Disciple-making: Bringing evangelism and discipleship together
When we think of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, we often assume the focus is on evangelism. But Jesus commissions us to "make disciples."
Is that the same thing?
Disciple-making
Evangelism, discipleship, and disciple-making are all important terms for us to understand both in their meaning and in their relationship with one another.
If I could redo our vocabulary in 2020 and beyond, I might encourage a more biblically direct term, disciple-making, which is a little different than the way we commonly use the words evangelism and discipleship.
Disciple-making means the totality of the process from making initial contact with a person who has no knowledge of the gospel, to the steps that lead to hearing the gospel, then from hearing the gospel to responding to the gospel. But it doesn't end there.
The disciple-making process goes on to include Christian growth until ultimately the person becomes a multiplying disciple-maker himself or herself. The way we use the terms now we would say, "In our modern formulation, evangelism is the process leading up to conversion and discipleship means the process from conversion and beyond."
Bifurcation
However, I think we've bifurcated evangelism and discipleship in a way you really wouldn't find in Scripture.
Now, let me be clear. I'm not mad at people who say, "We ought to evangelize," and then see the next step as discipleship. I say that!
But that's not the way the disciples understood that reality. When we separate evangelism and discipleship, what usually happens is evangelism gets pushed to the periphery because discipleship is what most people would rather do. The unintended consequence of this is to contribute to the divide between evangelism and discipleship.
This graphic can bring our current use of the two terms evangelism and discipleship in line with the term disciple-making:
DISCIPLE-MAKING
(Overall Process)
<---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Evangelism Discipleship
(Sharing Christ to Conversion) + (Growth after Conversion)
This process might include contact, service, showing empathy, loving the person, and a witnessing relationship leading to gospel proclamation where there's a response by grace through faith, followed by continued growth. When I talk about outcome-based, mission-driven discipleship, I'm referring to this disciple-making process.
A lot of the little booklets used in initial discipleship for new believers today may have good content, but they aren't particularly aimed at life-on-life discipling, and they don't tend to be evangelistically centered. That's because they are about discipleship, but not connected to disciple-making, emphasizing both reaching people and helping them grow.
So, the disciple-making process includes everything from making initial contact with an unbeliever, sharing the gospel with them, helping them to grow as believers, until they do the same, becoming disciples who make disciples. This brings evangelism and discipleship as we've used the terms together rather than bifurcating the two.
Sharing the Gospel
When I first came to Christ, a leader said we should go home and tell somebody about Jesus. He actually said the first thing we should do is to go tell somebody about Jesus. Because I didn't know any better, I did just that. I went home and told a member of my family, because I thought people really did that.
I said to him, "Are you saved?" using the language that the person used with me. He asked, "Saved from what?" And I said, "I don't know but you need to be, I just was."
Here's the problem: I did not hear that connection much following that experience. For years, I heard people talk about how to come to Christ but did not see it followed by and connected to sharing the gospel. My evangelism was separated from discipleship, rather than connected as disciple-making.
Evangelism and Discipleship
Later on, it seemed like the way to Christian maturity was to read five books, but in these books witnessing was finally mentioned at the end if at all, and missions was never mentioned.
If we are going to use the term discipleship to talk about helping believers mature, our focus has to be more mission-driven and evangelistically focused. Our evangelism has to be focused on making disciples who become disciple-makers, and our discipleship has to be mission-driven, leading those discipled to share Christ.
Both of these concepts can be understood in the overarching idea of disciple-making, which is what Jesus told us to do in Matthew 28:19-20.
 | Ed Stetzer, Ph.D., holds the Billy Graham Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College and serves as Executive Director of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism. He has planted, revitalized, and pastored churches, trained pastors and church planters on six continents, holds two masters degrees and two doctorates, and has written dozens of articles and books. |
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