How Traditional Churches and Disciple-Making Networks Can Work Together to Fulfill the Great Commission

Three Steps to Embrace the Mission of Jesus Together with the Body of Christ

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Adapted from an Article Written for the June 2026 Issue of the Priority Newsletter of the Missionary Church, USA.

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😳 37 years now 😳

Thirty-seven years in various forms of ministry.

You might say that I’ve tried it all.

• Sunday church services.

• decentralized disciple-making communities.

• marketplace ministry.

• faith-based non-profit and for-profit.

• traditional and contemporary services.

You could certainly call me a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. But if there is one thing I’ve mastered in almost four decades of service, it’s flexibility. In other words, my experience has trained me to partner with Jesus’ Great Commission in each of those ministry contexts.

That must have blossomed from the proverbial ”School of Hard Knocks.” Raised in a community of cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents in rural Alabama, I only attended church for the occasional wedding or funeral. And that was often in the extravagant Catholic cathedral in our German-influenced closest “big city.”

Church, for me, was inaccessible amid financial, relational, and spiritual challenges.

Although I lived in the buckle of the Bible belt, I didn’t know the language or the stories. Once, when I was around 11 years old, a neighbor picked me up for VBS. The teacher asked my friend John Haynes (I still remember his name) to share how he was “saved” in the church parking lot. All I could imagine was John being pushed from in front of a moving car. For a couple of years, I thought I would only be ready for heaven when something happened that physically saved my life.

Give me a break, I was only 11!

And then at 15, I got it good. I embraced the only answer to my deepest need, Jesus Christ. I never turned back! I was mesmerized by this person who gave me incredible hope. But my new life of faith didn’t mean that I understood or “fit in” with the other half of the folks in my neighborhood who understood the Sunday culture. They would spout off big Bible words as if they were household knowledge. I felt like I had arrived at a movie an hour late.

Obviously, I caught up over the years (mostly), and I love a great sermon or seminary-level Bible class. But I also understand why there is a chasm between the Sunday gathering and the rest of culture.

The week after I moved to Spring Hill, Tennessee, I went to lunch with a Christian co-worker and asked about the town’s spiritual climate. He looked up and said, “Oh, everybody in Spring Hill goes to church.” The very next week, I went with another guy, who answered the same question with, “Oh, no one goes to church in Spring Hill.”

🤯 Seven days apart, same restaurant, same company, perfectly opposite perspectives.

Why? Because, just like that gap in my childhood experience, there is a chasm between our Sunday church culture and the uninterested “nones.”

As missionaries in the places we live, learn, work, and play, we must recognize that the river is too wide in our current culture for those far from God to jump. We must discover how to drop one stone at a time and see who hops on. And when they do, drop the next stone.

Drop ➠ wait ➠ repeat ➠ drop ➠ wait ➠ repeat.

Until our friends, co-workers, and neighbors make it to the other side and embrace the Savior who is waiting for them.

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How Do We Do This?

How do we, as missionaries, equip Joe and Mary to drop stones and bridge gaps?

And more importantly, how do we model for our people to do the same despite the differences we carry in how we prefer to experience “church”?

Step #1: Embrace the actual GREAT COMMISSION, not only some form of it.

We all read the Great Commission through the filter of our ministry experience. We often think, “How do we do this through worship, teaching, and pastoral care?”

Or, in Simple Church settings, we are always looking for the silver-bullet tool to accomplish this.

Those are not bad things; it is actually good stewardship to think of the commission in the context of our comfort zones. But the problem is that we often limit the command to those obvious places and tools and fail to bridge the gap between the contexts all around us.

🚫 That’s not at the heart of the Great Commission 🚫

Jesus didn’t point to a form of ministry, but a set of ministry behaviors. He didn’t tell us WHERE to make disciples or even HOW. He didn’t tell us to “plant a launch-large church.” And He didn’t tell us to start a “simple church” or “micro-church.” He didn’t tell us to move overseas or to start a Bible study at our workplace. He knew if He gave us a form to build, the form would be the focus.

🔥 Instead, he told us WHAT to do.

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“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age”

- JESUS in Matt. 28:19-20

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WHAT NOT WHERE

In order to bridge the gap for that co-worker at lunch, we must be about the BEHAVIORS of making disciples in whatever FORM God assigns us to. And we must equip and train others to do the same. Making disciples is the command. The place and method we use to do that is simply the context.

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Step #2: Activate both disciple-SHIP and disciple-MAKING in your faith community

We have used discipleship and disciple-making as if they were the same word with the same meaning. They are not. They are related. They are both critical to walking like Jesus, but they are not the same.

✔︎ Here’s the clearest way I know to draw the line:

• Discipleship is primarily inward.

• Disciple-making is primarily outward.

• Discipleship is the process of sanctification.

• Disciple-making is the process of multiplication.

The suffix, “-ship” changes the meaning of a word to reflect the “act or state of being.” So, in other words, discipleship is the act or state of BEING a disciple. Of course, making disciples first requires one to BE a disciple, so it is a critical part of becoming a disciple-maker.

We have taught people that once they get their disciple-ship right, once they have grown enough, read enough, matured enough, gotten enough of their stuff together, THEN they will be ready to make disciples. That is not the Jesus model. Of course, there was teaching and training as they journeyed together, but they assisted in the ministry of Jesus as they grew toward readiness to be sent.

Jesus called His disciples while they were still in process.

✔ Simon Peter had an anger problem.

✔ Thomas had a doubt problem.

✔ The Sons of Thunder had a power problem.

These were not polished, put-together spiritual giants. These were works in progress.

• Just like you.

• Just like me.

And Jesus sent them out to make disciples anyway. Before they had it all figured out. Before they fully understood the resurrection. He sent them on mission in the middle of their own growth journey.

💥 The closest person to those on the other side of the river is the one who has most recently become a follower of Jesus 💥

Discipleship and disciple-making are not sequential.

They are simultaneous. That’s a game-changer. You do not graduate from discipleship into disciple-making. You grow in both at the same time. Don’t wait for a perfect disciple before you send them to the mission field in the places where they live, learn, work, and play.

Step #3: Provide a pathway to make disciples in their mission field

We can preach the Great Commission in our congregation churches and disciple-making hubs, put it on the wall, write it in our vision statement, and still have a community full of people who have no idea how to actually do it.

Intention without a pathway is just inspiration. And inspiration, without direction, creates great disciple-teachers, but not true disciple-makers.

We believe in disciple-making. We celebrate it in theory. But when the one among us who genuinely wants to reach a neighbor, co-worker, or college roommate asks how to actually do this, the answer they get can be too complicated, too institutional, or too vague to act on.

Jesus gave His disciples a pathway by walking with them. He modeled the conversations. He formed the small group. He created the community. And then in Luke 9 and 10, He sent the 12 and then the 72 to simply do what He already modeled for them on the road and in the villages.

That’s the pattern.

And it STILL works.

What your faith community needs isn’t another program. It needs a clear, reproducible, Jesus-patterned pathway that anyone, not just the spiritually gifted few, can follow in the places where they already live, learn, work, and play.

🚫 That’s not a strategy.

🟢 That’s a movement.

And it starts when we model a set of behaviors for them.

Have you and your co-laborers spent the time and energy to model behaviors that work in your context and equip your people to follow the model of Jesus and to incarnate themselves in their workplaces and neighborhoods to bridge the gap?

Conclusion

👉 Here’s what I’ve learned after almost four decades of watching what works and what doesn’t.

The river is too wide to jump. You cannot get the guy who told me “no one goes to church in Spring Hill” from where he stands to where Jesus is waiting in one giant leap. The gap is too wide, the credibility is too thin, and the discomfort is too real for that to work. But you can drop a stone. And you can do that whether you worship in a building or a coffee shop.

The river between two guys eating lunch at the same restaurant seven days apart is not an obstacle to multiplication, but an opportunity for mission. Not a mission to build a bridge for people to admire, but a mission to drop stones for people to navigate the gap.

And that’s the movement we’re after.

Let’s work together in every ministry and mission context to embrace the behaviors of the Great Commission and not cling tightly to the forms of ministry that are most comfortable to us. No matter the context, let’s lock arms and commit fully to the work of Loving Like Jesus and Living Like Missionaries.

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