Evangelistic Discipleship

I’ve heard the com­plaint many times that the church does not engage in dis­ci­ple­ship, or at least does not dis­ci­ple as it should. Hope­fully (well, usu­ally) the dis­cus­sions turn to what I think is most impor­tant ini­tial ques­tion: what do we mean by dis­ci­ple­ship? As I said in my pre­vi­ous post, it has been sug­gested that by dis­ci­ple­ship we should include evan­ge­lis­tic and wit­ness­ing out­reaches. That is, dis­ci­ple­ship should also include con­ver­sion as well as any sub­se­quent teaching.

Our next ques­tion con­sid­ers what we mean by dis­ci­ple. Turn­ing to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Merriam-Webster defines a dis­ci­ple as one who, “accepts and assists in spread­ing the doc­trines of another: as b : a con­vinced adher­ent of a school or indi­vid­ual”. Tra­di­tion­ally, Dis­ci­ple­ship is the process whereby dis­ci­ples grow in their under­stand­ing of Jesus and doc­trine and then fur­ther spread what they’ve come to regard as truth.

We end up with two … (Read more)