Finding the Faithful

Last night I went to a discipleship training class. We had a speaker named Dr. D. Michael Henderson, author of The Ladder of Faithfulness. What I loved about this training session was the focus on what God is doing right now, in our lives and in the lives of our students, and how does He want us to be involved? Dr. Henderson emphasized the need to find the faithful in our groups and in our life. Find the people who are receptive to what you are teaching and intentionally disciple them and show them how to grow and in turn disciple others. One of the most easily done recommendations that he gave was to showcase what you want to produce. Our students don't want to hear about what they should be doing, but they want (and need) to see us doing what you want them to do.

One thing we can easily lose sight of is that discipleship is just as important if not more than evangelizing. As we disciple students we get them past the seeker and believer stage, hopefully past the worker stage and into the shepherd stage, where they can be discipling others. Evangelism should happen in this context. Don't get me wrong, I believe it is our mission to make Christlike disciple of all nations, and that includes introducing people to Christ, but we can easily focus so much on introducing people to Christ that we never get them past the "baby Christian" stage. We never ween them off the milk and get them on the meat, and this is what Jesus has commanded us to do. This is what it means to make Christlike disciples.