Sayings of Jesus: “Go and make disciples…”
This command of Jesus features in his final discourse at the end of the last chapter of Matthew’s Gospel—the penultimate verse. I’m fairly sure you’ll have heard evangelical expositions of this from the pulpit, probably along the lines that Jesus told us to ‘make disciples’ not ‘believers’—that being a disciple is different from being a believer; a higher calling, involving a greater commitment.
Whether Jesus or the New Testament writers had such a distinction in mind is debatable, but let’s go with it for the time being.
But what does the phrase actually mean? It’s easy to mutter “Amen!” when the preacher quotes it, but what does ‘making disciples’ actually look like in practice, in our day and age?
In terms of its original meaning, we should note the fuller phrase is making disciples of all nations. We recall that the pre-resurrection Jesus saw his mission being primarily to the Jewish people; for example, Matthew 15:24—“I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”—and Matthew 10:5–6, instructing the Twelve to go only to Israel when sending them out.
This ‘Great Commission’ (as we call the Matthew 28 passage) is one of several sayings in Jesus’ ministry that foreshadow the widening of the people of God beyond Israel to the nations (the enigmatic John 10:16 is an example), and it becomes a prominent ministry theme in Acts and the New Testament letters.
In that ancient Mediterranean world, discipleship was a common phenomenon. A disciple was a follower deeply committed to a leader’s political or religious cause, teaching, and beliefs. The term disciple had various senses, such as ‘adherent’, ‘student’, ‘apprentice’, and ‘learner’. Preceding Jesus’ ministry, we see John the Baptist with disciples. Jesus adopted this existing concept to characterise the kind of relationship that he would develop with his close followers.
When Jesus called his disciples, the invitation was to literally ‘follow him’—not just philosophically or metaphorically. This required leaving their families and their professions to a substantial degree. The ‘master-disciple’ relationship involved living alongside the master—serving him, learning from him, and replicating his teachings and works. It was fully immersive.
Quite what discipleship looked like after Jesus’ ascension, as the Gospel spread to the wider Mediterranean world (not least through the ministry of Paul), is hard to be sure. If vocabulary is relevant, it is striking that while there are over 230 occurrences of ‘disciple’ in the Gospels, and 29 in Acts, there are zero in the New Testament letters. That should at least make us stop and think. Modern evangelical churches talk extensively about ‘discipleship’, yet the apostles, writing to churches, apparently didn’t. Arguments from silence are always questionable, but Paul never calls believers ‘disciples’ (he uses other terms instead).
Perhaps more significantly, there was no New Testament Greek word corresponding to our modern term ‘discipleship’!
So why has evangelicalism made discipleship one of the defining categories of the Christian life? Most likely the answer lies in the status accorded to Matthew 28:19. Evangelicals have quite understandably taken Jesus’ “final words” as a defining text for the church's mission. My question is whether our understanding of it owes more to contemporary church culture than to the New Testament as a whole.
In fairness, of course, though the word ‘disciple’ may have fallen into disuse in the early church period, the concepts underlying following Jesus did not disappear. The vocabulary may have changed, the model may have changed, but the values did not—and should not. The Christian life is fundamentally about becoming like Jesus.
And yet, there are self-evident differences between being a disciple of the incarnate Jesus and the ascended Jesus.
The classic challenge when reading and applying what we see in Scripture in our world today is the need to (a) understand what it was and what it meant ‘then’, and (b) to then faithfully translate that into what it ought to be and to mean ‘now’.
Our calling is not to ‘copy and paste’ from Scripture as if there was no gap between ‘then’ and ‘now’. (Some evangelicals assume that faithfulness to Scripture requires minimising the gap—in so doing, over-extending the scope of what is timeless and minimising what isn’t. A sure recipe for inconsistency and selectivity, not least in inappropriately tagging as ‘biblical’ first-century cultural features and insisting on applying them to today.)
Scholars sometimes helpfully frame meaningfulness for today as being found in the fusion of ‘two horizons’—those of the ancient text and our contemporary world.
A clear distinction between discipleship as practiced by Jesus with the Twelve and any version today is the absence of Jesus in person. This raises a question: Does someone now become a disciple of Jesus vicariously through becoming a disciple of a pastor or some other spiritual teacher and role model? In our world today, that idea should probably be ringing alarm bells.
I don’t believe the first-century model of Jesus is to be copied and pasted. Older readers may remember the profoundly damaging ‘heavy shepherding’ practiced by some charismatic evangelical churches in the not-too-distant past.
The modern evangelical idea of ‘discipleship’ tends to organise around concepts such as discipleship programmes, discipleship courses, discipleship groups, and discipleship ministries (subscribe online!). Churches seek to have discipleship strategies. All of this implies that discipleship is a department of church life. I think that’s a reflection of the idea we began with—that in evangelicalism, a ‘disciple’ is a more committed, more mature version of an ordinary believer. Further up the ladder of closeness to Jesus: knowing more, volunteering more, giving more, and looking and sounding more ‘spiritual’. Oh, and of course, more loyal to the church and its leadership.
Is that entirely wrong? No, of course not. But it very much depends on how it’s interpreted and applied.
The question I’m still wrestling with is how we fulfil Jesus’ command to make disciples.
Interestingly, the New Testament Greek for ‘make disciples’ is mathēteuō—and it’s just the one word (‘make’ is not a separate word). It appears three times in Matthew and once in Acts.
In the two Matthew instances (other than our primary text of Matthew 28:19), it’s referring in a past-tense sense to persons who have become disciples (Joseph of Arimathea, and teachers of the law). The concept of ‘making’ as a long-term process is absent.
In Acts, its one appearance is in the context of a Paul and Barnabas missionary journey, proclaiming the gospel in the city of Derbe, where it says they “made many disciples” before moving on to Lystra.
In none of these other—remarkably limited—instances of mathēteuō is there any sense of something called discipleship corresponding to modern evangelical deployment of the word, either in programmes, courses, or any long-term sense of ‘making’. Still less, any correspondence to for-profit specialist discipleship ministries.
At this point you might validly say, “So, Steve, you haven’t answered your question: What should discipleship and making disciples look like in our world today?”
Generally, I prefer not to offer prescriptive answers to such questions; I would rather pose them and their complications and allow readers to make up their own minds.
Personally, I think the answer will be a combination of ‘yes’ to certain features and ‘no’ to others.
Essentially, I’m in favour of a kind of ‘self-taught’ version of becoming a disciple that centres the responsibility with us. Not to be an unaccountable Lone Ranger kind of Christian (they are generally rather unattractive), but to emphasise that we are responsible for our spiritual growth, maturity, and learning from Jesus through the Holy Spirit. It can’t be subcontracted.
So, ‘Yes’ to:
Seeking through the Holy Spirit to replicate the nature of the close, personal relationship to Jesus that we see in Jesus’ disciples in the Gospels, notwithstanding that this will be in a spiritual sense.
Immersing ourselves in the Gospels, especially, looking to take Jesus’ values and teaching (such as the Sermon on the Mount) and ways of receiving people seriously, and then replicate that in our life.
Engaging with the speaking and writing of those whose thinking resonates with us (ideally those who are also theologically qualified). That may sound subjective, and it’s not without its risks, but we ought not to be trying to engage with every person’s speaking and writing, still less those that people tell us we ‘ought to be’. Go with your gut instincts—but never accept anyone’s speaking and writing uncritically!
Being part of a community in whom we have confidence and to whom we can be willingly accountable in a ‘light touch’ and always entirely voluntary way.
And ‘No’ to:
‘Discipleship’ that is in any sense imposed or demanded (especially if ‘spiritual language’ is being used to frame it).
Anything that doesn’t feel right. (Running a mile is OK.)
One-to-one discipleship to an individual. The ‘master-disciple’ relationship was Jesus’ model; it’s not our model. Jesus was not fallible; people are.