Start Disciple-Making in Your Congregation with the Gospel

The temptation for us (as authors of The Discipleship Gospel) is to give you a step-by-step plan for implementing a gospel-driven disciple-making strategy. We will resist this temptation, though, because a prescribed list of instructions would do you harm. We don’t want to create disciple-making zombies out of you. We suggest making a plan—your own plan—because we want your work to be fully human and fully personal within your context.

The common virus among writers and powerful practitioners is to present you, the reader, with a ready-made solution. We’re going to insist that you do this for yourself. We could inject you with a factory-made, synthetic plan, but you can develop your own plan through prayer, study, and reflection, and actualize it by carefully living it out. So how do you create your own plan? If you’re starting from scratch, this can be a daunting task, but don’t lose heart! Jesus promises to be with us always, until the end, if we’re making disciples (Matt. 28:20). We’ve devoted this chapter to the important task of helping you create a workable plan.

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You can’t make disciples without some sort of accountability, and you can’t practice accountability without structure. That’s where a plan comes in. Accountability is simply helping people keep their commitments to God. You don’t want to force anything, but you can create a supportive environment where people who have made commitments to God can more easily keep them. The majority of people give up on themselves too soon in the discipleship process they have chosen because of discouragement. Caring persons, though, provide encouragement and exhort their friends to continue, especially when it’s difficult. The very best people at accountability are on the same journey as the people they keep accountable. They have similar challenges and move forward in following Jesus together.

The most common pastoral malady in the Western hemisphere is laboring under the false belief that congregants agree on the gospel and what it means. Our guess is you get that by now. The most common gospels make discipleship and serious Christian faith optional and disconnected from going to heaven when you die. The pastor’s hands are tied by the basic assumptions of what most congregants believe is required of them. Ipso facto, pastors spend much of their career persuading nominal or consumeristic professors of Christian dogma to take up the option on their salvation contract.

This will require the leader to carefully reteach the gospel point by point to the congregation. Of course, this requires care and concern, reassuring members that they’re safe while this is all rethought and reconsidered.

One tip that might help: don’t trash the gospel you have been teaching and previous generations have taught. Simply cut the taproot and don’t nourish and feed it any longer. Rebuild around it and explain it in such a way that creates a more robust gospel in a way that will help people flourish and understand that their calling to salvation is also a call to discipleship—no exceptions, no excuses. Additionally, all followers of Jesus are to make other followers of Jesus. This is our calling, the full and abundant life to which Christ has called us (John 10:10).[1]

NOTES:

 1. For a full explanation of the various gospels that are presently taught, see Conversion and Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) 33.

 This was taken from The Discipleship Gospel by Bill Hull and Ben Sobels. Used by permission of HIM Publications. Use code TBP at checkout for a discount when you place your order here.