MISSIONARY APPROACH: The Jesus Way in Disciple-Making

Simple. Multiplying. Reproducing. Fruitful.

The one thing the enemy of our faith in Jesus Christ wants to blind us towards (those who genuinely follow in the way of Jesus) is the incredible power found in disciple-making. Keep us from the genius of making disciples and the church is disabled from fulfilling the mission Jesus handed off to us. It is that simple …. stop making disciples and you stop the multiplication of reproduction.

The Jesus way in disciple-making is almost revolutionary to observe among the Family of God as it challenges us to a deeper, counter-cultural way of living. It isn’t that we are void of discipleship; we make disciples. The question is: what type of disciples are we making?

Seriously, this approach to making disciples is so freeing once we get past the web of deception which blinds us to the simple missionary approach Jesus handed off to His disciples. It is the same missionary approach through which the Early Church turned the known world upside down: Disciples making disciples!

At the center of it all sits the way Jesus went about making disciples. Relationally- based. Pragmatic. Oddly effective. Lightweight enough to be easily reproduced in any environment or culture. Low control so it could spread like wildfire everywhere learner-followers went in this world. This is the stuff people movements, which change entire cities and even the world, are built upon.

Bottom line …. disciple-making is about much more than an information download detached from any strong sense of an obligation to actually live it out. Disciple-making is about the transformation in a life as one’s mind is changed in the way one thinks, and a heart is captured through the love, acceptance, and forgiveness of Jesus Christ at work.

Disciple-making is far more about the passing of our treasured understanding of God, along with the experiences that go with it, and lessons learned through them, than it is about the memorization of the right facts. We are talking about being born again and living in the way of Jesus. It’s the practical understanding of this truth we have discovered which impacts the way we live it out in real time than it is about storing up proper theological beliefs.

It isn’t that memorization or theological beliefs are bad, wrong, or unimportant; quite the contrary, they are important in the overall understanding about discipling. It’s just that the Jesus way of disciple-making is much more relational in nature, which changes the type of information we invest in one another and the process we use to pass it on from one generation to the next.

Reality check! It’s doubtful any of us make disciples exactly the way Jesus discipled those who followed Him. We pick up principles we discover Jesus using and then try to figure out how it might look in our lives with the people we are equipping. The facsimile may not be perfect, but it is amazingly similar to what Jesus did.

This is the goal in the Leadership Huddles we (the Bennett’s through Mission Converge and Mission 330) lead both online and in person … we strive to extract the principles Jesus used in relationally passing on to the learner-followers who walked with Him, and then we use them to the best of our ability with those we walk with each day. Wow … what a game changer. It is the missionary approach to life and ministry that we pass on to those willing to stick with us and learn how we should therefore live each day.

Influencing other influencers. Discipling other people. It is about building the type of relationships that allow you to share such important information with one another. This is what we have come to know in the Jesus way of disciple-making. It is the same approach we pass onto others as we mobilize a missionary movement.

We have a few discipling opportunities coming up over the next couple of months and more starting up in the fall. There are a couple of Huddles advertised below in the feed of this newsletter. Others will follow soon through future mailings or on social media. Watch and see if there is something which might be helpful to you as you learn to walk in the Jesus way.