I spent an intense but very meaningful weekend with the Petaling Jaya Evangelical Free Church in Selangor, Malaysia. I was one of the speakers at their Disciple Making Conference. The Lord had spoken to them five years ago that this was to be their focus going forward.
At such conferences I usually take pains to voice my concern about a two-tier understanding of salvation that still plagues the church. The way the gospel is often presented is focused on the need to escape hell and go to heaven when one dies. This escape is provided by the gospel. And the gospel is activated by the sinner’s prayer, an acknowledgement that one is a sinner and lost, and the invitation for the Lord to enter one’s life to save him/her. When you say that prayer, you are saved. You are now a Christian. Later they will come back to you and ask if you want to be a disciple. A disciple is one who takes the faith seriously and is committed to faithfully undergoing various spiritual disciplines, like the regular study and memorisation of the Bible, the commitment to share the gospel to as many people as possible, and a life of regular prayer.
There are two main concerns for such an approach to evangelism. The focus is on what happens when one dies — escaping hell, going to heaven — and not on how one lives one’s life in the present. As a friend puts it, it focuses on life after death but not on life before death. My second concern regarding this approach is that it positions discipleship as optional. One is a Christian and saved if one has accepted Christ but, although it is encouraged, one need not be a disciple. In other words, all of us are Christians and some of us are disciples. But is that what the Bible teaches?
It is critical that we understand what “disciple” means. It does not mean super Christian. It means “learner, apprentice, student”. Here is my working definition of “disciple”:
A disciple of Jesus is someone who has responded to Jesus’s invitation to follow Him, has accepted His offer of eternal life, has acknowledged Him as Saviour and Lord, and has embarked on a lifelong journey of growing in His image in the power of the Holy Spirit.
I must make it clear that we are saved by grace. We can never earn our salvation. It is a free gift of the Lord (Ephesians 2:8–10). But if, by faith, we have responded to Jesus’s invitation to follow Him, we will bear the fruit of our salvation (Luke 6:43–44). We will be embarking on a journey to be like Jesus. We will be students of Jesus as He teaches us how to be truly human. Note what Acts 11:25, 26 says:
Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch. (NIV)
Followers of Jesus were disciples. But if they learned their lessons well, if they grew in Christlikeness, people called them “Christians”, i.e., “little Christs”. Discipleship is not an option. God is not just saving people from hell. He is raising a new humanity, one that bears the image of Christ (Romans 8:28–30).
So we are all disciples — we are all learners of Jesus, learning how to be like Him. If we learn our lessons well, we will exhibit more and more of His character. We will be Christians.