Disciple-Making Recipe for Churches
This editor’s note highlights Randy Gariss’s call for churches to rethink disciple-making so more people look like Jesus. It points to three essentials—knowledge, relationship, and service—and urges churches to focus less on activity and more on forming disciples through teaching and lived practice.
- Disciple-making aims to help people look more like Jesus.
- Gariss emphasizes knowledge, relationship, and service as key ingredients.
- Teaching matters, but it must be more than classroom-style instruction.
By Mark A. Taylor
Randy Gariss believes not enough people today—inside or outside the church—look enough like Jesus (READ GARISS’S COLUMN). And he asks, isn’t that the hallmark of a disciple, to look like Jesus? And isn’t the church’s job to make disciples?
Discipleship as the Church’s Priority
In this week’s “Reflections,” he suggests we need to rethink our process for leading people to be more like Jesus. He offers three ingredients—knowledge, relationship, and service—in a simple recipe for disciple-making.
I like what he says. I particularly resonate with his challenge to the church: Let’s shorten our list of activities, sharpen our focus on just these three priorities, and devote ourselves to the imperative of making disciples.
His column prompts us to elevate the church above the atmosphere or approach of a service organization or retail outlet or entertainment venue. The church is about helping people look like Jesus. Church members become more like him as they submit to a twofold process: deepening their own spiritual maturity as they commit to developing others.
I chose Randy’s column for this issue specifically because of what he says about teaching. (“Reflections” writers send their columns four times a year, without knowing which week we’ll use them. Sometimes their topics fit perfectly with a theme issue. Sometimes their essays provide a change-of-pace to the pieces in the front of the magazine. Randy’s “Reflections” this week does both.)
Teaching That Forms Disciples
He says formal classroom teaching has too often been our sole strategy for developing disciples, and that has to change. But he’s quick to add we can’t build disciples without Bible teaching.
I have two responses. First, we should look at teaching as something more than teacher-talk poured into the brains of students sitting in rows an hour at a time. Jesus, the “master teacher,” was most successful with only 11 students, and he did far more than talk to them. Jesus combined knowledge, relationships, and service in a teaching strategy that quickly changed the world.
Second, Randy’s column lifts up the reason Standard Publishing exists. Standard Publishing is here to help Christians do a better job of understanding and teaching the Bible. As this week’s issue underscores, Standard’s ministry for generations has been equipping teachers to help students understand God’s Word.
Your brothers and sisters at Standard Publishing understand our company can’t accomplish everything the church must do. But we’re committed to one primary goal: providing the church with excellent tools for teaching the Bible, “bringing the Word to life.”
Randy wrote, “The great church will teach and teach well.” We want to partner with churches like yours to help make that happen.
Author: Mark A. Taylor
Mark A. Taylor, who served as Christian Standard editor from 2003 to 2017, retired in June 2017 after almost 41 years with Standard Publishing (Christian Standard Media).
