What Am I Supposed to do When No One Wants to Make Disciples?

When someone proposed this scenario, my gut response was “join the club.”

I came up in an era of church programming. I attended a program-oriented Bible college then jumped into the Navigator/Campus Crusade stream. We made disciples who made disciples.

Mostly, whatever success we knew came because of awarding disciple-making a high priority after our relationship with God and then our families. God, family, disciple-making, and then church stuff fell in that order.

However, we were soon out of step with the big-C church. Post Jesus Revolution megachurches became the rage (many were born in that spiritual awakening but forsook their roots). By rage I mean that fewer than 10 percent were even considered “small mega” with a thousand or more people while most of the other 90 percent of church leaders coveted their grandeur.

It got harder to find folks interested in the process of living in a deep relationship with a few disciples. I was a cultural outsider. This was especially true because it seemed easier to formulize the process into a few quick lessons following a basic marketing campaign to attract the attractable.

So, what to do when no one else engages? Worse, when the church world thinks you’re a little wonky? The answer is simple, and you’ll even find it in scripture…

Make disciples. Teach others what you learned and teach them to teach the same to others who will repeat the process.

But what if no one is interested, you may ask?

Find an engage-able person and begin with them, even if they don’t yet know Jesus. Make a friend. This may be a promising young leader or a proclaimed atheist willing to put time into an argument. Perhaps you know someone who is merely lonely and susceptible to friendship. The answer to the problem is to make a disciple and go from there.

In a church setting, leaders are either hungry for anything appearing successful or put off if it threatens their comfort. Whatever the case, you making a disciple who makes a disciple will draw attention and someone else is sure to show interest. If no one seems to care, keep the stream flowing and it will grow as new people get added to the mix.

My advice is always (read that ALWAYS) start in a corner with no more than two or three. Do not make it a program or invite wholesale numbers to participate—partly because you may get depressed by lack of response and partly because a large response would dilute the fellowship so often missing in disciple-making attempts.

Finally, remember that you needn’t be too successful at whatever you do currently to attempt this. Jesus left the great task of disciple-making to eleven guys, some of whom still doubted his resurrection if I read Matthew 28:17 correctly.

A friend once told me that “beginning is half done,” not bad insight.