The mission of the church is making disciples. Doing so is accomplished through baptism and through teaching believers to obey everything Jesus commanded. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is — and it isn’t. Let me explain.

If disciple-making was strictly an academic pursuit, we could package it as a curriculum of books and classes and then simply require students to participate and demonstrate proficiency. That would be easy — and everyone would be doing it successfully. We’re not. So, what’s the problem?
Transformation

Being a disciple of Jesus Christ requires more than education — it also requires transformation. According to Paul the Apostle, the mind of a disciple must be yielded fully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, offered as a “living sacrifice — holy and pleasing to God” for the miracle of transformation to take place. See Romans 12:1-2.

Jesus spoke of yielding as “taking up your cross and following me.” See Matthew 16:24. It is only in this fully yielded state that a true disciple is miraculously formed — and that’s what makes discipleship so difficult for the church to manage. The church just can’t control the heart and mind of the individual.

Friend, if you haven’t discovered it yet, living a life fully yielded to Jesus Christ is a messy proposition. Discipleship rarely travels in a straight line because life is full of unexpected challenges, delays and detours. Real discipleship can take years to accomplish. For many disciple makers, and for the church at large, that messiness is just plain intolerable. It is likely the very reason we settle for legalistic religiosity over authentic spirituality. Religiosity can be managed, calendared and budgeted — authentic spirituality cannot. Instead, it must be lived-out and refined in the intimacy of relationships, day by day by day.
Relational

For this reason, Jesus modeled discipleship as a relational process. He spent three years living with and teaching the disciples He was making. It was messy work, and at times Jesus expressed His frustration with the slowness of their progress. Yet He stayed on mission and the disciples He made adopted His mission and changed the world.

Jesus didn’t spend a lot of time working with or preaching to crowds. Instead, He invested three years into the making of twelve disciples. Had He consulted with me before launching His ministry, I would have suggested a different methodology. Seriously, if He only had three years to give, why waste time on just twelve people? I would have suggested at least a hundred — or better yet — ten thousand. How could he possibly expect to change the world with just twelve disciples?
Metrics

Now we’re starting to expose the real challenge the church is facing today. Our main metric is size, so we see big churches as successful and small churches as failing. We reward big churches for being big, and we make small churches feel guilty for being small. Isn’t it odd and troubling that by our metrics, Jesus could be considered a failure?

But what if we changed by adopting the metric used by Jesus? What if we pastors and church leaders saw ourselves as successful, not by the crowds we gather on Sunday mornings, but rather by the number of believers being genuinely transformed by the renewing of their minds? What if every pastor and every church leader gathered together a group of twelve people to disciple over a three-year period? And what if every one of those disciples also became disciple makers?

It’s probably a pipe dream, but for fun, let’s do the math: One disciple maker with twelve disciples makes a group of thirteen. If after three years, those twelve become disciple makers and all thirteen each take on another group of twelve, the result is 156 disciples after six years. If those 156 each take on a group of twelve, the result is 1,872 after nine years. If they all take on twelve disciples, the result is 22,464 after 12 years. 15 years out? 269,568. Project those numbers out three more years and you get a staggering 3,234,816 transformed missional disciples in just 18 years.

This concept isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. Disciple-making visionaries have been saying these things all along, but most of us don’t hear it because we are hopelessly trapped in our traditional metrics and our methodology. Change seems impossible. But who knows, maybe someone reading this article will break free and become a disciple-maker just like Jesus. I’m praying for the courage to do so — and I encourage you to do the same. Until we are willing to change, the mission will keep losing ground.
Postscript

I’m not suggesting in this article that big churches are not making authentic disciples. I am certain that some churches are big because they are very good at it. However, just because a church is big doesn’t guarantee it is successful at disciple-making. Every pastor and church leader must evaluate their own missional efforts and metrics knowing that they will someday give an account to Jesus Christ for the stewardship of His church. Big or small, I pray that each leader will prayerfully, honestly, and humbly consider the metric that is most important to them. Listen, if we leaders are fooling ourselves, the mission has little hope.