Fully Trained Disciples

Impact Discipleship Ministries published their latest book by Ken Adams and are very excited for you to read it. This article features part of the first chapter on the blog. You can purchase this book on their website here.

“Luke 6:40 – “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.”.

If you are like me, you have probably seen far too many people become “partially trained” disciples rather than “fully trained” disciples. My experience with most churches is that they get some of the “making disciples” mission right, but not all of it. Most churches make disciples who look a little bit like their teacher but not completely like him. The church can do better! The church can be the place where disciples who look like their teacher are being made. The church can be the place where fully trained disciples are being launched into the world on mission for Jesus.

A little over two thousand years ago Jesus stood on a mountainside in Galilee and he told his disciples to “Go make disciples of all nations…” Making disciples was and still is the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ. We get that. We all understand the mission of Jesus Christ is to see every person, in every nation, in every generation become one of His disciples and make even more disciples. What we don’t get, is what it looks like when we’ve actually made one.

I’ve been in ministry a long time (over thirty years as a pastor) and I am still amazed at how many different answers there are to the question, “What does a disciple look like?” In fact, if you go to a dozen different churches and ask the pastor of each church to define a disciple, you will probably get a dozen different answers. I may be wrong, but I don’t think that is the way it ought to be. Call me narrow-minded if you want to, but if we are all making disciples of Jesus, they should all look the same. They should all look like Jesus! We might use different words to describe them, but they should all mean the same thing.

If each church is defining a disciple differently, I submit to you that we are not making disciples who look like Jesus. We are defining it according to our own understanding rather than letting Christ explain it. He is our true picture of a disciple.

Imagine having churches all around the globe that are making disciples who look just like Jesus. If every church has the exact same target, the exact same end product, then we would be impacting the world by having a planet full of people who are living the same way Jesus lived. I think that might actually be the way God intended for things to go when he sent Jesus to earth over two thousand years ago. Jesus came to make disciples who look like him…”

Read more from this book and other books in our Disciple Making Church series on our website here!

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