Disciples Make Disciples: But What Are We Making?
“Disciples make disciples” is one of those Christian phrases that is difficult to argue with because there is something obviously true behind it. Jesus commanded His followers to make disciples. The gospel was never supposed to stop with the people who first received it. Christians proclaim Christ, teach others, raise children in the faith, strengthen younger believers, and pass what they have learned to the next generation. Paul told Timothy to entrust what he had received to faithful people who would be able to teach others also. Christianity is supposed to spread.
The trouble begins when a useful summary quietly becomes a definition. A disciple makes disciples; therefore, if you are really a disciple, you should be making another disciple. If you are not currently discipling someone, something must be wrong with your discipleship. Before long, disciple-making becomes another measure of spiritual productivity: Who are you discipling? How many people have you discipled? Are your disciples making disciples yet?
That raises a problem that is often overlooked: what exactly counts as making a disciple? Suppose I invite a coworker to church and he comes. Have I made one? Perhaps he returns the following Sunday and eventually professes faith in Christ. Does that settle it? What if someone else had been sharing the gospel with him for five years before I met him? What if the sermon he heard at church was the first time the gospel finally made sense to him? What if another Christian spends the next ten years teaching him Scripture while I barely see him again? Claiming that I “made a disciple” becomes considerably more difficult once we look closely at everything involved.
We can make the definition as easy as necessary if our spirituality depends upon producing one. Get somebody through the church doors, get someone to repeat a prayer, complete a discipleship curriculum together, or meet for coffee every Tuesday for three months. At some point we declare the process complete, put a check beside make a disciple, and start looking for the next one. Before deciding whether we have accomplished the task, however, we should first determine what Jesus meant by a disciple and what He meant when He commanded His followers to make them.
What Is a Disciple?
The word disciple fundamentally describes a learner or follower. In the New Testament, Christian discipleship is centered upon Jesus. A Christian disciple is not primarily the disciple of the person who evangelized him, the pastor who teaches him, the author whose books helped him, or the Christian who meets him for coffee every week. He is a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Jesus describes His disciples in terms considerably richer than their ability to recruit another person. He tells those who had believed Him:
“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.”
— John 8:31
Later He tells His disciples:
“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
— John 13:35
In Luke 14, Jesus describes discipleship in the demanding language of allegiance. No competing relationship can take precedence over Him, and the disciple must bear his cross and follow Him. Discipleship concerns whom we follow, whose teaching we receive, and to whom our allegiance belongs.
None of this means disciples have no concern for making other disciples. They certainly should. It does mean that making another disciple is not what makes someone a disciple. Otherwise the definition becomes circular. A disciple is someone who makes disciples, who are themselves people who make disciples, who then make still more disciples. We can build an impressive multiplication chart without ever explaining what these people are actually being multiplied into. The purpose of Christian disciple-making is not to produce recruiters who produce more recruiters. It is to make followers of Jesus Christ.
What Does It Mean to Make a Disciple?
The Great Commission is usually where the phrase “disciples make disciples” begins, and rightly so. But it is worth reading beyond those two words:
“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.’”
— Matthew 28:18–20
Jesus does not merely command the making of disciples. He describes what that mission involves. The nations are to be brought under His authority, baptized in the triune name, and taught to observe all that He commanded.
Those final words deserve considerable attention. Jesus did not say merely to tell disciples that He had commands or even merely to tell them what those commands were. He commanded His apostles to teach disciples to observe them. Christian teaching therefore aims at more than transferring information. A disciple is being taught to understand the teaching of his Master and to live accordingly.
Disciple-making is consequently much larger than getting someone to attend church or make a profession of faith. Evangelism is essential to making disciples, but conversion is the beginning of Christian discipleship rather than its completion. Someone who has come to Christ has begun a lifetime of learning to follow Christ. If we are going to teach that person to observe what Christ has commanded, we must also equip him to understand what Christ has commanded.
You Cannot Obey What You Cannot Understand
We know the teaching of Christ through Scripture, which means disciple-making necessarily involves helping people understand Scripture. Simply placing a Bible in someone's hands and telling him to “read it and do what it says” does not solve the problem.
Imagine that a new disciple takes that instruction seriously. He begins reading and eventually reaches Leviticus:
“When any one of you brings an offering to the LORD, you shall bring your offering of livestock from the herd or from the flock.”
— Leviticus 1:2
He wants to obey God. Should he buy a bull?
Christians immediately know that the answer is no. We do not offer animal sacrifices. Yet an enormous amount of biblical understanding stands behind that simple answer. Leviticus really is Scripture. God really did command those sacrifices. We cannot resolve the difficulty by pretending the passage no longer matters or by telling Christians to obey the New Testament and ignore the Old. We need to understand who received the command, the covenant under which it was given, the function of sacrifice within that covenant, the relationship between the Old and New Covenants, and the fulfillment of the sacrificial system in the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ.
A disciple therefore needs more than the correct conclusion; he needs to understand how that conclusion was reached. Telling him, “You don't have to offer sacrifices because Jesus fulfilled them,” may give him the correct answer to this particular question, but tomorrow he will encounter another passage and then another. Eventually he will encounter a passage on which Christians disagree. He will hear a preacher interpret it one way, read an author who interprets it another way, and find someone online confidently announcing a third interpretation. If we have only given him our interpretations, we have made him dependent upon us. If we have equipped him to examine Scripture faithfully, we have helped him mature as a follower of Christ.
Give Them the Tools
Disciple-making therefore cannot consist merely of handing people a collection of theological conclusions. We should certainly teach doctrine. Christianity has actual content, and truth must be taught. Paul did not tell Timothy to encourage everyone to discover whatever Christianity meant to them. Timothy had received apostolic teaching that was to be guarded and faithfully transmitted. Mature Christian teaching, however, should include more than what we believe. It should help people understand why we believe it and how Scripture leads us there.
That requires giving ordinary Christians basic tools for reading Scripture responsibly. They should learn to consider context: who is speaking, who is being addressed, what situation is being discussed, and how the surrounding argument controls the meaning of an individual verse. They should recognize that poetry communicates differently from historical narrative, that a proverb functions differently from an epistle, and that apocalyptic imagery should not automatically be read as though it were a newspaper report. They need to recognize figures of speech without turning everything inconvenient into a metaphor, distinguish descriptions of what happened from commands concerning what Christians should do, and use cross-references without assembling unrelated phrases from across the Bible into a meaning no biblical author intended.
They also need to understand the difference between interpretation and application. A biblical text does not acquire a new meaning every time a different person reads it. We first seek to understand what the author communicated in his context. Only then can we responsibly ask how that truth applies to us. They need enough understanding of the Bible's unfolding story to recognize why God's Word remains God's Word without every command being directly addressed to every Christian in precisely the same way. Without those tools, “obey the Bible” can become either impossible or dangerously subjective.
None of this requires turning every Christian into an academic specialist. It simply recognizes that Christians are people governed by a book and therefore need to know how to read that book. Good discipleship does not merely give people biblical answers. It equips them to read Scripture, understand why those answers are true, and apply what they have understood faithfully.
This changes the relationship between the teacher and the disciple. Instead of simply saying, “Here is what this passage means,” we can open the text together and ask how we know. We can examine the paragraph, follow the argument, identify the audience, consider the genre, determine what the author intended to communicate, see how the passage fits within the rest of Scripture, and then ask what faithful application looks like. As the disciple grows, he increasingly learns to perform that work without waiting for someone else to supply every conclusion. That is not independence from the church or freedom from teachers. It is Christian maturity.
We Are Not Making Disciples of Ourselves
One danger in discipleship receives considerably less attention than failure to multiply: we can become very good at reproducing ourselves. It is possible to teach someone our doctrinal system, favorite teachers, political conclusions, denominational distinctives, preferred Christian vocabulary, and interpretations of every controversial passage we can think of until that person sounds remarkably like us. That does not necessarily mean we have taught him to handle Scripture.
Someone who has been equipped to read Scripture should eventually be capable of examining our teaching as well. There may come a day when a person we have taught opens his Bible, examines something we told him, and concludes that we were wrong. His conclusion may itself be wrong, and we may need to work through the passage together, but his willingness to test our teaching against Scripture is not a rebellion against discipleship. It demonstrates that he understands whose disciple he actually is: he belongs to Christ, not to us.
The goal is therefore not to create someone who needs our interpretation before he can understand his Bible. We want to help equip followers of Jesus who remain teachable, participate in the life of Christ's church, receive instruction from others, and increasingly become capable of examining Scripture responsibly themselves. Christian maturity does not mean graduating from teachers or becoming independent of the church. The same New Testament that commands disciple-making gives the church pastors and teachers and repeatedly describes believers teaching, encouraging, correcting, and serving one another. Members of that body, however, are expected to grow rather than remain permanently helpless whenever they encounter a passage nobody has explained to them.
Who Actually Made the Disciple?
Understanding disciple-making this way also corrects the temptation to use other people as evidence of our own spirituality. Paul encountered a related problem in Corinth, where Christians were attaching themselves to particular teachers. His response radically decentered the human minister:
“What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”
— 1 Corinthians 3:5–6
Paul planted and Apollos watered. Their contributions were real and necessary, and God genuinely used both men. Yet neither man could claim ultimate responsibility for what resulted because God gave the growth.
The same pattern makes it remarkably difficult to place another Christian on the table as a spiritual trophy and announce, “I made this disciple.” One Christian may first share the gospel with a man. Another may answer questions that have kept him from believing. Someone else invites him into the life of a local church. A pastor teaches him week after week. Older believers model Christian maturity. Friends encourage him when he struggles and correct him when he sins. Another believer teaches him how to study Scripture. Over the years he begins serving others with whatever gifts God has given him.
Asking which one of those Christians gets to count him misunderstands what happened. Many members of Christ's body participated in making a disciple of Jesus Christ, and God gave the growth.
That corporate reality does not erase individual responsibility. Paul planted. Apollos watered. Christians actually have work to do. We proclaim the gospel, teach Scripture, encourage one another, raise our children in the faith, correct error, model obedience, support the spread of the gospel, and use our gifts for the building up of Christ's body. What we cannot do is manufacture spiritual growth in another person.
A faithful Christian may proclaim Christ repeatedly and see no conversion. A teacher may carefully explain Scripture to someone who refuses to obey it. A parent may spend decades teaching a child who eventually rejects the faith. If personally producing a disciple becomes the necessary evidence that someone is himself a genuine disciple, we have made his faithfulness dependent upon an outcome he cannot control. Scripture instead calls us to faithfulness in the work Christ has given us while recognizing that the resulting growth belongs to God.
Multiplication Without the Scorecard
Paul's instruction to Timothy shows that multiplication itself is thoroughly biblical:
“and what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.”
— 2 Timothy 2:2
Paul taught Timothy. Timothy was to entrust that teaching to faithful people, and those people were to become capable of teaching still others. There is genuine multiplication here, but what makes that multiplication possible is that people are being equipped to teach.
Paul is not describing a spiritual pyramid in which every Christian needs someone underneath him so that he can prove he has successfully reproduced. He is concerned with the faithful transmission of truth. What Timothy received must not terminate with Timothy. Others must become capable of handling and teaching it faithfully.
Good disciple-making should produce precisely that kind of maturity. We teach people the gospel and the Scriptures. We show them how to read carefully rather than merely handing them our conclusions. We help them understand how interpretation leads to application and how application leads to obedience. We model submission to Christ while recognizing that our own interpretations remain subject to correction by His Word. In time, those believers possess tools they can use while sitting beside someone else with an open Bible.
Multiplication has occurred, but not because we began with a quota or because somebody needed another name on a discipleship chart. It occurred because an equipped disciple became capable of equipping another.
Teaching Them to Observe
Making disciples does not require us to begin by searching the church lobby for someone willing to become our disciple. It can begin much more naturally by opening Scripture with the people God has already placed around us. When someone asks what a passage means, we can do more than supply an answer. We can show how we reached it, ask questions that direct attention back to the text, explain why context matters, and demonstrate what changes when a verse is read within its paragraph rather than in isolation. When we encounter something difficult, we do not need to pretend the answer is obvious. We can work through it together, and when we do not know, we can admit that and demonstrate how to investigate the question responsibly.
The purpose is not merely to produce competent Bible interpreters. Biblical interpretation serves discipleship because disciples follow Christ. We want Christians who can understand their Master's teaching so that they can live according to it. Jesus commanded His followers to make disciples by teaching them to observe all that He commanded, and that necessarily means giving them the tools to read, understand, and apply the Scriptures through which they know His teaching.
That causal connection is important enough that the entire Read It Again study on this site is available free. It is devoted to the practical work of learning how to read, understand, and apply Scripture faithfully—not by supplying an interpretation for every passage, but by providing tools Christians can continue using when no teacher is standing beside them. Working through those principles with another person and then using them together while reading an actual book of the Bible is itself a practical form of disciple-making. Instead of merely telling someone what a passage means, we can teach him how to determine why it means what it means and how to move responsibly from interpretation to application and obedience.
Eventually, that disciple becomes capable of sitting beside someone else with an open Bible and doing the same thing. The multiplication was never the definition of his discipleship or the proof of his spirituality. It is the natural result of a follower of Christ becoming equipped to help another person understand and follow Christ.
In that proper sense, disciples really do make disciples.