Playing the Long Game in Local Church Disciple Making
It was a perfect morning in the Rockies. The skies were a shade of blue you rarely see in the humid Midwest. I was with a small group of men at a men’s conference. Because I had previously brought other groups to this conference, I skipped the morning session. I needed time to be still before God. In the last month, I had made a gut-wrenching vocational decision. Had I missed the will of God? On this morning, I needed stillness. I needed the majesty of the mountains, the clear blue sky, and cool, pine-scented air to clear my head and heart. I needed a reminder that God had me in his care. That’s when I was struck by a quick thought. How great would it be to live here!
Then my eyes shifted to the village below. I saw a person on their way to work, dashing to her car with a piece of toast in her mouth and a cup of coffee in her hand. I saw a young mom struggling to load three school-aged children and all their gear into her minivan. Beneath this picturesque setting, life in the village looked just like life everywhere else. If I lived here would I appreciate this setting as much as I did this morning? Perhaps like the people living their hurried and hassled everyday lives, the mountain setting would be present but not significant, devoid of the awe it inspired in me.
It strikes me that disciple making has something in common with this mountain setting. Like the mountain, it is both majestic and significant. The resurrected Jesus’s marching orders for the leaders of his movement were to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19a). Think about how Jesus’s movement has grown from humble beginnings and endured over centuries despite fierce opposition!
In my network of churches, I have never encountered even one church that did not give the Great Commission its due. Like the mountain, the command to make disciples is inspirational. It spawns visions of winning the lost, maturing saints, and multiplying harvest workers and churches. In decades of local church ministry and denominational service, I have seen multiple iterations of vision work that sprang from the headwaters of Jesus’s disciple-making commission.
Yet at this moment in history—with access to more resources, conferences, and consulting than ever—bold disciple making visions often fall short of reality. How can this be? Perhaps like the people in my mountain village, pastors and their people are scurrying from place to place trying our best to make our churches flourish. Yet, we can’t help but be influenced by our culture where everything from information to food to virtual relationships are at our fingertips. No matter now much we would like to, we cannot make a disciple the way we grab a meal from a fast food drive through.
Discipleship in the Wilderness
In my younger years, I did a fair amount of discipleship with men in the wilderness of Wyoming. Something you discover quickly in the wild beauty of the mountains is that life is slow. It moves at its own pace. It cannot be hurried.
This reminds me of Jesus’s method of disciple making—slow. It was slow because the human heart was as resistant to change then as it is today. Though less modern, life in Jesus’s world was no less complex, no freer from class, race, and political tensions. Jesus’s method of launching his movement involved influence through relationship over time. Jesus played the long game in making disciples. Jesus’s method was intentional, relational, and missional. It was relational in the classic sense of spending time together in all kinds of settings, not the tidy kind of relationship that we can click in and out of today. Jesus’s method was missional. He prepared disciples to advance his life and kingdom among a religious establishment and world that would hate them (John 15:18–16:4). Jesus played the long game in disciple making. Unless we lift our eyes and reorient ourselves to Jesus’s words and ways, we will continue to live in the frustrating place between grand visions and underwhelming results.
I don’t intend to be harsh. I know many churches producing healthy, disciple-making fruit. Yet those churches are dwarfed in number by churches that think they are doing just fine in the making and multiplication of disciples.
I regularly gather small groups of pastors into cohorts with the express purpose of helping them grow as disciple making leaders. Honest self-assessment is the starting point for growth. One question I routinely ask at the outset is: “Is disciple making in your church a program or a way of life?” I recall one pastor confidently replying, “Everything in the church is disciple making.” I hear this response from churches swimming in the latest resources, best practices, and hot tips from celebrity pastors (where the hype rarely matches reality).
In this moment, I offered a gentle course correction to his thinking. Local church programs possess the potential to make a contribution to the life of a disciple, but without the presence of a consistent, loving and accountable disciple making relationship these programs struggle to make disciples that make disciples. Discipleship programs are not inherently bad. They can be an entry point for discipleship, but they are no substitute for the steady, long-term relationships that reproduce the life and mission of Jesus.
Playing the Long Game
How do we play the long game in local church discipleship? It involves prayerful, persistent investment in priorities, processes and people. Process is not to be confused with pathways (a sequence of programs designed for growth). Process involves more than gathering people into relational settings. Process involves shepherding and coaching people in Christ following in and outside formal gatherings. It involves assigning God directed risks, and helping people process success and failure. It introduces habits that make new desires about life in Christ sustainable. People is a reminder that the human element is indispensable! Disciple making that sticks involves equipping people who are growing in the character of Christ and living out his mission to pass it on to others. I can equip someone to facilitate meetings in forty-five minutes. Raising up disciple makers is longer, messier proposition. Time and messiness are barriers to the “long game” strategy of Jesus.
For our purposes, I will focus on priorities. Misaligned priorities are the silent killer of well-intentioned disciple making initiatives. These priorities are both organizational and personal. Organizationally, church leaders, often innocently and unintentionally, create disincentives for playing the long game in disciple making. Churches and pastors point to the volume of activity in the church as proof that disciples are being made. They measure inputs instead of the output of a person who can reproduce the life and mission of Jesus in others. That output is harder and costlier. It takes more time and heartache. The easier path—it seems—is to create programs with fixed time commitments that demand little real, measurable devotion to Christ. The needs change. The target keeps moving. Motivating people to participate in the programs we think they need is exasperating. Conversely, there is nothing more life giving that seeing one person grow in the character and priorities of Christ!
I know pastors, desiring to shift time and energy from inputs to outputs, who have faced employment jeopardy. Reproducing the character and mission of Jesus is slow work, and everyone in the organization from pastors to Elders must embrace “long game” priorities, measures, and methods. To follow Jesus in the long game of disciple making we must choose: keep the masses happy or deeply invest in the development of a few.
A change in personal priorities is also needed. The disciple making learning communities I facilitate are full of sincere, hardworking pastors desiring to make more and better disciples. I recall a conversation with one of those pastors who confessed that his “people don’t want discipleship.” Sadly, he isn’t alone. I fear we have conditioned people to see church as a place to receive the commodities of encouragement from the Scriptures, pastoral care as needed, and Christian instruction for their children. The harder path of following Jesus and serving as his witnesses in their generation is not something they desire. Today, many church leaders assume that what they want is all they need.
How do we help people commit to something they don’t want? The same way Jesus started, with an invitation to relationship. My first church was zealous for evangelism and mission. That was how I started with Jesus. But they had no plan for how to continue with Jesus. Frankly, I floundered after coming to faith in Christ. I was discipled “in spite of” my gospel-proclaiming church. In God’s providence, I was invited by an international student into a disciple making relationship. At first, I blew off meetings if I had a better offer. Yet this man never wavered. He offered me his consistent, loving, not judgmental and persistent presence—even when I didn’t want it.
My mentor taught me to pray, read scripture and share my faith by being with me. Experiencing the life and mission of God in relationship changes both the priorities of the disciple and the one being discipled. Through the communal experience of life in Christ, people eventually move heaven and earth for the priority and joy of that relationship. We invite people slowly into the life of Jesus through example and relationship. We don’t badger people into discipleship. We offer them our prayerful, loving, forbearing presence. I recall hearing Dallas Willard remark that everything in the Christian life is self-verifying. You learn the value of prayer, or reading the Scriptures through engagement, not by talking about it.
Neglecting the groundwork of organizational and personal priorities will stifle well-conceived strategies, best practices, and good curriculum. The work of forging new priorities is not the one and done work of a sermon series. Old priorities have an elasticity to them. New priorities require a persistent and continual reset—not just with words, but personal and organizational habits. It’s process over content, people over program, the mess and risk of the long game over quick, self-justifying inputs.
In our learning communities, we help try to create “quiet mornings” where pastors can lift their gaze from the hustle and bustle of life in the local church to the majesty of the founder and sustainer of our movement. Jesus is our model. His mission is critical. He can accomplish it in our midst. How will it start? With the simple invitation of Jesus, “Follow me.”