Replicate: How to Create a Culture of Disciple-Making Right Where You Are

Evangelism

An Introduction You Can’t Skip

One must decide if he wants his ministry to count in momentary applause of popular recognition or the reproduction of his life in a few chosen men to carry on his work after he has gone.

• ROBERT COLEMAN, THE MASTER’S PLAN OF EVANGELISM

We have designed this book to be a resource you can pick up for years to come. Some of you will read it from cover to cover. Others will flip to sections that address where you are currently. Regardless, grab a highlighter and pen for logging insights along the way. Since a disciple is a learner or student, take notes in the margin. The material we will cover is massive. By implementing Jesus’ model for making disciples in three different church sizes, in three different cities, and three different contexts, we’ve learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. We’ve paid the dumb tax so you don’t have to.

ROBBY’S STORY

The first church I (Robby) pastored was very gracious in extending an invitation to a seminary student who was a three-year-old believer. Later, I found out Immanuel Baptist Church had been on a steady decline for years and feared closing the doors. Maybe they thought, We’ll take a chance on this guy. We have nothing to lose. The next two and a half years would be a roller-coaster ride no one could have predicted. During that time, the church grew from 65 in weekly attendance to almost 250. What made the difference?

First, my testimony of following Jesus coupled with freedom from drugs and alcohol as a result of the gospel resonated with the people. Second, I created a system, which became the groundwork for this book, for moving people from decision to discipleship.

After much prayer and fasting, Kandi and I accepted the senior pastor position at Brainerd Baptist Church in 2008. Brainerd could not have been more different than Immanuel. On Sunday, there were two diverse worship venues on the same campus. The traditional service was led by a twenty-person orchestra and a sixty-person choir. Up the hill at the BX (the family life center), they worshiped with electric guitars, drums, and multiple singers. Even though Brainerd was a different place than Immanuel, I quickly learned that both churches faced similar challenges: How do we move new believers beyond a one-time decision? How do we grow our existing believers to become coworkers instead of consumers?

During my tenure at Brainerd, the church grew from 850 in weekly attendance to 2,200, but that wasn’t the thing I was most concerned with. I realized that many believers desired to grow in their relationship with God but simply didn’t know where to begin. It was my job as the spiritual leader, according to Ephesians 4:11–13, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, so that is what I wanted to do. I implemented a discipleship pathway (which we will explain in the book) for spiritual growth so that we could move believers from the bench into the field of Christian living. What was most exciting to my team was the exponential growth in discipleship groups.

When I arrived at Brainerd, only one other staff member, Gus Hernandez, was investing in other men. So I started two discipleship groups my first year along with Gus’s group, meaning that the first year I was at Brainerd, we discipled a total of twelve people. Here’s the progression of these numbers over my time at Brainerd:

Exponential Growth of Discipleship

Year 1 (2009) | 12

Year 2 (2010) | 32

Year 3 (2011) | 65

Year 4 (2012) | 126

Year 5 (2013) | 255

Year 6 (2014) | 787 (Growing Up Challenge)

Year 7 (2015) | 1167

Year 8 (2016) | 1500+ (I moved to Long Hollow in September)

Because we started from the ground, our discipleship team kept records of the names of every person involved in discipleship. These numbers are exact. I’m not sharing any of this to impress you but to impress upon you what God did when we created a simple process for moving people through a discipleship pathway.

I had to start over when I moved to Long Hollow in 2015. An evangelistic DNA was woven into the fabric of our people. During the search process, one of the team members asked me, How do you feel about coming into a church that baptized over 1,000 in 2013 and right under 1,000 in 2014? I was blown away. I’d never known of a church that baptized that many people in a single year. I asked them, What did you do with the people? The room was silent for a moment. Then a lady spoke up, That’s why we’re talking with you. We’ve realized that our back door is as big as the front door. I was grateful for her honesty.

I’m a few years into pastoring Long Hollow. It’s been the greatest, most difficult journey of my ministry. Implementing a discipleship strategy into an evangelistic church, while preserving the passion for taking the gospel to unbelievers, is no easy task. We’ve gained a lot of insights along the way and learned many lessons the hard way so that you don’t have to. What you will find in this book is years’ worth of discipleship trial and error in churches of various sizes, in different cultures, and in different communities. The principles work in every context because Jesus gave them to us.

CHRIS’S STORY

Have you ever been asked a question that altered your life from that point forward? I (Chris) grew up unchurched. I attended a few times around Easter, participated in VBS, and went to a church camp once as a kid. But I didn’t have a relationship with Jesus, and I certainly wasn’t following Him. At sixteen, I started going to church at the invitation of a friend. For the first few months, I connected to the other attenders and, over time, began to listen to the teaching and preaching. One Sunday morning in June 1990, my Sunday school teacher asked if anyone wanted to trust Jesus as Savior. Much to my teacher’s dismay (apparently this was the first time anyone had responded to the question), I slowly raised my hand. I remember clearly that day responding to Jesus’ call to follow Him, to be a disciple. Months later, I realized that God was calling me to full-time ministry. I began serving in full-time ministry in 1998 after four years of service in the Marine Corps. I had the privilege of serving in a lot of growing ministries across Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Georgia. But it would be almost twenty-five years from the point of my salvation before someone asked me a critical question that changed my life and ministry completely:

Are you making disciples?

Robby Gallaty asked our whole congregation and me that question when he was the guest preacher one Sunday morning. I hesitated. I’d been serving in ministry in some capacity since 1990. I had led ministries and served in churches that consisted of thousands of attendees every week. I had served in numerous roles and capacities in every level of leadership, from intern to executive within the church. Why did I hesitate? How is it that I was unable to answer this question effectively? My mind raced.

I experienced a full range of emotions, from anger to frustration to sadness. Most of my ministry had focused on growing the church numerically. The priority was always to share the gospel and invite people to services. I had been fortunate enough to serve with leaders who invested in me and led me to understand the critical nature of the Great Commission. But somehow, I never, in all my ministry, made the connection between effective evangelism and effective discipleship. I focused on going, reaching, sharing, and growing (numerically). Almost every aspect of my ministry was focused on those we had not yet reached. Even the small groups and Sunday school ministries were leveraged for missions (locally) and generating more people.

As I type this, I am thinking of arguments for why these are good things and why that’s the way ministry should be done. I have often been dismissive of ministry that focuses on discipleship because I operated from an unbalanced, unhealthy view of how successful churches work. I’m not blaming anyone else; I own my misunderstandings and misplaced focus. In the end, I had a decision to make. Would I continue with ministry as usual, or would I obey all of the Great Commission? Like me, you have a decision to make. How will you proceed? Making disciples involves leading people to Jesus and teaching them to be like Jesus. Will you do both? I’m asking the same critical question that started this journey for me: Are you making disciples?

MULTIPLICATION IS GREATER THAN ADDITION

We want you to see the impact of a ministry that doesn’t just add—it multiplies. God has always been interested in multiplication. In fact, His first command to Adam and Eve in the garden was not to be spiritual, productive, or upstanding citizens of earth. Rather, it was to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28). What God commanded the first humans to do physically is what Jesus commanded believers to do spiritually. The goal of every discipleship group is for the mentee, the one being discipled, to become a mentor; to multiply—make other disciples.

In essence, the discipleship group is designed for the player to become a coach. The heart of discipleship, as Christ modeled and instituted it, is that you are not learning only for yourself. You are learning for the person whom you will mentor in following Him.

The Great Commission is designed to be a team effort. Instead of the pastors, leaders, and Sunday school teachers performing all the duties of ministry in the church, the saints are the ones who should be equipped to carry out the work. The ministers cannot carry out the command alone, as Paul clearly stated:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry. (Eph. 4:11–12 ESV)

Greg Ogden, in his book Transforming Discipleship, illustrates this point by showing the contrast between an evangelist bringing one person to the Lord every day for a year and the disciple-maker investing only in the same two people for an entire year.¹ The evangelist hits the streets every day with the goal of sharing the gospel with as many people as needed to see God save one person. In contrast, the disciple-maker walks two people through a year of intensive discipleship.

The slow-moving discipleship process creeps forward with only four people being impacted after two years, which seems to pale in comparison to the evangelist’s 730. However, this radically changes with the passing of time. After sixteen years of the same activity, the evangelist would have seen almost 6,000 people come to faith in Christ, while the disciple would have impacted 65,536 people (see chart below).

Evangelistic Addition vs Disciple-Making Multiplication²

Every person on the planet would be reached multiple times over after thirty years from the work of a single disciple-maker. Multiplication—not addition—is Jesus’ plan for reaching the world with the gospel. And multiplication is the purpose of the discipleship group. If the body of Christ would accept this plan, embrace it, and faithfully obey it, then the Great Commission could be accomplished.

If you are a church leader, there are specific parts of the book that will help you implement disciple-making processes in your church or ministry. But regardless of whether you are a church leader or layperson seeking insight into discipleship, this book will provide you with the urgency and understanding you will need to make disciples.

How to Lose Seven Million People

Most of us have become quite good at the church thing. And yet, disciples are the only thing that Jesus cares about, and it’s the only number that Jesus is counting.

• MIKE BREEN AND THE 3DM TEAM, BUILDING A DISCIPLING CULTURE

How do you lose seven million people?

That was the question the world’s largest protestant denomination, Southern Baptists, asked themselves at their annual convention in 2018. After two years of leading a team of pastors and ministry leaders who made up a disciple-making task force, I (Robby) couldn’t believe our findings. As shocking as it is, you may have noticed a similar trend in your church regardless of denominational affiliation. Before we can formulate a plan of action, we must face reality. Facts are our friends, but we have to decide whether we are going to ignore them, reject them, or accept them.

We discovered the missing seven million people near the end of our evaluation. After examining a report that compared baptisms to church attendance numbers over twenty years (see the chart below), we discovered something as astounding as it was heartbreaking. In 1996, 5,224,000 people attended a worship service at an SBC church. Over the next twenty years, roughly forty-six thousand churches baptized seven million people. One would expect church attendance to grow by roughly the same amount. You could rationally reduce the number by about three million after you factor in mortality rate and family transitions. Did the weekly attendance of churchgoing people increase to eight or nine million? Not even close.

Shockingly, rather than adding people to the fold, SBC churches declined. Weekly attendance dropped by twenty-four thousand people. Before you think we’re throwing stones at the Southern Baptist Convention, please know: we merely want to sound the alarm. It’s time we stop pretending there isn’t a problem in churches today. While we are reaching people, we are struggling to keep them in church.

The diagram above offers insight into SBC churches; however, trends suggest this is not an issue isolated to Southern Baptists alone. The weekly attendance, if those that were baptized were retained during these years (represented by the dotted line), would have yielded exponential growth. Churches have been celebrating baptisms but have been ineffective at retaining new converts or new guests. Attendees and members are streaming out the back doors as fast they come into the front doors—and often even quicker. While retention will never be one hundred percent, something is drastically wrong when the church is not retaining those who have made decisions to follow Christ.

Baptisms shouldn’t be minimized or glossed over. We should celebrate every single time a person steps out in baptism and shows the body of Christ outwardly what God is doing inwardly. However, baptism is not the finish line of a relationship with Christ. It’s the starting line of a lifelong journey toward God.

The primary challenge to lackluster commitment to church attendance is the changing culture of our day. Thirty years ago, Americans who self-identified as Christians went to church on Sunday mornings. I remember my parents waking me up every week for service. Although both were unbelievers at the time, we rarely missed church. Those days are long gone. Generis, a church consulting company, surveyed churchgoers to determine how often they attend monthly. In the year 2000, the average church member made it to church 3.2 times a month.¹ Just seventeen years later, that number dropped to 1.8 times. Unfortunately, this trend is expected to continue in the future.

Results like these can be heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. People who identify as members of your church likely only attend about half the time—half as often as they did two decades ago. But this means pastors who thought their church was declining may actually be plateaued or stable since the same people come less often.

Even so, what’s the solution for steering away from this inevitable cliff? Discipleship. By encouraging believers to pursue discipling relationships that are accountable, meaningful, and transparent, our churches will see fewer people leave and more people stay and serve. Taking a look back at the early church will help us understand how this can happen.

The first-century church was founded on relationships that moved people beyond conversion into community. In Acts 2, the disciples were scrambling to connect baptized believers into discipling relationships that would continue after they exited the baptismal pools outside the temple. Contrary to what we see today in many churches, where salvation is essential and discipleship is optional, the first-century Christians took Jesus’ commission seriously.

The apostles followed the pattern they’d watched Jesus demonstrate in the years before His death and resurrection. What they’d seen Him do, they now attempted to emulate knowing that’s what He expected from them. We know Jesus’ method of making disciples worked because we are disciples today as a result of His disciples following His example. We must compare our current disciple-making practices against His model for ministry.

We can do this by evaluating our current context. Every ministry leader* must ask themselves and those they lead two questions:

1) Do we have a process for making disciples—moving new believers toward biblical maturity in Christ?

2) Is it working?

Your answers to these questions will help you diagnose the state of your disciple-making process (or lack thereof). You may find you have a process to grow attendance, build membership, and generate decisions without a specific plan to disciple your people. And even if you do have a process for making disciples, you may find it is not working the way you hoped it would. As we examine the problem with disciple-making over the next few chapters, ask yourself the questions above.

We can’t go back and reconnect the millions of people we’ve lost, but we can change our model to impact the millions to come more effectively. I pray that our churches will embrace a model of making disciples that Jesus demonstrated for the church. I pray that as you read this book, you will learn from our mistakes and successes as you make key adjustments to become a healthy church.

*While this book is focused on helping every disciple of Jesus make disciples, some content will focus on church and ministry leadership in order to help in that context.

The Dangerous Half-Gospel

When 96 percent of your disciples have been taught not to make disciples, you reap what you have sown.

• BILL HULL AND BRANDON COOK, THE COST OF CHEAP GRACE

Why do we find ourselves in a discipleship deficit? Perhaps because we’ve been preaching half the gospel. Since the advent of mass evangelism, with preachers such as Charles Finney, D. L. Moody, and Billy Graham, becoming a Christian has been viewed by some as praying a prayer or walking an aisle. As long as I say the right words the correct way, I’m good with God. What I do for God from that point on is optional. Bill Hull, in his book Conversion and Discipleship, devotes an entire chapter to getting the gospel right. He states, People profess to be Christians yet believe they do not need to follow Jesus. We’ve defined discipleship as optional, a choice and not a demand.² Jesus didn’t just save us from sin; He saved us for something.

If the purpose of Christianity is only to gain eternal life, Jesus wouldn’t have left us on earth after He saved us. We’d be raptured immediately because we found the purpose of our existence. Surely the purpose of the kingdom of heaven is greater than simply achieving eternal life. Jesus gave us a commission to make reproducible followers of Him. It’s called the Great Co-Mission for a reason: God expects our involvement. The reason He didn’t usher us into paradise the moment we were born again is because there’s work to be done. We were saved not just from the world, but for the world.

Most evangelistic tactics move people toward making a decision or a convert; however, Jesus and His disciples focused on making disciples. A decision to follow Christ is necessary to go from death to life, but it doesn’t end there; you must also follow Christ. As my friend Derwin Gray, pastor of Transformation Church, said to me recently, The apostle Paul wouldn’t understand the invitations issued after services today. Raise a hand, walk an aisle, say a prayer, and repeat after me would have been foreign concepts to the apostle.

Sadly, we have reduced salvation to a transaction. If sinners provide the correct answers to a mental, spiritual questionnaire and say Amen at the right spots, we declare they are saved with nothing else required of them. Whether they follow Jesus after saying this prayer is optional. Whether they enjoy the blessings of the kingdom is up to them. Whether they replicate their lives into the lives of others is a choice—and frequently, the choice is no. Salvation in Christ comes through a simple prayer to follow Jesus, but it doesn’t end there. Jesus expects so much more; He commands so much more.

In a decision-centered model, spiritual disciplines in the Christian life become nothing but recommended activities. Obedience, reading the Bible, memorizing Scripture, and sharing the gospel are optional. Praying and fasting are optional as well. This can’t be what Jesus envisioned when He commanded His followers to make disciples of all nations. The longer we perpetuate this form of Christianity, the longer people will remain comfortable as consumers and not coworkers in the gospel.

CONSUMERS VS. COWORKERS

Every church has two types of people: consumers and coworkers. Our goal as leaders and disciple-makers is to move people from the first category to the second.

A consumer is a spectator.

A coworker is a participant.

A consumer shows up late to the service.

A coworker arrives early to help.

A consumer criticizes everything that doesn’t line up with his or her preferences.

A coworker appreciates what God is doing in the church.

A consumer comes to