Video Transcript: Personal Discipling, Corporate Discipling

Welcome back. This is our next to last video. In our course developing great  commission skills, we're going to be wrapping up our discussion of leaving a  gospel footprint and zeroing in on two skill topics, personal discipling and  corporate discipling. So let's dive in. The Greek word for disciple is the word  mathetes spelled for you there on the screen in transliterated English. Now this  word carries the basic meaning of pupil, student or learner. Now the way that it  worked in those days is that rabbis would attract students that wanted to study  with that particular rabbi, and the practice was that the student would approach  the rabbi and essentially make a pitch, you know, apply to be included as a  student or a disciple, a methetes of that particular rabbi. So the student was the  one who was catalytic in in getting started down that path. And if the rabbi  agreed that that particular person could study with him, and then you would  become a disciple of that particular teacher. So disciple was not considered to  be just sort of a generic term for, you know, anyone who is a student of anything. It was referred specifically to be you were a disciple of a particular rabbi. Now,  what's different, of course, with the coming of Christ, is things got flipped  around. Jesus, the rabbi, didn't wait for Peter, James, John, Matthew. The  disciples didn't come to him and ask permission to be his student. Jesus  stepped into their lives and called them in a way that apparently they could not  refuse, as they dropped everything and immediately became disciples of Jesus  Christ. So that's a very different protocol from the norm in that day, but I think it  points to how Jesus operates. Jesus does the calling. And you will recall from  our last session, no one comes to Christ without being drawn. Well, it's a similar  idea. You're being drawn in to being a disciple of Jesus Christ. The theological  Dictionary of the New Testament informs us with this. In the New Testament, the  word methetes occurs only in the Gospels and Acts it is attested some 250  times, almost always for those who follow Jesus further methetes implies a  relationship to a particular teacher. So being a student was not a general  categorization for someone who was a student in the sense of the words usage  today, rather to be a student or to be a disciple was to affix that learner to one  particular teacher, the disciple then was a follower of That teacher. So there was a very personal, singular relationship between being a disciple and the person  whom that disciple was following. Now, what was the objective of discipling back then and now? The objective is this. It's to center the disciple on an ever  deepening relationship with Jesus Christ. If you are discipling someone  personally, your goal ultimately, is to help that person center his or her life on the person of Jesus Christ, discipling is not primarily about the content of the  material. You know, a lot of times in our day when we think of discipleship, our  thoughts immediately go to the content of the study. you know, a study on the  book of Ephesians, or a study on the history of the church. You know, it's, it's  related to the curriculum. Whereas the the real idea of disciple, in the sense of  disciples of Christ, is to be centered on the person of Jesus Christ, building into 

relationship with Jesus Christ. So matters like curriculum, are tools that are  utilized in that process, but they are not the goal. They're not the ends. They are the means. Okay, now one analogy I'd like to share with you would be this, as a  discipler, think of yourself somewhat as a tour guide, if you'll think about the role  of a tour guide, you know, if you're going to some particular location, maybe  you're going to a museum, or you're going to, you know, the Kennedy Space  Center, something along those lines. And you want to see all that's going on.  You want to learn all that's going on. Very often, you will be directed to a tour  guide who is going to facilitate that for you. Now, the tour guide is someone who  is very familiar, very knowledgeable, who can share that knowledge with you.  Point out to you what's what's important, what needs to be pointed out. Take you places you could never go, give you insights that you don't have. That's the role  of the tour guide. But you know, at the end of the day, when the process is  completed, when you leave that experience, you're really not thinking about the  tour guide. You're thinking about all the things that you learned, that you saw,  that you experienced. Well, when you're a discipler, it's kind of like being a Jesus tour guide. You have a relationship with Christ. You are familiar with the Bible.  You have certain insights and understandings into how God works, how life  works when you are a follower of Christ and you are guiding this person with  whom you are discipling through that experience, pointing them to Jesus,  pointing them to Scripture, pointing out key elements that this person needs to  understand in order to grow to maturity. But at the end of the day, you're not in  the spotlight. Jesus is in the spotlight. So this idea of being a a discipling tour  guide, I think, has a lot of valid validity, and I hope that you will take that to heart. Now, there are three elements that I want to emphasize regarding personal  discipling. And those elements are these, the ministry of the word and prayer,  the conversion discipleship gap and obedience based discipleship. So let me  speak to each of these briefly. You know that phrase, Ministry of the Word and  prayer? It comes to us out of Acts 6, if you're familiar with this account, early on  in the life of the church, there was a situation that arose among the followers of  Christ where the Grecian widows were being overlooked in the distribution of  food. And so this problem was brought to the attention of the disciples, and  here's how they responded. It says the 12 summoned the full number of  disciples and said, you know, it is not right that we should give up preaching the  Word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you  seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. So in other words, they're going to raise up a team of people that  will take care of the distribution of food problem. But for them, as the leaders,  the ones who were training others in the faith, they said this, we will devote  ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word prayer and the ministry of the word what a discipler is doing in. Working with someone through discipleship is  working with them through the ministry of the word and prayer, training, 

teaching, instructing, praying with praying for helping that person develop solid  biblical spiritual habits of daily time with the Lord, daily time in the Word, daily  time in prayer, growing in faith, establishing a pattern that will lead to greater  and greater maturity over time. And central to this is the ministry of the word and prayer. Secondly, what I'm calling the conversion discipleship gap. Here's what  I'm pushing for. Here, what I'm finding is that many times when someone steps  forward to receive Christ, to express a desire to receive Jesus as Savior and as  Lord, there's a lot of celebration. There might be a baptism service, and those  are wonderful things, but quite often it sort of pauses there, because that person that that newcomer to the faith, doesn't quite know what to do, like, what do I do  now? And there's a gap between that time of conversion and when true  discipleship begins. And so what I'm suggesting here is that we want to close  that gap. We want to begin discipling immediately upon a person's conversion.  We don't want there to be, you know, a three month, six month delay before that person has someone working with them to disciple them into living out their  faith. So we want to close that gap. We're going to use the ministry of the word  in prayer, and we're going to close the gap between the time of conversion and  the time that discipleship begins. One final element that I want to mention,  obedience based discipleship. Getting back to the Great Commission, the Great  Commission says, Teach them to obey all that I have commanded. In some  versions of the Bible, it says, teach them to observe all that I have commanded.  The point is not just to receive biblical information. The point is to begin to to to  live biblical lives, lives of obedience to the teachings of Christ, not just  knowledge of the teachings of Christ. So as you are working with someone as a  discipler, I want to encourage you to think about leading them into obedience  based discipleship, not just information based discipleship. They need to do  much more than just learn. They need to be obedient, and that, of course, is  going to require that you model for them what obedience looks like. So the life  that you're living is an obedience based discipleship as you follow Christ as his  disciple. Okay, now there's a principle here, and the principle is this, obedience  based discipleship will secure and develop the life transformation that begins at  conversion, that begins at conversion. So whatever we do in the various ways  that we go about discipling, people, just make sure that you're dialed in to  obedience based discipleship. So that's what personal discipling can look like,  Ministry of the Word and prayer, closing the gap between conversion and  discipleship and obedience based discipleship being the thrust. Now I want to  move into corporate discipleship and just a few things to say there. Think of this  as three levels of. Corporate discipleship, the cell level, the community level and the congregation level. Now, these particular words I have borrowed from Peter  Wagner. Peter Wagner was quite a leader in the Church Growth Movement back in the, I guess, the mid to later part of the 20th century, and this is the language  that he used. It might be a little bit obsolete today, but I think it makes a good 

point. And so I'm going to lean on on what he had presented before. Now the  cell level would be the small level, not necessarily a formal small group, but any  small grouping of people. You know, if you think about a Sunday school class  that maybe has six people, or small group that has maybe 10 people, you know,  these would be considered the cellular levels of the church. So one of the  platforms that we might use in discipling people are these cells. Now, of course,  the smallest cell would be the one on one cell, but now we're getting into back  into personal discipling, corporate discipling suggests that we have systems in  place to corporately disciple our congregation. And I'm suggesting that there are  three levels on which that could operate, first, the cell level. Secondly, there's  the community level. That would be the level of groups of people that are truly  actively involved. It's not as large a group as an entire congregation. It's more of  a subset of a congregation, but in typical, conventional form, many churches  over the years have had, say, a midweek Bible study of some kind. Well, that  would be more the community level, where it's not, it's not super small, but it's  not the full congregation. It's more that in between group that can be leveraged  for discipling. And then, of course, there's the congregation at large. You know,  even preaching on Sunday should be considered an act of discipling. You know,  anytime that you're pouring out the word of God, the things of God, we're  sharing about how to live this life of obedience, whatever shape that takes, it's  encompassed under discipling. So we can disciple in small gatherings, we can  disciple in medium sized gatherings. We can disciple in full congregational  gatherings. So this is how we want to be thinking about corporate discipleship.  So, you know, in in putting these pieces together, we're going to blend these two concepts together. What we're going to do is we're going to disciple people  through the ministry of the word and prayer, making sure that we get people  started into decide, into discipleship as quickly as possible following conversion.  Now, a spin off of that would be making sure that we get people into discipleship very soon after their arrival at our church. As a newcomer comes into our  church, maybe that newcomer is going to be coming in through a conversion  experience, but it might be something where you know, someone who's drifted  from the faith has come back, or someone who has been quite faithful but lived  someplace else has now moved into our our area, and is now coming to our  church. Well, the sooner we can get people into discipling, the better, whether  it's on the heels of conversion or on the heels of recently coming into the church. And then, of course, our emphasis on obedience based discipleship, and we're  going to navigate all of this at the three levels, the small cell level, the medium  community level, the large congregational level. Now, when you fit all of these  pieces together, what you have is a very proactive approach to to thoroughly  discipling a congregation. So on one hand, we have personal discipling, but  we're going to link that to corporate discipling, and we are going to strive having  taken responsibility for the spiritual. Development of people we're going to we're 

going to take the responsibility of moving them forward into deeper levels of  maturity, deeper levels of service, and ultimately, the one being discipled  becomes a discipler, and that's how we multiply. So that wraps up our video. Our final video in the sense of these skill sets leaving a gospel footprint with  personal and corporate discipling. Now we've got one more video to go, and that will conclude our class. But this final video, we've already covered all 36 skill  topics and all six, all six topics. Oh, my goodness, I forgot. I forgot. I want to  summarize quickly the six, the six skill topics that we talked about. In this case,  let me pop myself back on screen. You will recall we worked our way through life with God, through personal outreach and evangelism, through corporate  outreach and evangelism, we talked about the gospel ask, and now we've just  completed a discussion of personal discipling and corporate discipling. So we've covered all of that ground as part of leaving a gospel footprint. And our final  video session, we will be doing a bit of a wrap up, and we will be talking about  moving from theory to practice. I know that I've laid out an awful lot of theory  over these three dozen videos. Much of what I have shared with you has been  very practical in terms of doing ministry. But you know, we must get off the page  and into the harvest. That's where the action is. So next time, we'll wrap up with  from theory to practice. May God bless you as you are about to complete this  course, and I pray that it will be very meaningful you to you in both your  personal ministry and in your ministry to others in the name of Jesus amen.