Who Can Be a Disciple? Who Can Make a Disciple?
Chapter 3 from my Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers
Welcome to Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers
When you picture a disciple-maker, the kind of person who walks with others toward Jesus, who builds into people’s spiritual lives, who actually multiplies the Kingdom in the places where they live, learn, work, and play, what do they look like?
How do you know if, and when, someone is qualified to be a disciple-maker?
Now, I remind you that I am not talking about someone walking in their own internal disciple-SHIP pathway; I’m talking about one who is fully committed to walking with someone else on their journey toward Jesus.
Does the disciple-maker have a seminary degree?
Do they know Greek?
Do they preach well?
Are they the kind of person who has a gift for public speaking and a way with words that makes a room go quiet?
Have they been in ministry for twenty years?
Do they have a title in front of their name or letters behind it?
If you checked any of those proverbial boxes and the person you imagined looks more like a pastor than a plumber, more like a theologian than a middle school teacher, more like a professional than an ordinary person living an ordinary life, then let’s talk. Because the assumptions we carry about who qualifies to make disciples are quietly slowing down the Jesus movement. And those assumptions are not coming from Scripture.
They are coming from a system we built.
🧱 And it is time to dismantle them, brick by brick 🧱
The Qualification Problem
Here is what most of us were taught, either explicitly in a class or implicitly by watching how things work in most legacy churches: ministry belongs to the professionals.
The pastor makes disciples.
The youth leader makes disciples.
The one who grew up in church and has read the whole Bible more than once makes disciples.
The person with the platform, the microphone, the title, and the theological training, that’s the disciple-maker. Everyone else is the audience and plays supportive roles, and invites the crowd to worship services, and takes up offerings, or parks cars.
When you internalize that long enough, a particular kind of paralysis sets in. You start to genuinely, sincerely believe that you are not qualified. That you haven’t arrived yet. That you need one more class, one more year of spiritual growth, one more confirmation from a leader you respect before you can step into the Great Commission.
I have watched this happen over and over again. Men and women who are deeply in love with Jesus, who carry a genuine burden for the people in their oikos, who feel the tug of the Holy Spirit toward missional living, and who are sitting still. Waiting for a green light that is never coming. Because they’ve been told, in a hundred different subtle ways, that someone more qualified is supposed to do this.
Let me say this as clearly as I can. That is not what Jesus taught. That is not what Jesus modeled. And that is not who Jesus chose to do the significant work of launching the movement He founded two thousand years ago.
The Least Likely Led the Charge
When Jesus launched the most impactful and world-wide transformational movement in human history, He had options. He had a lot of them. Historians estimate that at the height of His ministry, Jesus had access to somewhere around six to eight million Jews in the Roman Empire.
Conservatively, six million people who shared His heritage, His Scripture. And from those millions, He could have hand-selected the finest theological minds of His generation. He could have recruited the graduates of the best rabbinical schools in Jerusalem. He could have gone straight to the scholars and the Pharisees, who already knew the text inside and out, and to the priests who held positions of religious authority. He could have even picked from the 70-ish most qualified religious leaders of his time from the Sanhedrin.
💥 He Didn’t 💥
Read that slowly.
He. Did. Not.
🐠 He walked to the water’s edge, where rough-handed fishermen were doing the less-than-glamorous work of sorting fish and mending nets, and He called them to follow Him. The unclean fisherman who touched dead fish every day and couldn’t show up at temple without cleansing rituals.
💰 He showed up at a tax collector’s booth, the desk of a man most respectable Jewish society considered a traitor and a thief, and He said, “Come with me.” And then He threw a party with all his friends!
⚔️ He recruited Zealots with violent political agendas. He called Simon Peter, who would later, at a campfire on the worst night of his life, swear up and down that he never knew the man.
Most of these guys had probably been rejected from advanced rabbinical study. In the Jewish education system of the first century, young boys who demonstrated exceptional promise were invited to continue in the study of Torah under a rabbi. Those who didn’t make the cut, even as young teenagers, went home and helped with their family business or learned a trade. They became fishermen, tax collectors, and craftsmen. They went back to ordinary life.
❤️🔥 And Jesus walked right past the elite and chose the rejects.
The movement that would turn the known world upside down within a couple of generations did not launch from the most credentialed, respected, and powerful people in the room. It launched from unclean fishermen and social outcasts. It launched with flawed, impulsive, sometimes cowardly human beings who had one thing in common: they said “YES!” to following Jesus.
👉 So, when you sit quietly in those pews and think you’re not qualified enough, not educated enough, not spiritually mature enough to make disciples, I want you to hear this clearly: Jesus is not asking for your résumé. He is asking for your obedience.
Enjoy the first half of Chapter 3 and get the rest at myhandtotheplow.com.
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The Rabbi and the Talmidim: What “Follow Me” Actually Meant
To understand who can be a disciple and who can make one, you need to understand something about how discipleship actually worked in the world Jesus lived in.
In first-century Jewish culture, the rabbi was the advanced-level teacher. The talmidim were his students. But the relationship was not primarily academic. It was not a lecture or a test. It was not a curriculum completed in a classroom. The talmidim FOLLOWED their rabbi, literally and everywhere.
They watched how he prayed.
They observed how he treated people.
They saw him when he was tired.
They heard how he handled conflict, navigated difficult conversations, and responded when things went sideways.
The goal of a talmid was not to master the rabbi’s content. The goal was to become LIKE the rabbi. They “walked in His dust,” as one of my favorite teachers, Ray Vander Laan says. This is a phrase taken from ancient Jewish instruction, which said a student should walk so closely behind his rabbi that the dust the teacher’s sandals kicked up would settle on the student’s own clothes. That was the aspiration. Get close enough to be marked by the life of your teacher.
And then, the rabbi’s ultimate act of investment was to look at his students and say, “I believe you can do what I do.” The greatest affirmation a rabbi could give was to release a talmid with the authority and the responsibility to go and make their own disciples.
🚶🚶♀️🚶🏽♂️“Come, follow me,” Jesus said. 🚶🏽♂️🚶♀️🚶
Three words.
But they were not an invitation to a class. They were an invitation into a life. They were a declaration. Walk with me, watch me, do what I do, and eventually lead others to do the same. “Follow Me!”
✔ That is the model.
And notice what is not in the model. You will not find a degree, a platform, a building, or a budget. What is in the model is proximity, obedience, and the willingness to be shaped by the life of the one walking ahead of you.
Now, here is the question that matters to you and me.
❓If that is what Jesus meant by “follow me,” then who can step into that call❓
Every single one of us.
🚫 Not someday.
🟢 Now.
Discipleship and Disciple-Making Are Not Sequential
Here is one of the most liberating truths in this entire book: you do not graduate from being a disciple into making disciples. You grow in both at the same time. Read that again, because I know some of you are already building a case against it.
I am not saying that brand-new followers of Jesus should immediately attempt to teach a theology class or lead a missional community. What I am saying is this: the moment you begin following Jesus, you are equipped to invite someone else to start the same journey alongside you. You don’t need a complete map to be a guide. You just need to be a few steps further down the trail.
Jesus himself illustrated this when He sent the twelve on mission in Luke 9, and then the seventy-two in Luke 10, before they fully understood who He was and before they had witnessed the resurrection.
He sent them in the middle of their own growth journey. He sent them incomplete and in process and still making mistakes.
And they went.
And things happened.
And they came back having seen the Kingdom move.
Once again, Paul put it plainly to his young disciple Timothy:
“And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others”
2 Timothy 2:2
As I said early in the book, this is four generations of disciple-making embedded in a single sentence, and it was written by a man who simultaneously had a thorn in the flesh, relational conflict with Barnabas, and a long list of personal struggles he was working through in real time.
Paul was not finished growing when he wrote that. He never finished growing. And neither will you. That is not the standard Jesus set. The standard is faithfulness, not perfection.
🛑 So, stop waiting 🛑
The green light Jesus gave at the utterance of the Great Commission has not expired. The moment you surrender your life to Jesus is the moment you are called into the work of helping others do the same!
So Let’s Go!