Stop Wasting Your Best Disciple-Making on People Who Aren't Ready to Multiply
The 3-question tool I stole from a business book and how it freed me from the guilt of trying to make everyone ready.
Are you weary of investing time, energy, and resources into people who seem excited about making disciples but disappear the first time it requires sacrifice? Or who love learning the principles of disciple-making, but never actually get busy on their mission field and apply them?
👉 Not everyone in your circle is ready for the same investment right now. And not everyone who says “I want to make disciples” actually means it, 💥YET💥.
If you’ve ever poured hours into someone who never moved an inch, or overlooked someone who was quietly hungry for more, you already know the problem. You weren’t lacking effort.
You were lacking a tool to assess THEIR READINESS.
I want to give you the best tool I’ve found to find the most disciple-able people in my disciple-making world. Those who assess ready on this tool become my network’s most effective multipliers of disciples. It’s called GWC — Get It, Want It, Capacity to do it.
I didn’t invent this. I borrowed it and contextualized it, happily and without apology, from Gino Wickman’s book Traction, where he uses it as part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System to evaluate whether someone is right for a role in a business.
The moment I started applying it, I couldn’t unsee its application to disciple-making. If it helps a business owner figure out who belongs in what seat, it can absolutely help a disciple-maker figure out where someone actually is on the disciple-making pathway, and how to appropriately invest in them and coach them to be more effective disciple-makers advancing the best news that ever has been, that Jesus died and rose again, that we might have life to the fullest.
🔥 IT DOESN’T GET ANY MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT!
Three Questions That Change Everything
GWC asks three simple, non-judgmental questions about a person:
Get It — Do they understand the Great Commission not as a verse to quote, but as a lifestyle to live? Have they had the paradigm shift where they see their oikos, the people where they live, learn, work, and play, as an appointed mission field?
Want It — Do they have the will, the urgency, the willingness to pay the cost? Understanding something intellectually and wanting it enough to reorder your life around it are two very different things.
Capacity — Do they have the bandwidth, in this season of life, to engage? A single mom working two jobs may Get It and Want It with everything in her, but simply not have the margin right now. That’s not a spiritual failure. That’s real life.
None of these three questions is about someone’s worth, their salvation, or their spiritual maturity. They’re diagnostic, not judicial. GWC isn’t a tool for ranking people. It’s a tool for being honest about where they are, so you can invest the ❤️🔥 right way, at the ⏰ right time, in the 📐 right measure.
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The Eight Combinations — Read the Map
Once you start asking these three questions honestly, eight combinations emerge. Learn them. They will change how you spend your time.
✔ 3-Stars: Get It + Want It + Capacity = Launch. This is your green light. This person is ready right now to launch an X-Group, lead a Discipling Community, or initiate a movement. Don’t wait for more ideal conditions.
👉 Get with them and go.
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✔ 2-Stars: Get It + Want It, No Capacity = Procrastination. Tread carefully here. What looks like a capacity issue might actually be a priority issue in disguise. Walk with them. Ask honest questions. Help them discern whether life genuinely has no margin or whether busyness has become a convenient place to hide.
👉 Keep investing and keep being honest.
✔ 2-Stars: Get It + Capacity, No Want It = Never Launch. This person understands the mission and has the time, but keeps pulling back from full commitment. This is usually a comfort or cost issue. It doesn’t need a guilt trip; it needs a deeper conversation about counting the cost of following Jesus. This is often your “disciple-teacher,” the person who can talk brilliantly about disciple-making principles but never quite lives the lifestyle.
👉 Pray for the Holy Spirit to light the ❤️🔥 fire!
✔ 2-Stars: Want It + Capacity, No Get It = Disciple First, Disciple-Maker Later. Heart and margin are both there. The vision just hasn’t clicked yet. Your job is investment and modeling. The commission will eventually become their own.
👉 Bring them along, show them what it looks like in real life, give them language and handles.
✔ 1-Star: Want It, No Capacity, No Get It = Theorizing and Dreaming. They love the idea. They just can’t yet translate it into reality. Be patient. Be present.
👉 Keep the vision in front of them, and be ready to move the moment their season shifts quickly.
✔ 1-Star: Capacity, No Want It, No Get It = Busy With No Fruit. This one is sobering. The life looks completely full, but nothing is multiplying. Nothing is reproducing. This person needs a prophetic voice who loves them enough to say plainly: you have capacity for things that aren’t advancing the Kingdom. What would it look like to redirect some of that?
👉 Challenge them with hard questions that catalyze introspection.
✔ 0-Stars: No Get It, No Want It, No Capacity = Not Yet. This is not rejection. Hear that clearly. This is a person who needs consistent, patient, incarnational investment from someone in their oikos, someone who will pray for them, love them, and keep showing up without an agenda.
👉 The timing belongs to God. Your job is faithfulness.
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The Principle That Changes Where You Spend Your Time
Here’s where GWC stops being an interesting framework and starts being a strategy:
😳 More time with fewer people produces greater results.
Since that’s our primary principle in disciple-making, the practical application of GWC is unavoidable: spend most of your time with your 2-star and 3-star people. These are the ones who are Get It and Want It, the ones whose only barrier is capacity, or whose vision just needs sharpening.
💦 Pour into them.
💪 Coach them hard.
🏃♂️Send them out.
This is where multiplication actually happens, and this is where your time produces the greatest Kingdom return.
That does not mean you abandon your 0-star and 1-star people. It means you stop mistaking activity for fruitfulness.
🛑 You stop spreading yourself paper-thin trying to manufacture readiness in someone who isn’t there yet. You keep loving them. You keep praying for them. You keep the door open. But you stop making them the center of your disciple-making strategy, because right now, they aren’t ready to multiply what you give them.
💥 You’re not rejecting your 0- and 1-star people. You’re simply waiting on them.
And that waiting is not passive. Scripture is clear about what usually moves someone from “not yet” to “ready.” Generally, it happens in one of two ways:
through pain and loss
or through the activity of the Holy Spirit.
Sometimes it’s both at once.
a job loss
a health scare
a broken relationship
a wake-up call
These things have a way of stripping away the illusions that kept someone comfortable in spiritual consumerism. And sometimes it’s simply the Spirit doing what only the Spirit can do: opening eyes, softening hearts, creating hunger where there was none.
You cannot manufacture either one.
You cannot rush pain into someone’s life, and you certainly cannot substitute yourself for the Holy Spirit. What you can do is stay present, stay faithful, and be ready to move the moment the door opens.
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Why This Matters More Than It Seems
This isn’t about efficiency for efficiency’s sake. It’s about stewardship. Jesus himself modeled selective, intentional investment
He had crowds
He had seventy-two
He had twelve
He had three
He didn’t pour His limited time equally into everyone who followed Him. He read where people were, and He invested accordingly, all while never writing anyone off.
GWC gives you permission to do the same, without guilt, without guessing, and without wasting years hoping someone’s readiness will simply appear through your sheer effort. It replaces vague frustration (”Why isn’t this person moving?”) with clear diagnosis (”They Get It and Want It, but their capacity really is maxed out right now, let’s walk with them and watch for the season to shift”).
So here’s your assignment.
Take an honest look at your oikos, your Discipling Community, your church. Run the people God has put in front of you through Get It, Want It, Capacity. Find your 2s and 3s, and go all in with them. Keep loving your 0s and 1s, and keep waiting on the Lord to do what only He can do.
This is not rejection.
This is wisdom.
This is the field guide Jesus gave His disciples.
And it still works today.
Beyond the Diagnosis: Why GWC Is a Moving Target, Not a Label
Most people use GWC once, slap a star rating on someone, and file it away like a permanent record. That’s a misuse of the tool. GWC isn’t a label — it’s a snapshot.
📸 And snapshots change.
A 1-star today can be a 3-star in six months. A 3-star can slide back to a 2-star the moment life throws a curveball:
a job loss
a newborn
a season of grief
If you’re not re-assessing regularly, you’re coaching a ghost, not a person.
This is why the tool has to be relational, not administrative. You don’t run GWC on someone from a distance. You discern it with them, in conversation, over time, through the actual context of walking with them in Seeker Group, X-Group, or one-on-one discipling.
The moment GWC becomes a spreadsheet exercise instead of a relational lens, you’ve killed the very thing that made it powerful.
The Coach’s Real Job: Moving the Middle
Here’s where it gets practical.
Your 3-stars don’t need much from you, they need release, not management. Get out of their way and let them lead. Your 0-stars need patience and presence, nothing more. That leaves the real coaching work sitting in the middle: your 2-stars and your 1-stars.
This is where disciple-making actually gets skillful. A 2-star who Gets It and Wants It but lacks Capacity needs a different conversation than a 2-star who Gets It and has Capacity but doesn’t Want It. Collapse those into one generic “keep encouraging them” strategy, and you’ll miss both. The first needs help discerning priorities. The second needs a cost-counting conversation, not a guilt trip.
This is the muscle DMC coaches have to build: reading which combination you’re actually standing in front of and refusing to default to a one-size-fits-all pep talk.
The Holy Spirit Still Runs This
Next-level GWC use also means staying honest about your lane. You can cast vision (Get It). You cannot manufacture desire (Want It) or create bandwidth (Capacity) for someone else; that’s the Spirit’s territory and the disciple’s own responsibility. A coach who tries to do the Spirit’s job burns out fast and produces dependency instead of disciples.
Tie It to the Send
Don’t forget, Jesus sent the Twelve and the Seventy-Two in Luke 9 and 10 before they had it all figured out. GWC isn’t a gate that keeps people from mission until they’re perfect. It’s a lens that tells you how to send someone, not whether. A 2-star still gets sent, just with a different kind of coaching wrapped around them than a 3-star gets.
That’s the next level: GWC is not used as a filing system but as a living, Spirit-attentive, relationally-discerned map that changes how, not whether, you invest.
Yes sir!