Recently I have been more and more convicted that what we really need to concentrate on in the American church in general and in my local church in particular is to develop a culture of discipleship. The problem is every time we begin to talk about “discipleship” people get nervous.

In the classic church there has been a tension between discipleship and evangelism. Evangelism and discipleship seem to war at each other because they each have opposite targets in mind. Evangelism targets the unbeliever, so we need to be more “seeker sensitive” in order to be effective evangelists. On the other hand, discipleship is aimed at the believer who has sensed a need for spiritual growth. “Seeker sensitive” suddenly becomes a hinderence to “going deeper” in God’s Word.

Yet, I am coming to the conclusion (actually I think I have already arrived) that the tension we feel between evangelism and discipleship is a false one brought about by our own inadequate understanding of what Biblical discipleship really is. If we could re-capture a Biblical model of discipleship, I think we would find this tension to be a figment of our frenzied imaginations.

There are two main mistakes the Western Church has made in the past two hundred or so years. The first is that it has believed that its main mission is to convert as many people as possible into believers. The second is that it has spent much too much energy and effort educating Biblical students. The problem is that the Bible never tells us to do either of these things.

If we make converting people into believers our main mission we miss the mark. Biblically Jesus told us to “make disciples,” not believers. The problem with “believers” is that belief alone never translates into a Christ-like life. Each of us needs models to follow. These models cannot only be dusty, old, dead people from the pages of the Bible. Certainly the examples of people like Joseph, Daniel, and Elijah are great, but if you are like me (human, that is) you need a concrete living example of what it looks like to live a life that is fully surrendered to Christ. Getting people to “pray the prayer” just won’t do that. As a matter of fact, you can search the whole Bible and not find one example of a person who prayed the “sinner’s prayer.” You can’t find it because no one did it. People were exposed to Christ’s followers. They believed or they didn’t believe. Those that believed got baptized. Those that were baptized were discipled. It was that simple.

But discipleship isn’t some study program either. When we approach discipleship as an educational process (can you name all the books of the Bible in order?) we miss the mark altogether again. That’s because discipleship is about transforming lives, not transfering information. A process of information transfer doesn’t produce Christ-like lives either. Instead, it produces cocky, self-assured attitudes.

The Biblical model of discipleship isn’t about getting people to be believers and it isn’t about filling people up with information. Back in Jesus’ day a disciple had just one goal: to become just like his master. That must be the number one goal of discipleship today as well. If we are going to be, and more importantly if we are going to build disciples then the goal of that discipleship is to act, breathe, think, love, and live like Jesus. In other words, the measure of discipleship won’t be about how far we get through a set of material that we have been assigned. It won’t be about answering a list of Bible questions correctly. Instead it will be about how well we love God and love others. It will be about how effectively we serve others. It will be about developing humility in ourselves and confidence in Christ.

Now how does this happen? Stay tuned…