WITH

This weekend, I attended the Navigators Midwest Laborer’s Conference where I heard Jim Rinella, the Rocky Mountain regional director and campus director of the Navigator ministry at Colorado State University. During the Saturday morning ‘rally’, he delivered a message about discipling, specifically Jesus’ strategy for discipling. At the beginning, he illustrated the importance of discipling (which comes from the root word “disciple” which is a follower or believer who is learning through the instruction of the teacher (or rabbi) they are following) in when ministering to the lost (those who haven’t believed on Christ for their salvation and therefore are outside the redemption found therein).

Discipling is a process by which a follower and disciple of Christ (a.k.a. Christian) both learns from a person more mature in their Christian walk than themselves, while simultaneously teaches someone that is less mature the principles, tools, lessons, and passions needed to be a follower or disciple of Christ (a.k.a. Christian). His illustration came from a famous article written by Dawson Trotman (the founder of the Navigators) called “Born To Reproduce” which lays out the principles of spiritual multiplication. Spiritual multiplication uses the mathematical model of exponential growth to provide a way in which the followers or disciples of Christ (a.k.a. Christians) can evangelize (and bring into redemption) the entire population of the world in a relatively short period of time (around 30 years). What happens is one person (follower or disciple of Christ…) invests their life into another person for one year, teaching them, helping them to grow in their spiritual walk, equipping them to teach others, and instructing them so that they will grow into a mature disciple themselves. At the end of that year, the new disciple will go out and find his own protégé to mentor teach and equip, and the first discipler will find another person to disciple. So now, instead of one disciple making one disciple, there are now two disciples, each making one more disciple. These two disciples teach, equip, love, and instruct their new disciples, and at the end of the second year, each new disciple finds a new disciple of his own to teach. Now instead of four disciples, there are now eight. I’m confident you see a pattern here. Eight become sixteen, sixteen become thirty-two, thirty-two become sixty-four, sixty-four become one-hundred-twenty-eight, so on and so forth, until in about thirty years, the entire population of the world (a ridiculously huge number) will have been reached and given the redemption found in Jesus Christ.

The Navigators Midwest Laborer’s Conference is for students on the Leadership Teams of the Navigator ministries around the Midwest, so being very familiarized with the principles and the mission of the Navigators, we had all heard about and were familiar with the principle of spiritual multiplication. The message Jim delivered that morning was about how to best go about investing your life in the life of another. After he had given his short exposition on spiritual multiplication, he began to talk about the ministry of Jesus (who was the first to use spiritual multiplication). He (one man) started by teaching and training 12 disciples, entrusting and charging them with the task of teaching and training others. So if you have any doubt about if spiritual multiplication actually works, think about this, Jesus (one man) started with twelve men and now there are nearly one billion disciples of Christ around the world… It works. He summed up the ministry of Jesus in one word: With. Mark 3:14 says “And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach.” Jim related the story of how he was discipled as a young man. A man took him under his wing and taught him, equipped him, and mentored him, spent time with him every week. Met with him every week, and encouraged him to start doing the same with a young man of his own at a very young spiritual age. If you’ve ever seen two people that spend a lot of time together, you know the power of “with”. Those two people sound alike, they think alike, they act alike in some cases, have the same idiosyncrasies, the same expressions, the same views on life, etc. Jesus did everything (when He wasn’t praying by Himself) with them; they were even with Him when He died on the cross. Jesus did teach them, and He did give them to tools they needed, but in order to truly shape their lives to be like Himself, He spent almost all of His time with them.

A lot of people, including me, put such a complicated framework and substructure in the principle of sharing our faith, of discipling (even if you don’t call it “discipling”, if you’re a follower or disciple of Christ –a.k.a. Christian–, you do this). We think that to properly confer the knowledge, faith, tools, wisdom, ability, and everything else it takes to be an effective disciple, we need this complex set of instruction or rules to make sure that everything gets transferred. That absolutely is not the case. Jim, in his story, said that after four days, four days, of being a Christian, Allen, his friend and discipler, took him to the shopping center to share Christ. Four days! It doesn’t take large amounts of time, or an extensive network of training principles and lessons and workshops to prepare someone to be a disciple (and a discipler), it just takes another person, another disciple to come alongside them, teach them the basics, and do it with them. As long as you know and are able to teach the basics of the Christian walk (which are things pretty much straight from the Bible), you can make disciples simply by walking with them; by sharing your faith to others with them; by making disciples with them. The entire life is based on imitating others. We learn to walk by watching others, we learn to talk by listening to others, we learn our values from those around us, we learn our behaviors from watching others. So why not learn to make disciples by simply doing it with others. You can teach all the knowledge and the wisdom in the world, and you can give somebody every resource there is on sharing their faith and making disciples, but the most effective and the surest and most lasting way to make a disciple is to do it with them. It’s so incredibly simple! When I heard this message and let it sink in, I was struck and overcome by the beautiful simplicity of it. I think this is something that every follower or disciple of Christ needs to hear, because we’ve made Christ’s mission so complicated, so difficult that we are paralyzed by the complexity of it. We don’t know where to start because we have put so many extra steps in it that don’t need to be there. All that needs to happen to make a disciple for Christ is to do it with someone else. To get into God’s Word (the Bible) with your disciple, to pray with your disciple, to witness (or evangelize) with your disciple, to walk with Jesus with your disciple. No “twelve easy steps”, no complicated theorems, not even a formula. All a person needs to become a effective disciple is for an established to disciple teach them all that they know, and do it with them.

I hope that what you’ve just read has inspired you or has rejuvenated your desire for Christ and your desire to reach the lost; it has mine (it’s so simple, how could it not!). My prayer for you, whoever you are, is that the words I have written above will change your life, just as the words that I heard on Saturday morning have changed mine. God bless, and may Christ be with you.