Faithful to Disciple - Session 3

The Five-Fold Connection

Uh, five things I see again and again at pastors' conferences that pastors want to see their churches grow in, that I think are related in a way pastors sometimes seem to not understand: discipling, evangelism, raising up elders, church planting, and missions. Let me say those five things again: discipling, evangelism, raising up elders (seeing new leaders and new preachers raised up), church planting, and missions.

I think when I see just one of those things being done well by a church, I'm a little concerned. The pastor probably went to some pastors' conference, got convicted over something, or was really attracted to something, and they went back and stapled some fruit on a tree. I think if it's real, all five are going to be happening. All five are going to be growing up naturally, maybe at different stages, but they are all five going to happen because they all come from the same germ.

And the germ is the topic of our time this afternoon: discipling. It is the idea that my part of following Jesus is helping other people follow Jesus. Put another way, if you tell me that you are following Jesus and you're not helping other people follow Jesus, I just don't know what you mean by saying you're following Jesus. I don't think helping other people follow Jesus—whether we're talking about evangelism or discipling—is a part of extra-mature Christianity. I think it's a part of the basic package. So, I basically think you're either working to help other people follow Jesus, or you yourself are not following Jesus.

Now, different people have different personalities, they are put in different circumstances, and even in one person's life, those circumstances change over time. So, I don't mean there's an objective standard by which everybody's fruit is going to look the same in any of those categories. But I do think that what is normal in the Christian life is for us to act to see other people grow in their knowledge of Christ and in their following of him.

I think that's most naturally and easily seen in your congregation in discipling, because then it's talking to other people about Jesus who already say they believe in Jesus. It's trying to help them follow Jesus better. That's what we do in so much of our pastoral ministry: trying to take those who are already claiming to be followers and equipping them in that. What objection could there be to that? That's usually the easiest place to start to see all of this increase.

If you want to try to help other people grow in Christ, you can work that through Bible study, Scripture memory, time together, accountability groups—there are so many ways. Reading a book together, like I've just been doing by giving these books out—there are so many ways you can do this, where you as an individual, or in groups of two, three, or four, can try to see each other spiritually grow and come to know the Lord better. That's discipling. That's taking a concern for the growth in Christ of another disciple and calling them on, helping them on, encouraging them, and spurring them on.

I think once that is modeled by you as the pastor and becomes a little bit more common in the experience of Christians in your church, you're going to find evangelism being easier. They will have become accustomed to talking about spiritual matters with other people. When they can do that, they are beginning to learn the basic skills that you need in order to share the gospel with others. The same, or very similar, parallel skills are used in helping other Christians grow in their discipleship and sharing the good news with another person at the beginning: mastering the art of talking about spiritual matters, talking about the most important things in life, initiating those kinds of conversations, and helping them along. That's what you want to pray the Lord enables you to do.

The third one, then, is raising up leaders or elders. I think when you begin to have a culture of discipling and of evangelism grow up in a congregation, you'll very naturally see elders start to grow up in that congregation. It'll become clear who are gifted in this. In the same way that you'll find small group leaders for women's small groups (Titus 2 things) and men's small groups growing up, you'll find elders naturally growing up. People will say, "Mr. Evans understands the Word; I know I can ask him that," or "Tom is always wise in the way I see him counseling his kids; I know I can turn and ask him a question about how to live my life faithfully, and he will teach me the truth. He'll go to the Word; he'll show me something." Whether or not it's in a sermon or public teaching, this is a person who is known for knowing the Lord, knowing his Word, and being able to apply that in life. You see these people who are good at and successful in discipling having that gift used for the congregation as a whole.

Once you see that happening, it's not surprising to begin to see your church exporting some of these elders, exporting some of these preachers, and exporting some of these pastors to new congregations. You have more people able to preach than you have need or opportunity for preaching at your church. And so, it just begins to happen. You begin to pump out pastors and preachers to other churches around, and maybe even start new churches in your area as people have opportunity or create new opportunities to hear God's word.

And then, if that's the kind of thing you've done here in the local area, it's the kind of thing you can transfer to see, "How can I do this in Lebanon? How can I do this in France? How can I do this in Brazil? How can I do this in the Solomon Islands?" The same kind of questions get going: "Now we just need to figure out how to do this there." That's why I would say, brothers, that these five things—missions, church planting, raising up elders, evangelism, and discipling—are all closely related to each other because they have the same germ: you helping someone else follow Jesus.

The Priority of Expositional Preaching

What I want us to think about is how things that we would all agree on as being good in our church are specifically useful in creating a culture of discipling—where it's normal in our church that Christians realize that the Christian life is personal but not private. The Christian life is something that I must personally feel, understand, advocate, attempt to practice, and grow in, but it is not something that does not involve other people getting involved in my life. It does involve other people getting involved in my life, so it forbids a privatized life.

How do we grow as Christians individually? If we can answer that question just by reflecting on our own experience, and then cast that vision larger for our whole churches, we understand how our members grow spiritually. As pastors, we think of how we can lead the congregation to be in a position where it is optimally prepared for the whole congregation to be discipled.

While there is an almost infinite number of things we could think about in regard to this, where I would begin would definitely and without any surprise be exactly what I was talking about in the last message I gave: I would begin with expositional preaching. I think if you really want to see a culture of discipling developing in your church, expositional preaching is where you need to begin. Expositional preaching is the thing in your church that will most encourage Christian growth, because they are seeing you model studying God's Word, and they are seeing examples in your own life of how rich God's Word is. You are breaking open the Word of life to them, and you're showing them how it is the very thing that sustains you, so of course it's going to be the thing that can sustain them. We listen to God speaking from his Word into our own lives.

Expositional preaching—preaching God's Word—helps us to hear him in our lives. As we show people how to do that in the congregation as a whole, we break this down at a level everyone in the gathering on the Lord's Day can see. One person has written this exaggerated half-truth about the churches needing to meet needs:

meeting needs breeds unintended consequences just as Church growth's modern passion for relevance will become its road to irrelevance so its modern passion for felt needs will turn the church into an echo chamber of fashionable needs that drown out the one voice that addresses real human need below all felt needs after all if true needs are a first step towards faith and prayer false needs are the opposite

Friends, how do we decide what to preach on? If we're preaching on what we feel the congregation needs—what the felt needs are of the church—then we've got to be very careful lest we make it seem like the church is defining itself according to whatever the culture is pressing in on right now. We need to see what the Bible says our most basic needs are, and sometimes even the Christians attending the church, the members of your church, might not have thought that out correctly. We certainly cannot look to the culture around us to tell us what we most need. We can't even look into our own hearts to have that kind of surety of knowledge. We finally have to be taught what it is we most need by God himself.

We need to hear God's Word preached expositionally, and all of it, so that we don't just hear those selective themes that we like to hear talked about. You know, there are some Christians who have real hobbyhorses on these two or three or four topics, but not much interest in anything else. But yet God has inspired a very big book with lots of different topics talked about. Let's just take four topics almost at random: giving, the Second Coming, world missions, and prayer life. Those are four good topics. Any of those topics are worth a good topical series on. There are a lot of things we want to know about all four of those if we want to grow as Christians, and there are things that we need to know if we're going to be genuinely converted, and there are things in Scripture that we want to be careful to avoid on all of these topics.

There is no one here so holy and perfect and well-shaped spiritually that we in our hearts happily welcome every word in God's book. All of us are corrected by some parts of Scripture, so we should pray that God would honor his Word, bless his church, and build her up with preachers who will preach all of God's Word. We should pray that we would be those preachers, that we will take God's Word and assume that it is relevant and important even if we don't always immediately see how it is so. We should simply believe and trust that it is so.

I think we want to teach our people to be very, very careful about ever joining a church which is not led by an expositional preacher who is committed to preaching all of God's Word, regardless of how uncomfortable some parts of it may be for us. This idea of expositional preaching—which I began with earlier this morning and which I think and assume most everybody here would affirm as basic to what it means to follow Christ normally as Christians—means we are fed by God's Word being taught to us publicly by gifted and called expositional preachers. That is fundamental to the idea of Christian growth and discipling taking place among all the Christians in the congregation.

I'm trying to show that what happens in the pulpit and what happens in the pew are not unrelated; they are related. You are being an example that Scripture should be studied and how Scripture can be fruitfully inquired of and learned from in the way you pursue God in his Word in your sermons on Sundays. The way you see Noe and Bobby in the Q&A times with John acting as excellent examples of men who are prostrate before the Lord in his Word, who are happy and willing to be corrected by his Word—that's what we want to example in the sermons that we preach if we want to see discipling and a culture of discipling grow up in our churches.

The Importance of Biblical Theology and the Gospel

Another thing we want to see that would help our churches in this is a biblical theology. We grow up as we understand more of the truth about God and us. What the Lord says is true about himself and the specifics of what the Lord says about us are important. We grow as we understand more of his care and more of his character throughout the whole story of the Bible. As we see his choice of a people and his working with them through very difficult circumstances—the whole story of Israel—we see more of his character. We begin to grow up in our knowledge of him and we begin to trust him more. And so, we see Paul in Ephesians 1 and 3 praying for those Christians' understanding of God and the gospel to grow as they study Scripture.

In our sermons, we want to make sure that we are teaching people the entirety of the story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. We want to help them see that God has always been about this. A couple of you have asked me questions about kids and how you deal with children, particularly when children are not affirming the faith. I've used the phrase with some of you, and I did in the Q&A time, of "playing the long game." Well, brothers and sisters, where do you think I get that from? I get that from God promising a Messiah for centuries before the Messiah comes, but him being no less faithful the century before Jesus came than when Jesus in fact came. He teaches people over very long periods. How long did Hannah pray for a child? How long did Simeon stand waiting at the temple to see the hope of Israel?

Brothers and sisters, we could go through example after example of how God sometimes answers prayers the same day we pray them, many times he answers them the same week, we can think of examples where he's answered them the same year, and other examples where he's answered them twenty years after we began praying them. Yet, God was faithful to see that person converted or that thing happen. And others we pray for still. Why would it be like that? The Lord seems to be teaching us something through biblical theology about what he's like: that he is an utterly trustworthy God. He is allowing us to slowly but surely build up our personal records and faith squatting so that we can take more and take a longer amount of time, and still a longer amount of time, and his glory is not diminished by that. In fact, he is shown more and more to be faithful when he had always planned for the Messiah to come at that time. The Messiah was not one year too late in coming; he came at just the right time. There was no unfaithfulness in Malachi's life on the Lord's part in the fact that the Messiah had not come by the time Malachi uttered his last prophecy of the Old Covenant. The Lord was faithful in all of his promises.

In the timing of when Jerusalem was delivered from the Assyrians, he could have delivered Jerusalem much earlier, made the threat abate earlier, and yet he left them to feel the very teeth and breath, as it were, of the Assyrians down their necks before he completely delivered them to get glory to himself. We learn things like that not just by memory verses from Paul's letters; we learn things like that by watching the faithfulness of God over the centuries of the inspired record he's given us in Scripture. So, you want to teach your people the entirety of God's Word.

To make it super clear what I'm saying here: if you want there to be a good culture of discipling in your church, preach the Old Testament as well as the new. Do not just preach the New Testament. Preach the New Testament, but by all means, also preach the Old Testament. What do you think Jesus taught the disciples? The Old Testament. What do you think Paul argued justification by faith alone from? The Old Testament, bringing forward the examples of Abraham and David. Friends, there is plenty of material in the Old Testament along with the new for us to learn about God and his character and to encourage people to grow in Christ.

We begin to understand more of our own brokenness, our sinful rebellion, as we come to understand more of the full story of what's going on in Scripture. Because I think a church in which there is a biblical understanding of theology easily, more easily and more naturally, becomes a church in which there's a biblical understanding especially of that part of the Bible's theology we care about most: the gospel. We want that to be crystal clear in our preaching and teaching. That is going to help us grow as Christians as we more and more realize the depth of our own need and are trained to rely upon Christ.

When you begin to have a biblical understanding of our state as humans, though we're grievously saddened by all that may be happening in Gaza, in Israel, in a shooting, or in a church in Pakistan at Easter, we can't say that we're finally shocked in the way a non-Christian would be. We understand something of the tremendous capacities with which we were made in the image of God, and how terribly, terribly wrong those very capacities can go when they're not used in accordance with God's will and along with his love, his loving kindness, and his purposes. We begin to understand more of our own brokenness and of our own sinful rebellion. As strange as it may seem, we begin to understand more of his love. All of this becomes clearer to us the more we study the entirety of God's revelation.

As we teach this to our people, the distinction that is made in the popular mind between God's love on the one hand and God's wrath on the other becomes more complex, like that book of Don Carson's I gave out called The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. We begin to understand God's patience with us, we begin to understand those things that are just characteristics of God, and we begin to understand that he is much greater in his purposes than we will normally, naturally get. If you haven't read John Piper's book on Providence, it's a wonderful meditation on this. We want to understand more and more of what Christ has done for us. What burden has he carried? What has he borne for us? Because the less we understand that, the less extent we think he's gone to in loving us. The very ways Bunyan was meditating in that quotation I read to you earlier this morning about the length of the love of Christ, our congregation will appreciate less if you've not made clear the extent to which we have sinned against God and the extent of our offense against him.

Friends, when we understand something of the reality of our sinful rebellion against God, then we understand more of God's love for us in Christ. It's been said by most people in church history: he who thinks lightly of sin will think lightly of the Savior. It's true, isn't it? He who thinks lightly of sin will think lightly of the Savior. You'll never hear of a Christian sermon from a Christian preacher so hot on sin that there isn't an understanding that God's love exceeds even that measure of our sinfulness. A Christian sermon understands that Christian churches are only for sinners. We have no news for non-sinners. We've got nothing good for you if you are here today and you don't sin. Our only good news is for sinners. We don't have good news for anyone else. But of those people, we only have good news for a subset of sinners, and that is repenting sinners who will trust in Christ. Repenting sinners who will trust in Christ, we have almost unbelievably good news for, but we have good news for no other kind of sinners—only for those sinners. They'll only understand that, they'll only be able to talk to each other about that, share that with each other, and relish it, if you are clear on that in the pulpit.

If you make the gospel crystal clear in your preaching, it will help grow your confidence in the love of God. If people can know more about the love of God, you almost can't help but grow the more you come to understand what God has done for you in Christ. That's why I happily give out copies of books on the atonement, because when you understand more of what Christ has done for you, you obviously grow in your appreciation of who God is and of how much he loves you. As a pastor, you want to make sure that is taught clearly in your sermons. You want to understand for whom he has died and how he has shown his love on the cross. So, do you want to grow as a Christian? Marvel at the grace of God in the gospel. Do that regularly.

I had a friend whose mother was born in Los Angeles around 1920. She grew up in a non-believing family, but as a teenager, she became very convicted of her sins, and she knew that Christianity had something to do with that. So, this young teenage girl in the mid-1930s started going around different churches in Los Angeles to see if any of them could tell her how she could be forgiven of her sins and get right with God. As she told me this story many years ago (now in the 1980s), she went to church after church that she, looking back, realizes were Bible-believing churches, but in none of them did they tell her how she could be forgiven of her sins. She would go Sunday after Sunday, and they would preach on other things or assume that knowledge. She said it took her months to find a church where, finally, someone explained to her how she could be forgiven of her sins.

Dear brother, I would encourage you to be the kind of church that actually tells everybody there that day how they could be forgiven of their sins. You've got time for much else besides that in your service and in your sermon, but try to make sure that is clear to everyone within the sound of your voice. There are teenagers growing up who have heard it three hundred times, but you know, the Holy Spirit of God may move on the three hundred and first time. So, tell them again. Be clear on how it is that there is good news for us in Christ.

Biblical Conversion and Evangelism

Just one more thing I want to bring up: if we're going to have a church in which there can be a culture of discipling, we must teach very clearly about conversion. We must be very clear in understanding what conversion is. Michael Lawrence has done an excellent book in the little 9Marks series (it's the yellow one) called Conversion. I would strongly encourage you to read that with some other friends in your church—maybe some of your elders or your deacons.

I think as you realize your own spiritual state and you realize your dependence on God for your own Christian life, you find it does not have the effect of making you indifferent; it has the effect of stirring you up. That's going to happen with your own people as they hear your preaching if you are clear on conversion—if you are clear on how the undramatic appearance in the soul of the four-year-old is masking a truly dramatic spiritual occurrence in the spiritual reality that is evident to God. You become grateful, profoundly and deeply thankful to God, who has had mercy upon your soul and upon the souls of so many others. And as you do so, then your hope becomes more certain because you realize your hope isn't finally based on your own faithfulness; it's based on God's faithfulness. That is a tremendous encouragement to anyone who knows himself, to see that God loves us out of his own nature of love, as we were thinking of in that John Bunyan meditation on Ephesians 3.

As we begin to recognize our own salvation as the fruit of God's work in our lives, we're not even tempted to feel the wrong kind of pride in our own spiritual life because we've understood something. No, we understand because we've understood from the Bible what conversion is. We know even this faith that we have, according to Ephesians 2, is a gift from God. So, we're nothing but humbled by understanding the truth of God's actions in our lives. As we understand more of what a true Christian is and how to become one by the grace of God, that begins to cause the kind of humility in your congregation which is the optimal circumstance for a culture of discipling to grow up—where people humbly open themselves up honestly to one another so they can share about how they're doing spiritually and can encourage one another.

One more thing to add to this would be making sure the congregation has a biblical understanding of evangelism. That will help them grow as Christians and help them help each other grow, too. I think the lack of spiritual growth in persons who call themselves Christians is often evidence that they've been wrongly evangelized. That is, we've taught people who are not Christians to think of themselves as if they are. You understand what I mean by that? Let's say you're here from a pedobaptist church (which apparently none of you are, though my concern is there even if you're not Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic). Even if you're from the reformed Protestants—the Anglicans, the Presbyterians, the congregationalists—even they, who would understand the gospel the same as we do, give that sign of salvation to their infants, and friends, I think that's confusing. I think it confuses them as they grow up, even if we teach them otherwise from our pulpits that they're not converted until they personally profess faith. For some reason, they were given that sign, somehow including them in the community.

Friends, I think Baptist churches are often these days in America slightly worse, because Baptist churches often are baptizing people at very, very young ages, assuring them they're believers—and no doubt some of them are, but many of them statistically prove to not be. We have to ask: what are we doing, then? How are we helping them grow in Christ if we are convincing a bunch of people who aren't Christians that they are by baptizing them quickly?

One church growth consultant claimed, "Five to ten million Baby Boomers would be back in the fold within a month if churches adopted three simple changes: one, advertise; two, let people know about product benefits; three, be nice to new people." That was really some stuff that was mailed out to pastors. Advertise it, put up the product benefits, and then watch the results. I mean, maybe the churches would be fuller, but I don't know if we'd see the people converted—not to the true gospel.

Friends, Americans are enterprising people. They have again and again shown through all the cultural changes that they can fill auditoriums. Okay, we can fill auditoriums; we can figure out a way to do that. That is not the same thing, brother pastor, as seeing a church built up. It's not the same thing as seeing a culture of discipling grow up in your church, where Christians work to help each other and to edify each other.

A number of years ago, I co-taught a class at a seminary with a friend, and I did not realize until we taught the class how painful it would be, and I never did it again. He emphasized missiology; I emphasized ecclesiology. It was almost like we were talking about two different religions. His you could accomplish by buying a lot of products, like some he himself made, and you could most assuredly do it within certain measurable amounts of time. Mine was just looking at what Scripture said about what a church is and describing what God does.

With the kind of way he was looking at the world, I think he would look at a place like Korea in 1860 and say it doesn't have a chance, or unless we do this, this, and this, this nation can never be evangelized. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit of God caused an amazing wind to blow from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, and Korea became one of the most Christian nations on Earth. Friends, God doesn't need our help in the sense of us strategizing to make sure how something gets done; he needs our faithfulness. We need to use the appointed means, but again and again, God has shown that he blows past all of our attempts to sort of home-make a revival.

We want to be faithful in our own Christian lives, and we want to be active in sharing the gospel. But Jesus says in Matthew and Luke that if you notice that the harvest seems to be unharvested, what should you do? Try to understand the "four fields" better? No, he says to pray to the Lord of the harvest that he send out laborers into his field. Turn to the one who has sovereignty and ask him to act.

I'm always fascinated, instructed, and encouraged in Acts. If you turn to Acts 15—Acts 15 of course is the Jerusalem Council, just full of instruction for us—let's look at verse 36:

After some time had passed, Paul said to Barnabas, “Let’s go back and visit the brothers and sisters in every town where we have preached the word of the Lord and see how they’re doing.” Barnabas wanted to take along John who was called Mark. But Paul insisted that they should not take along this man who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not gone on with them to the work. They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company, and Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed off to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas and departed, after being commended by the brothers and sisters to the grace of the Lord.

— Acts 15:36-40 (CSB)

We don't know if they excommunicated each other; they were going separate ways with separate methods, but the same gospel. And then it's interesting when you come to chapter 16. Look at verse 6:

They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia; they had been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. When they came to Mysia, they tried to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. Passing by Mysia they went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision in which a Macedonian man was standing and pleading with him, “Cross over to Macedonia and help us!” After he had seen the vision, we immediately made efforts to set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

— Acts 16:6-10 (CSB)

All right, so the gospel will go to Europe. The gospel, for the first time that we know of, goes to Europe because Paul had this call. So, he went to Europe to preach the gospel. But now, what about those poor Bithynians? Well, if you look over at First Peter, turn over to First Peter chapter 1:

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ:To those chosen, living as exiles dispersed abroad in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, chosen

— 1 Peter 1:1 (CSB)

Apparently, God loved the people in Bithynia, but he had more means than just Paul and Silas.

One way you can get missionaries is to make everybody feel very, very guilty for the amount of lostness in the world and make you feel like you are personally responsible for every lost person. You can't get any sane action out of that, but you can motivate a lot of immediate action out of that. However, it's a kind of action that's not very realistic; it'll burn people out and it will cause people to have a wrong confidence in the flesh. What you see Paul doing as he turns from the Bithynians to the Macedonians is he trusts the Lord. It's not hyper-Calvinism; he knows God uses means, but he knows he is not God's only means. So, apparently, there were other means that the Lord used to reach the Bithynians with the gospel.

This is part of what it means to understand this glorious good news of the gospel and of conversion being God's work. I think when we understand that, it affects the way we do and understand our evangelism as well. It is in understanding all of these things, where we take the weight that is wrongly placed on our members' shoulders and we place it back on God's shoulders, that obedience becomes much more understandable, doable, and joyful on the part of Christians as we help each other grow and encourage a culture of helping each other grow, helping each other disciple, in our local church.

Let me lead us in prayer.

Lord God, we pray that as pastors here, as we handle your Word, and as we show the theology of your Word—particularly, Lord, what you tell us about the good news of Jesus, conversion, and evangelism—that we would teach your Word in such a way that will enliven our congregations spiritually. Lord, we pray that it will cause them to want to reach out to one another to help each other come to know you better. Give us wisdom on how we can do this, and bless our efforts, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Panel Discussion: Building a Discipling Culture

Interviewer: Mark, your topic was on discipling, and you spent the majority of your time talking about expositional preaching, biblical theology, the gospel, conversion, and evangelism. What would you say to someone who listens to a talk like that and says, "Mark, what in the world does this have to do with me discipling my church members week to week?"

Mark Dever: I would just play the talk right back for them. That is the question I just answered.

Interviewer: Got it. There are a lot of people that view discipling as something that they need to do in addition to those things, right? How do these structures actually aid in creating a culture of discipling the way you talk about it?

Mark Dever: Yeah, if you don't have these structures in place, you're not going to be able to help each other grow spiritually. You won't understand what it means to be a Christian or see the obligations that we have for one another with the actual weight that they have, as opposed to imagining that we're kind of sovereign and we create these things. If you don't explain to people the correct position of us over against God, then there's no chance that they're going to be able to do the joyful work that they really are called to do in Scripture. But what God does is he equips us in all the ways we need to be equipped in order to help each other rejoice in how God has saved us, what the gospel is, and share it with each other and encourage each other to share it with others.

Interviewer: This question goes for all three of you brothers. I think a lot of people when they have grown up and thought about discipling, it's often been structured in programs. So, you'll have a discipler and a disciple. Mark, when you were talking about discipleship, it sounded much broader than that. Do you three brothers mind commenting and unpacking your views on discipling?

Noe Garcia: I think that when we are thinking biblically about discipleship, we have to think about how the Bible records it happening. It does happen; there's a corporate dimension to discipleship. You see it in Acts 14. Paul is going to places, they're evangelizing, and the believers are being organized under elders, and then Paul leaves. Now, that local church is doing a couple of things. In Ephesians 4, they're building each other up through expositional preaching, through prayer, through using their gifts, and they're becoming more like Christ, and then they're reaching out to the rest of their city.

So, all those components of church planting, discipleship, and leadership development are means that God is using through local churches to continue this movement of people toward Christlikeness, either through evangelism or discipleship. We get locked in on the individual thing—like, "Are you meeting somebody on Tuesday night in your small group?" Yeah, that's discipleship, but it happens within this corporate reality of what Christ is doing through his local church. We just have to be clear on how we fit into what God is doing corporately, and Mark laid it out well.

Mark Dever: So, very practically, let's say in your church people do not understand the gospel. Let's say that they think the gospel is basically, "I've got to try harder and do my best." Well, they're going to influence each other to think that way. They're not going to be true disciples, or in so far as you have a true disciple who gets born there spiritually or moves there, they're going to be misled by each other. Whereas when they understand what the gospel is, and they know what a Christian is, and then they help each other rely on Christ more—that's going to just build and multiply on itself.

Bobby Jamieson: Yeah, I think if you think about discipleship in a restrictive way, limited to just this small-group kind of organized "Why don't you guys do this together or that together?"—if that's all we think of when we think of discipleship, then it doesn't even have to be a church context for that, right? Groups like the Navigators do that fantastically. But isn't it weird that we would divorce discipleship, or our concept of discipleship, and take that outside the church, as if it would be applied equally well outside the church context?

The thing that I appreciate about what Mark was sharing is that we're trying to build a culture of discipleship, not just trying to figure out how to give opportunity to sign up for a small group. We're trying to build a culture where members, as they grow in Christ and as they grow in the things of faith, want to reach out to other members and just get together and say, "Hey, let's read this together," or "Let's get together and just encourage each other this way," or "I have a coworker who just wants to know about Christianity; would you two guys want to meet with us?" That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to enculturate the concept of discipleship, not limit it to how you organize small groups. The corporate world knows how to mentor people in those forms, but we're trying to do something deeper: sort of de-clergify Christian growth, not centering it only on what the pastor does or only on sermons.

Mark Dever: Yeah, so it's not a pyramid. It's not like, you know, Tom disciples Jose, Jose disciples Bill and Charles, and so on. It is: John has fruitful relationships with me, Noe, and Bobby, and he learns from all of us, and we learn from him, and we're learning from each other. John is not just relating to us; he's relating to a number of other people like that. Those kind of spiritually inquisitive, pushy, and possessive relationships go in multiple directions. They are increasingly typical of the members of your church, and the result is people becoming mature in their knowledge of the Word, of how to follow the Lord in practical life, and they become more fruitful in the lives of others, and more humble as they themselves get used to encountering the Word through comments that others make to them.

Noe Garcia: If I could, let me just read Ephesians 4. That's what happens in the faithful local church when leaders lead well and preach the Word of God: then the members are being equipped. And being equipped to do what? To do ministry. What is ministry? Ministry is word-centered relationships. The Bible is at the center of our Christian relationships, and as we are keeping the Bible at the center of our church-based relationships, we all will be growing.

Ephesians 4—I'll just read it. Let me pick it up where the gifts are given for leaders in verse 11:

And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness. Then we will no longer be little children, tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, by human cunning with cleverness in the techniques of deceit. But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ. From him the whole body, fitted and knit together by every supporting ligament, promotes the growth of the body for building itself up in love by the proper working of each individual part.

— Ephesians 4:11-16 (CSB)

We define discipleship as moving us toward Christlikeness. It happens in this corporate church life, and then we move that through a church plant, and it happens there.

Interviewer: Now, Mark, you pastor in Washington, D.C., where there are lots of ambitious people who are kind of self-initiating. What would you say to a pastor in California who says, "It's great that you could just breathe on people and they read three books and come back to you, but in California, getting someone to read is like dental surgery"?

Mark Dever: Thank you for that. I've been told this in numerous places around the world, and I've never believed it. I get told this when I go to Hawaii. I've been told this in Australia. I've been told this in a couple of different places in Africa. I was told this in New England with a youth group I started to work with back in the 1980s: "Oh, they won't read books."

I just started finding the auto mechanic and handing him a book, telling him how to read it, too, and saying I'd meet up with him in two weeks. He read the book, we talked about it, and he grew spiritually. We just kept doing that. God was not stupid in inspiring a book to be read. This is not just what some highly educated WASP says; this is what God has done in the way he's decided to communicate to his creation. He has given a book, so there it is, friends. That's why literacy rates always have increased in world history whenever Bible-believing Christians get near; literacy goes up. There's a reason why we've got a book. That's right, Bobby.

Interviewer: For Noe and Bobby, you guys are serving in California discipling different guys. Any unique approaches that you have found to be helpful ministering in your context to the men in your church?

Mark Dever: Well, before they answer, I want to be clear. I'm not saying you have to throw out books like I did. Bobby and Noe could decide the most effective way for them to use the verbal nature of God's revelation is by memorizing Scripture. There are many different ways you can apply this. I just used the example of books because I do that, but just to be clear, there are many ways we can take advantage of God revealing himself to us through words, and another one that would be different than just reading books would be memorizing Scripture. Sorry, go ahead.

Bobby Jamieson: Just to affirm you, brother, I think one of the things I appreciated about your talk is that a lot of people would view these things as prerequisites to doing things the right way, but wouldn't view these marks as the engine that makes the church's discipling life happen. The difference between the ministry instincts is that one just checks the box and then tries to find other things to push the church forward, whereas what you're saying is that these things are the things that push the church forward.

Mark Dever: Exactly, that's good.

Noe Garcia: Yeah, I think I'm not sure that we do anything contextually differently. I know that, in the end, a part of what discipleship is—again, I really appreciate the idea that one of the main components of the discipleship of the church is our preaching on Sundays, because we are exemplifying what it means to take a passage of Scripture. How do we understand that? How do we unpack that? How do we apply that? I think every member who is listening to that over the course of time is starting to think about how they study the Bible themselves, and that's part of it.

But I think in the end, the thing that we want to encourage and to push forward in that culture of discipleship is to just develop an open culture of talking about spiritual things: talking about what we heard on Sunday, what you have read, if there is a good Christian podcast you've been listening to, what has been encouraging you. Just have that kind of dialogue. Because when that dialogue is open, a lot of guys engage in it. If two guys are talking about something and another guy comes in, and they're all talking about, "Oh yeah, that kind of reminds me of something I read here," that culture naturally begins to meet together and go, "Hey, why don't we get a few guys together and do this? Why don't we study this together? Why don't we go ask some questions about this?"

I think that's what you want. You're trying to build a culture, not a program. If that culture is developing, there's something really healthy and good about that. I'm thankful that, especially among our elders, they just kind of naturally meet with some guys. I'll say, "Hey, are you meeting up with anybody?" to a new member in the church, and they'll say, "Oh yeah, one of the elders asked me to just meet up with them, and we've just been doing this together, reading this gospel together," or whatever. I think that's what we're after as a church in terms of our discipleship model: the whole church is kind of pursuing this, and it's normal.

Mark Dever: Just one comment on program versus culture. A program is not bad; a program can be very helpful. Programs are specific, scheduled activities, often accompanied by materials that someone else has written and that you purchase. There is often a financial interest in promoting programs, and then there will be an interest on the part of the staff member or person who's responsible for that program's success at your church. If that program helps you in that area, that can be fine. Just, as the pastor, be aware there are some other interests going on in a program: the financial interest of those who make them and sell them, and the reputation of the person who forwards it at your church, particularly whoever teaches it or leads it.

Whereas a culture is owned by nobody, makes money for nobody, and is just simply what typifies your church. So, a particular program of evangelism might be useful for your church or for some people in your church, but if you equate your church's health with how that one program is going (like Evangelism Explosion), well, then that's probably not a very good graph or measure of your church's health in that area. Your church's health in that area is going to be much more complex. They can probably make a program succeed and themselves be, as a whole church, not very good at the culture of something like evangelizing or discipling. So, I think what we want to do as pastors is know: when is this program kind of like David trying to put on Saul's armor—it just doesn't work, it's not going to help us? Or when is it, "Hey, this is really useful; this gets us over something we're trying to understand, it's a great way to do it, and we'll happily pay for this and use this for a few years"?

Noe Garcia: You asked a question about whether there is anything in our cultures that might be unique in discipleship. I don't think anything unique, but actually, we are commuters in LA, and we've got to drive. So, what we have done in our church is we gather for corporate worship. The Word of God is proclaimed, and I believe through the work of the Spirit, we are being transformed, convicted, and grown into Christlikeness through faithful preaching. The gifts are there, the body is there, the "one anothers" are happening, and people are being reproved, rebuked, and exhorted, and that causes growth. Gifts of mercy, kindness, and all these gifts are on display in the body of Christ, and we're growing.

And then, because we live in so many places—

Mark Dever: When you say we're growing there, do you mean you're growing numerically or growing in characteristics of Christlikeness?

Noe Garcia: Characterizing those things in Christlikeness. And so, then we'll gather midweek in various spots around LA. There, the Word is centered, we're praying, we're doing all these "one anothers," we're praying for unsaved loved ones, and we're encouraging each other in evangelism and our outreaches. We're doing that, but then I am being very strategic.

I have Mark 3 in front of me, verse 14. This is after Jesus prayed all night:

He appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, to send them out to preach,

— Mark 3:14 (CSB)

There's a component of discipleship—I'll just call it leadership development. You want elders to lead in your congregation and to send them out. That doesn't happen by accident. In this case, Jesus prays all night, and he picks some. So, there is a group of guys I meet with, and what I want to do with them is based on their giftedness as I'm discerning it: that they are gifted to lead and, I believe, shepherd.

Discipleship is like parenting in some ways. I'm showing my kids how I want them to live. I want to show guys how to lead; I want them to see me. I want them to go to the hospital with me. Mark is always traveling with guys; he wants them to see it. It's show-and-tell. So, I'm meeting with them, making sure they understand how to handle the Word, that their theology is deep and rich, and that they know how to evangelize. But I want them to see it, too, so I'm trying to keep those guys around me. Over time, a guy somewhere will say, "Bobby, I had this chance to minister, and I didn't know what to do, so I just did what you did." That's it.

When their giftedness matures, then yeah, you can send them out to pastor. So, what I'm doing culturally is we want people just to grow, and they grow through hearing the Word, so we want to preach it faithfully. God uses all of us in these ways, but the "one anothers" have to have a context to happen, so we gather so that happens, and then I want to be really intentional to make sure I'm training leaders.

A good book that's helped me is Robert Coleman's The Master Plan of Evangelism, which is all about leadership discipleship. He also has a book, The Master Plan of Discipleship, which is about evangelism. I thought somebody would think that was funny, I guess. But The Master Plan of Evangelism is all about leadership discipleship. Sometimes we call that just discipleship, but leadership training is just that: you're developing leaders. It doesn't cover everything about discipleship, but you do want to be doing that in your cultural context as a pastor. You want to be intentional. You don't want to minister for forty years and then have nobody to pass the baton to, having no Timothy. You want to be doing that now.

Interviewer: How do you brothers decide who you invest most of your time with?

Noe Garcia: I just mentioned it, but I look at Acts 6. The apostles couldn't do everything, so they said, "Who is really looked to in the congregation?" You're trying to ask that question of the body: who are those gifted to lead? Our elders will ask that question, we'll come up with a group of guys, and we will really pray. My co-pastor and I will split that group; he'll take half, and I'll take half.

Bobby Jamieson: Yeah, I think I lean heavily on the elder board and some of the leaders in the church to identify certain guys. There are young guys who have an interest in ministry, and so obviously we're going to consider them because we have to shepherd them. We have had an internship where we have one or two interns in the past. If you're thinking about the success of an internship by how many guys go into full-time ministry, we do pretty poorly. I think more than half of the guys who have gone through our internship end up not in ministry.

But all of them, I think rightly so, grow from it. Sometimes you're shepherding a guy, and he has a desire to do stuff, and you realize, "Hey brother, let's work on this because you're not very effective in your teaching, and I'm not sure that you're gifted in that." As you walk that through, that's still shepherding and that's still helpful. But if I'm trying to identify certain guys in terms of trying to develop leadership, I lean heavily on the other leaders. I might think of one or two guys that I know, but usually the other elders know a lot of other guys, and it helps to have a group of leaders looking for those future leaders throughout the whole congregation.

Interviewer: Any thoughts on selecting guys to be investing in?

Mark Dever: I think different people in the church are to choose different people. Ladies are not going to choose men; they're going to choose other women. Men are going to choose men. All of us are going to choose people who have schedules that make them available and who have spiritual hunger.

I regularly say at the door of the church, where I stand after the service, "Call me up," and I'll give somebody my number. Almost never will they call me up. I'd say ninety percent of the time, I never get any kind of response. But the ten percent of the time that guys take me up—boom, there we go. So, I'm a great one for serving the first shot, and then I'm all about response. As much as somebody initiates and responds, I'll keep playing as long as they will.

Now, if they say, "Will you meet with me every week?" I'll say no. But I'll tell them, "If you do this, when you're done, get back to me." And if they get done with it in three days, we might meet up twice that week. If they don't get done for three weeks, then we'll meet up in three weeks. We'll work on a time to get together then. Just at whatever level both they and I can sort of meet, we will keep meeting, talking, and praying. I've got a ton of those going on, as do most people in the church, probably in part as they've seen my example of how I do it. It works in a bunch of different relationships at a bunch of different levels.

Interviewer: Bobby, were you going to say something?

Bobby Jamieson: I mean, you all can tear this apart if it works—just a little acronym I had in my head back in my college ministry days. In college ministry, we used to call it "fast." In four years, you don't have a ministry if you're not evangelizing and discipling; everybody has graduated and gone. I've seen that happen. The ministry that I was a part of was tied into a local church, so we just had the stability and wisdom of elders.

At UCLA, forty years later, it is the largest student ministry on campus, not just the largest Christian student ministry. It started with a handful of us. Our little acronym was "FACTS." The FACTS of leadership: are they Faithful, are they Available, do they have Character, are they Teachable, are they Spirit-filled? We're looking for guys with the FACTS of leadership.

Interviewer: I like it. All three of you brothers have tried to implement this type of ministry philosophy for a really long time. Members of your church have probably felt neglected or frustrated with your approach to ministry at times. Any thoughts on handling that criticism?

Mark Dever: Well, in so far as it's the desire of a sheep to be fed, I am one hundred percent in favor of the criticism. I want every sheep to be fed all that they want to be fed and possibly more. So, it's a matter of me trying to hear it in the context of that person, how they communicate about things, and then I figure out how I weigh it and what I can do about it. But I'm thankful anytime I have a sheep bleating because they want to be fed.

Bobby Jamieson: Yeah, I think there are always some in the congregation who are just upset about one thing or another, or they just want your attention for something. I remember an older pastor telling me years ago: "If you have someone in your congregation and they seem to approach you with a scowl, they want your attention. Well, then why don't you just give them your attention?"

Again, I think Mark wisely will guard against just saying, "Okay, yeah, I'll meet with you every week." But certainly, if something's going on, I think it's encouraging for them to just be heard. It's the same rule that we learn from our wives, right? Sometimes they just want to be heard, and they just want the affirmation that you know what they're going through, and not necessarily even to fix it. Sometimes they just want you to know.

And sometimes, as a senior pastor, they want to speak to us, but it's not actually us they have to speak to. It may be good for us to just go, "Yeah, Tom, I cannot get to you until probably four weeks from now. But you know what? Bill is here, and Bill is happy to talk to you. So, if you're really concerned about growing in the Lord, Bill is here and available. If it's just me you're wanting to talk to, that's another matter. And yeah, I'll see you after vacation."

Interviewer: Anything that you guys used to do when you were discipling guys that you don't do anymore?

Bobby Jamieson: Well, I know for me, the character of when I'd meet with guys—I approached it a lot more legalistically. I don't know why I thought it would be more godly if guys showed up at 7:00 a.m. at the church or something. You know what I mean? Small, weird things like that. You've got to be careful of that in your own souls. There's something in us, especially as younger believers or younger leaders, that thinks that if this is harder on you and you still do it, then you're a better person.

Mark Dever: That kind of shows you the glory of sleep, doesn't it? Or the lack thereof.

Bobby Jamieson: Yeah, I shouldn't make guys meet really early.

Interviewer: So, one takeaway is to sleep in longer. Mark, you didn't used to make guys work out or anything with you? Bobby is so healthy, so if he was discipling, that's a fun way of discipleship.

Bobby Jamieson: I work out with my people. Yeah, that's a good way to hang out.

Interviewer: Anything else you guys want to say? Anything else you guys want to add?

Mark Dever: No, just try to make it work. People have complicated lives with family and all that kind of stuff, so just try to make it work. I was less inclined to do that when I was younger, but now I try to accommodate.