Who makes things anymore?  How many craft people do you know?  How many metal workers or tailors?  We have truly become a consumer society.  I lament the fact that people don’t make things anymore.  The same can be said of our churches.  We struggle in making disciples and making leaders.

I feel that the church has a stronger role to play in “making” or “turning” people into disciples of Jesus Christ.  Jesus said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20).

Honestly, we have one thing to do: make disciples.  But the question is how?  Jesus seems to suggest that both belief and practice are important.  His disciples are to make other disciples by baptizing them and teaching them.  The initiate must be taught to obey what Jesus said.  There.

To answer this more fully, we need to ask, “Well, how did Jesus make disciples?”  Jesus called disciples.  We should, too.

The disciples lived with Jesus.  We should, too.  But, wait!  We can’t.  Not in any literal sense.  Jesus is gone, and, if we are to make disciples, the only “Jesus” they can spend time with is us.

Dallas Willard emphasizes disciples as apprentices.  In the medieval period, apprentices might be as young as 10 years old.  They lived with their master craftsmen teachers year after year, studying and learning the trade and honing their skills.

Then, as masters themselves, they hung up their own shingle and took on an apprentice of their own, thereby continuing the cycle.

With Jesus gone, making disciples falls upon us, who presumably have been apprenticed to Jesus for some time and can now be considered “masters” who can take on “apprentices,” who will someday take on their own disciples.  All of this seems obvious to us preachers and pastors.  Making disciples is what we do, or are supposed to do.  But the call to action is a call not only to the professional clergy class, but to all “ministers” who worship with us on Sundays and are a part of the local community of faith.

Do our adherents understand that their “job” is, first, to be a disciple of Jesus (baptized and taught to obey), and then to call someone else (a friend, colleague or fellow churchgoer) to be an apprentice under their care and guidance?  Who is your apprentice right now?  Who is learning from you?  Who is watching how you “do” the teachings of Jesus?  How are they to learn if not from you, from me, from us?

Grace and peace,

Pastor Rhoden