Years ago while in the mission field in Malawi, Africa, I realized that we as a ministry (me specifically as the leader) were doing things wrong…biblically wrong.
As a brief background, I was saved at 30 years of age. Prior to that, I had relatively no church upbringing or experience. So for me, whatever I saw in the church, that was ‘normal.’ I had nothing to compare it to. While I was blessed to be a part of a good church when I was first saved, there were still things that I saw in churches, both there and around the world, that concerned me. Specifically, as I read the Bible for the first time, and continued reading It through each year, I noticed that the church today did not seem to behave the same as Jesus and the Apostles. This was most apparent when it came to evangelism and discipleship. It seemed that 2,000 years after the cross of Christ, our focus had shifted to making quick converts and promoting an ‘easy believism.’ 1 Below is a brief sampling of the disparity between what I was reading in Scripture and what I was experiencing within the church community.
- While I believe it was well intentioned, we tried to reduce the Gospel to something easy, discrete, and private. We over-simplified the Gospel in order to make it fit into easy to remember acronyms, and catchy monikers like A.B.C. and the Roman’s Road, and then we sealed the deal with the ‘Sinner’s Prayer.’ While these are all great, that was not how I was seeing the Gospel taught, shared, and contended for in Scripture. 2
- Often times, the norm I witnessed was, the pastor/evangelist/preacher would insist ‘every head bowed and every eye closed.’ He would then invite people to secretly and discretely raise their hands if they wanted to go to heaven. Again, this is not what I saw in Scripture…at all. 3
- Additionally, there was great focus on getting people to pray the prayer, but there did not seem to be much follow-up and commitment to mentor and disciple these new converts.
- Finally, we treated the ‘new converts’ as if they were immediately a done-deal. We led them in a prayer, dunked them in water, and then gave them their guarantee of eternal life.
- The result was…a large percentage fall-away rate. I have seen this play out all over the world in churches across denominational lines. While I cannot currently find any direct quotes, I know reports of 80-90% fall-away rate for new converts for denominations is not uncommon. 4
So what does all this mean, and how does it play out? In many churches, especially the smaller ones, these new converts get the idea that their primary responsibility now is to simply invite people to church for the pastor to ‘save them.’ Years ago, I experienced this in a very personal way…in fact, I was the cause of it.
Right after I was saved, a little over a year later, I started doing missions work in Africa. After a couple of years there, we had started 76 churches and had nearly 150 pastors in training. All of them…every one…expected this of me. They believed their responsibility was to invite people to church and then I would evangelize them when I came. At first, seeing anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hands raised for salvation at nearly every church service was encouraging, and if I can be honest, an unhealthy source of self-pride. Eventually this would both wear me out and wear on me. After about a year of being exhausted keeping up that kind of a ministry, I noticed that even though every visit to a church, and every altar-call given yielded a lot of hands and sinners prayers, the church was no more full the next time I came. It was then that the Lord began to show me the difference between just making a ‘convert’ (true or false) and making a true, fruit-bearing, spiritually reproductive, Disciple that would in turn be a Disciple-maker. This is our call and command from the Lord, “to go forth an make disciples of all nations.” 5
Below is a chart. This chart compares and contrasts the outcome of both the Convert and Disciple models. Here are the assumptions in each: In the Convert Model, I start with 100 imaginary pastors of 100 imaginary churches. Then we assume that each one can obtain 100 new decisions (converts) each year for 10 years. This is the model most churches operate under. The congregants invite people to the pastors for the pastors to do the wok of evangelism. As for discipleship, often times it is silently presumed that just coming on Sunday and hearing a sermon will satisfy the call to mature that disciple. It will not.
In the second table, I start with just 1 every-day believer. Next, it assumes that 1 person can spend 1 year mentoring and discipling 10 people per year. This means purposely, doing life together, life on life, investing in those individuals, being transparent with them, and poring all you have (spiritually) into them. So the result is at the end of 1 year, those 10 individuals are now ready to take 10 people and disciple them. So at the beginning of year 2, there are now 11 people ready to start making true disciple making disciples. Notice the math and the outcome:
CONVERT MODEL
| Year # | 100 Pastors to Start | Converts / Year | New Converts | Running Total New Converts |
| 1 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 10,000 |
| 2 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 20,000 |
| 3 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 30,000 |
| 4 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 40,000 |
| 5 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 50,000 |
| 6 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 60,000 |
| 7 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 70,000 |
| 8 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 80,000 |
| 9 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 90,000 |
| 10 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 | 100,000 |
DISCIPLESHIP MODEL
| Year # | Disciple Makers @ Start of the Year | New Disciples Made by Each | Total New Disciples @ the end of the Yr | Total Disciples Makers @ the end of the Year |
| 1 | 1 | 10 | 10 | 11 |
| 2 | 11 | 10 | 110 | 121 |
| 3 | 121 | 10 | 1,210 | 1,331 |
| 4 | 1,331 | 10 | 13,310 | 14,641 |
| 5 | 14,641 | 10 | 146,410 | 161,051 |
| 6 | 161,051 | 10 | 1,610,510 | 1,771,561 |
| 7 | 1,771,561 | 10 | 17,715,610 | 19,487,171 |
| 8 | 19,487,171 | 10 | 194,871,710 | 214,358,881 |
| 9 | 214,358,881 | 10 | 2,143,588,810 | 2,357,947,691 |
| 10 | 2,357,947,691 | 10 | 23,579,476,910 | 25,937,424,601 |
Take-Aways
- Note that in the Convert model, it would take 100 pastors at 100 churches leading 100 people to pray the sinner’s prayer each year to reach 100,000 converts. while that does not sound too shabby in and of itself, when you factor in the fall-away rate of 80%, for example, that reduces the real converts to only 20,000 at the end of 10 years. However those 20,000 are still not likely to be making disciples.
- By contrast, if just 1 person, 1 true disciple of Jesus, would invest 1 year of their life training just 10 people per year to both be a disciple and give them the tools to make disciples themselves at the end of the year, the entire planet could be discipled for Jesus 3x over in only 10 years.
- Part of how we make make this switch is to better grasp the roles of the pastor / church leaders and the congregation (clergy and laity). Ephesians 4 tells us that every church leader and office is for the ‘equipping of the saints.’ The job of the church leaders is to act as teachers and schools for the purpose of preparing the disciples to go out and make disciples of their own. Think about it this way: when we go to college for business, after class, our professor does not go to our workplace and do our job. The same applies to pastors and church leaders.
- Part of the change is our mindset. Are we going to church to punch a religious time-clock, fulfill a spiritual obligation, be entertained, to feel better about ourselves, to socialize…or are we primarily going to church to be equipped for every good work? To be trained how to train others in the faith?
I hope to do more on this topic in the future.
Article Footnotes- Later, I may write again tracing the development of the easy believism we have reached in our culture, but for now I will stay on the topic at hand.[↩]
- Jude 3[↩]
- By way of an example, consider the story of The Rich Young Ruler as told in Mark 10:17-25. This young man (a) acknowledged Jesus as Lord – he ran to Him and bowed at His feet, (b) he asked Jesus as the Messiah, what he needed to do to be saved, and what was the result? Jesus did not congratulate him. Jesus did not rejoice. Instead, Jesus methodically got to the heart of the man’s primary issue that was preventing his salvation. He confronted the man’s doctrines and beliefs. He corrected the young man’s position on no one is good except for God alone. Then Jesus, in love, confronted the man with his primary idol…his wealth. If you read the Gospels, this is not isolated behavior by Jesus. Accepting and following Christ is the only free gift that will cost us everything. [↩]
- Here is a quote from the Barna Group showing that American Christianity is on a sharp decline with American Atheism / Agnosticism / No religion has doubled in the same time period. The quote reads, “Percentage points for all religious segments saw little to no shift over a decade, from 2003 to 2012—but by 2018, Christianity in the United States had witnessed a significant loss of followers, from 81 percent in 2003 to 72 percent in 2018. Meanwhile, the atheist / agnostic / none segment has seen the greatest increase of all groups analyzed, nearly doubling in size from 11 percent in 2003 to 21 percent in 2018.” Source: https://www.barna.com/rise-of-atheism/ [↩]
- Matthew 28:19-20[↩]