5 Steps To Reproducing Disciples

Jeff Vanderstelt

An edited transcript of a message given at the Verge Conference

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God’s Creation Mandate In the very beginning of Genesis God says, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." He says, "Every plant that I make has the ability to throw off seeds and multiply. Every animal has the ability to reproduce after its own kind, and man and woman are also supposed to do the same thing."

God's intent, in his creation mandate was to fill the earth with his glory through his image bearers. That's his intent. As a result of rebellion God sent his son to be the perfect image bearer, the image of God in physical form.

And now we his body, the church, are sent by Jesus to be recreated image bearers who display the glory of God to the ends of the earth, so that the earth would be filled with the glory of the Lord. That's our call, and that requires reproduction.

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Adjust Your Metrics In fact, I would ask us, "What are the primary metrics we're using to determine whether or not we are being faithful to Jesus' command for the church?" If you don't rethink your metrics, you won't reorder your behaviors.

If your metrics are primarily attendance and church size, you don't have reproduction at the heart of what you're doing. Reproduction, if that was at the heart, you would say, "How many disciples are making disciples? How many people are being sent? How many people are being released to new places?" That's the stuff we'd start to measure.

Step 1: Keep It Simple So, how do we do this? How do we create a reproducing culture in the church? First of all, keep it simple. When you think about the picture of reproduction throughout all of creation it starts with a simple cell. Okay, you've got a seed. Trees don't reproduce trees. They produce fruit

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that fall that have seeds in them, and then seeds grow up to reproduce trees.

One of the mistakes we made at Soma was that we thought that we were supposed to reproduce structures. Now let's have missional communities multiply and create more missional communities, and we made our goal multiplication of missional communities instead of our goal multiplication of disciples.

If you want to be a church-planting church, you're all ready starting in the wrong place. You should be a disciple making church, and let churches come out of disciples who know how to make disciples. We aren't reproducing structures. We're reproducing at the most simple form. We're sharing the Gospel and we're seeing disciples formed in Christ's likeness.

I had a couple that came into our missional community via our cookouts. In the summer, we do weekly cookouts and Doug and Ashley just started hanging out with us.

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They were living together at the time, and they asked if I would start to help them think through what it might look like to be married. They heard that if you do pre-engagement counseling, or pre-marriage counseling, it'll help you have a great marriage.

So, I started to meet with them, and the very first session I said, "I want to talk to you about God's intent. God's intent in marriage is that you would tell the story of what God is like and what God is doing. So, your marriage is to be a picture of what God's like and it's to tell the story of how he loves the church through Christ laying down his life for her. That is the reason you get married."

They stopped, and I went through Genesis 1, 2 and 3 to show them that and Ephesians, and when I did that, they stopped and said, "We've never heard anybody ever tell us that marriage was about Jesus." They said, "We kind of grew up in the church. We kind of walked away." And I said, "Well, I want to let you know, everything is about Jesus." And so, I started walking through all the stories

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of the Bible, and they said, "We've been having a lot of troubles in our relationship, because we don't agree on the Bible in a lot of places, but what you just said, if it's all about Jesus, then we could actually come to unity about Jesus instead of all the arguments over every text."

What was I doing? I was doing what we're supposed to do. Get it back to the fundamental point. Simplify it. I'll tell you, I watch a lot of people and their disciple making techniques. They make it more complex so that almost nobody can do it.

And I wonder if it's a subtle form of narcissism, saying, if you have higher spiritual knowledge and more degrees behind your name, you are more spiritually accepted before God. But in reality, God loves you to be like a little child who simply walks by faith and loves Jesus and wants to obey him. Listen to Jesus' s call, "Come follow me. I'll make you fishers of men." Pretty simple. Pretty simple. Keep it simple.

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Step 2: Keep It Transferable Keep it transferable. You know, reproduction in some ways is almost like a virus. It could just start to spread. Jesus talks about the kingdom of God like yeast. And what we often do is we often try to have an epidemic and not a pandemic. An epidemic is when a disease can transfer from one like body to another like body. A pandemic is when it could transfer from one body to another entirely different kind of body. That was what Aids was. It went from animals to humans.

Well, the Gospel should be that way. It should not be locked into a particular system that can only be done with upper-middle class white people, or African-American urban, or whatever. It needs to transfer to every people group, to every part of the world.

When we started Soma we said, "Whatever we do, we must do it in such a way that if we've been with people long enough they could go to any part of the world and do the very same things we taught them. They don't need

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our buildings. They don't need our programming. They don't need our team. They don't need our staff. They should be able to do it without us." So keep it transferable.

I was with a bunch of guys the other day. We were talking about a curriculum that's being developed to help people multiply disciples and partway through it I said, "Can I just ask you a question? Did you write this for upper-middle class, highly educated people? Because my guess is if you can't read, you can't use this stuff." And everybody's like, "Whoa!" One of the guys said, "I'm working in inner city, but the majority of people I'm working with can't read. I can't even use this stuff in my own context." I said, "Yeah, you need to understand 65% of the country has a preferred style of learning, non-literate learning. They're not going to read."

So if all we do is go, "Let's write another curriculum to make disciples more effectively," guess what? They're not gonna get it and they're not gonna transfer it. When was

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the last time you, just for a little test, read a book and walked away after reading the book and went, "I can probably tell someone everything that's in that book now." You can't. You have to give them the book. But, we're not about giving books. We're about giving our lives.

So, if it can't be given through your life, it's not transferable. So wrestle through that in the way you do reproduction. Say, "Have we given somebody something that they can just on the street give to someone else?" And if they can't just give it to someone else on the street, it's not transferable.

Step 3: Sow The Seeds of Multiplication Into Everything Third. Do it in a continual manner. Another way I'd like to say this is, "You're always sowing the seeds of multiplication into everything."

Regularly I tell my son Caleb, "Hey buddy, one day you're going to be leading your own home." Now he's eight now,

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but I've been telling him this since he was about three or four.

I heard someone tweet yesterday like, "I would hate to have Jeff as my Dad." I don't know who said that. But I told him, I remember we were praying and he said, "Dad, I don't want to pray." We do bedtime prayer. "I don't want to pray." And I said, "Son, I just want to remind you someday you're gonna have to teach your son and your daughter how to pray." And see, the way I look at my kids is I'm not raising kids. I'm raising adults. I'm not teaching them how to be a kid. I'm training them to be an adult. And in the church, we're not raising converts. We're making disciples.

And so, when I first met my friend Clay, he was not yet a believer. Very early on I knew that everything I was doing with him he was going to have to learn to do with someone else. So I knew from the moment my relationship began with him, I was discipling him in how to make a disciple. I wasn't just getting him to Jesus, I was

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showing him what life looks like with Jesus. And so, the whole time I'm very mindful, I'm an example to him of what it means to be a disciple maker. When I would have a conversation with another person about Christ, I wanted Clay to watch it, not even a believer yet, but I'm like, "Someday, you're gonna do this."

I remember the conversation he and I had in the car one day, I said, "Hey, brother. I don't know if you're ever gonna believe what I'm telling you, but when you do, you're gonna do the same things I'm doing." You see, I'm not as concerned. I wasn't concerned about Clay just being a convert. I'm training him how to be a disciple maker even before he believes.

And it was amazing when he came to faith. He said, "Jeff, can we meet at the community garden?" We hung out, worked there a lot. And he showed up and he said, "Man, I believe, man. I want Jesus to have my life. I want to follow him." He said, "So, how much do I give now, and I want to learn to read the Bible like you do. I know I need

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to tell my friends about Jesus now, so I want you do help me more on that. Of course I want to serve. Man, we've all ready been doing that."

He just lists everything that you and I would teach a new believer in a new believer's class. I didn't have to take him to a new believer's class because I was taking him through a new believer's class before he was a believer, in everyday life. Because in my mind I'm thinking, "Someday he's going to believe and someday he's going to do the very same things I'm doing with him."

"Follow me. I'll make you fishers of men," Jesus said. He didn't hide it from them. People don't hide what Jesus is saving them to. Put it right in front of them. We shouldn't be shy about the life that we get to have. We should tell them, "Guess what? When you come to believe these things, this is what you're going to do. This is what your life's gonna be like." Call them to it. It's a great life. Don't hide it from them. Sow seeds of multiplication all the way.

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Step 4: See Regeneration As the Spirit’s Commission Next, see regeneration as the Spirit's commission. Seed regeneration is the Spirit's commission. When we baptize people, we say, "We baptize you in the name of the Father because now you belong to his family, and you're now going to love one another as brothers and sisters. We're going to baptize you in the name of the Son, because Jesus is now your king and you are to serve him as he served you. And we baptize you in the name of the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit has now, not only given you new life through regeneration, but he’s going to empower you to be his missionary to the world."

So we go, "Baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," take you out of the water and then when we take them out of the water, we say, "And now you're commissioned to the Great Commission to make disciples to make disciples." That's what our baptism is. It's not an introduction to Christianity. It's the

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commission from the Spirit to do the work of Jesus of making disciples.

If we started at that point, I think it would change for a lot of people. They'd be like, "I don't know if I want to get baptized man. Like you're saying I'm going to have to do the mission." That's what it means. You're not just being inducted into a club. You're being inducted into the mission of God.

Step 5: Have a Releasing Culture Lastly, Church, see yourself as a releasing culture. Churches, you should have a back door. People should be leaving. If they're not, there's a problem. They should be leaving because you're sending them to the ends of the earth. That's what we're called to do. Don't measure how many people stay. Measure how many people go in the name of Jesus to make disciples who make disciples.

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About the Author As the visionary leader of the Soma Family of Churches, Saturate and the

lead teaching pastor at Doxa Church

in Bellevue, WA, Jeff Vanderstelt gets to spend his days doing what he

loves – training disciples of Jesus to make more disciples of Jesus and

equipping the Church in the gospel

and missional living. Jeff is the author of Saturate, Saturate Field Guide and Gospel Fluency. He and Jayne, his wife of

twenty-four years, have three children; Haylee, Caleb, and Maggie. Connect with Jeff at saturatetheworld.com or on

twitter @JeffVanderstelt

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