A “radical revolution” in discipleship training is needed, Avery Willis, creator of the “MasterLife” discipleship resources, said during the 2006 National Discipleship Conference.
Discipleship is a relationship with God through Christ and a relationship with other people, said Willis, one of the featured speakers at Ridgecrest LifeWay Conference Center in North Carolina.
“If you just see it as a program or a course, then you don’t have real discipleship,” said Willis.
“No wonder our churches, being led by undiscipled people, become stagnated and dead – because they’ve never been introduced to discipleship, where the walk and the talk would match up,” Willis said.
“We’ve got to go back to the Bible and describe what a disciple is, and not just ask folks to come make decisions or be baptized or become a member of a church, but to follow Christ,” he also said. “And then to say that means ‘deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow Me.’
“It must become a priority of the leadership of the church. It must become a priority of the church. The church is to make disciples. If your church was a factory, what would you produce? You should be producing disciples. If you measure the disciples, you measure how good a factory you are,” Willis said.
Discipleship is on the decline, and many churches have just given up on a generation that doesn’t want to hear the “revolutionary message of Jesus Christ,” he said, citing research which indicated that the majority of Christians are “babes in Christ.”
There is an encouraging side to that statistic, said Claude King, editor-in-chief of leadership and adult publishing at LifeWay Christian Resources.
“Babes in Christ can be the most effective witnesses,” said King, who authored “The Call to Follow Christ,” which outlines six disciplines for new and growing believers.
In Matthew 28, Jesus commissioned all disciples to reproduce themselves, said Jay Johnston, LifeWay director of FAITH/evangelism and discipleship.
It is important to remember that Jesus never separated evangelism and discipleship, Johnston said.
“I think the greatest failure we have in our churches is that we do not begin discipling when a person is saved,” said Roy Edgemon, a former missionary and director of discipleship training for LifeWay.
Edgemon said, “I believe when they begin to know him and love him … everything else changes in their lives. But it begins with that new Christian.”
Bible scholar T.W. Hunt, author of “The Mind of Christ” discipleship resources, acknowledged that there is nothing easy about discipleship.
“Discipleship takes time,” Hunt said. “It’s not an easy road. It takes humility, self-sacrifice, placing the other person first.”
“Our culture has become more and more self-centered. Our culture swamps us with personal desire,” Hunt said. “This is why discipleship is failing. What matters is what position in the church I get, how big is my house or bank account.”
Reflecting the “desperate need of discipleship in our churches” are young people who see Christianity as “trendy,” who are “spiritually passionate and biblically illiterate,” said Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, Va.
“I think we’ve made a serious mistake in Christian discipleship, in that we are assuming the stupidity of the members in our churches,” Caner said. “We assume that the kids can’t study theology. If they can sing the doxology, they can learn theology. If they can memorize the words to 7,000 songs on their iPods, then certainly they can understand concepts that are far deeper than what we challenge them with.”