well as ongoing disciplemaking processes for people to continue to learn and grow in the likeness of Jesus through following in the way of Jesus. As group after group has walked through the training and we processed together how to create disciplemaking movements we realized that most of us have never actually been discipled under the convictions that we were holding to. Instead of giving up, we decided to together go on a disciplemaking journey so that we can practice together the convictions we now living under.

Each month, a group of Minnesota church planters and a group of South and North Dakota church planters gather virtually to be discipled. We decided together to use the Ralph Moore model of sermon-based obedience-centered discipleship as a model. It isn’t the only model, it might not be the best model (but it is pretty good) but it is super transferable, repeatable and tested, so we dedicated ourselves to becoming more like Christ together. Click here to see the outline of Ralph’s model through a webinar he did for the C&MA in November 2020. The webinar is free, you just have to plug in your information to get access. If you want to talk through this model with me, feel free to reach out.

Do you have a desire to be a better discipler? To not make the same mistakes of continuing systems of ministry that don’t yield the fruit of having people follow deeply in the ways of Jesus? Find a group of people in your context or a group of pastors and start growing together. Use this model or try to use another one. Experiment to see what is fruitful but commit yourself to doing the work of disciplemaking. Don’t let yourself be deterred by a small start. Jesus spent 3 years discipling 12 people and He is God. Good things start small, and a commitment to disciplemaking is the kind of small start that can yield great fruit.

Kyle Magstadt

Associate Superintendent for
Church Multiplication