Video: Ordinary People

Day 2: Anyone Can Do It

Disciplemaking is not reserved for the mature, educated, “arrived,” or confident. It is not only for the elders, the leaders, or the clergy. It is not just the pastor’s job, the missionary’s job, the guest speaker’s job, or the Bible study leader’s job. It is everyone’s job. God anoints us for specific assignments, but everyone who claims Jesus as Lord is called to make disciples.

If Jesus asked young John to be a disciplemaker, confident that he could do it with Holy Spirit’s help, then any young person can do the same. If Jesus handed over the “keys of the Kingdom” to Peter in Matthew 16:19, then any blue-collar Joe can be a disciplemaker. If Jesus can speak to a woman of a different ethnicity hiding in her shame, as he did with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, and release her to become one of the first missionaries of his message, then any baby Christian can be released to make disciples.

Every person can be a disciplemaker, no matter how young in age or young in the faith. You only have to be a couple steps ahead of a person to disciple them. A young adult can disciple a teen, a teen can disciple a middle-school kid, and a middle-school kid can disciple a child. A new Christian can disciple a newer Christian, and a baby Christian can disciple a person who has not yet believed. God is so good in the way he made this all possible!

Jesus made discipleship the heartbeat of spreading the gospel. That’s because without discipleship, without the passing on of the Good News from person to person, you only end up with one person making a disciple, but not a disciplemaker. This is a slow trickle that eventually slows to a stop. But if you take two people and they each disciple two people, who each go on to disciple two people—the growth is exponential. The movement of ordinary people answering the call is unstoppable.

Disciplemaker Pro Tip

Often we try to teach people the algebra and calculus of disciplemaking, but most people just really need some good arithmetic. We need to keep disciplemaking simple and provide easy tools that even baby Christians can use. Churches all over the world are started by teenagers. If we believe the fifteen-year-old can make disciples, and we help equip her to do it, then any of us can do it.