Making Disciples? Think Simple

While God’s ways and thoughts are higher than our own, God often uses simple things for maximum impact.

Jesus called mostly uneducated men to be his disciples and apostles (See Acts 4:13). This doesn’t mean we devalue education. Education is a wonderful thing (my wife and I have 500+ hours of college under our belts!). It does mean we often have to fight our propensity toward complexity and exclusivity if we want to participate in a movement.

The Gospel itself is both simple and complicated. It has layers. The core of the gospel contains simple truths that just about anyone can wrap their mind around. But you can dig deeper to more complex components of the message.

The more we study, often, the more complex things to get and if we are not careful we can very easily create the idea (inadvertently) that it takes a trained professional to proclaim the gospel and make disciples.

Our current paradigm for church is not movement prone or movement friendly. It is far too complex for that both in our operations and our doctrine. Again, our argumentation has become so complex that the uneducated might think there is no seat at the table for them.

Here is my main point - Complex things don’t spread quickly. That is why there are few astrophysicists and surgeons who do full face transplants than we have professionals of various other occupations.

Many of us are looking for, praying for, and dreaming of a movement of God’s people by the power and direction of the Holy Spirit. If history has anything to say about it, any movement is usually characterized by simplicity. If it requires a seminary degree to pull off, it can’t be easily or quickly replicated and movements have to self-replicate to move.

We won’t find movements if the requirements for replication are complicated, require years of advanced training, and are expensive.

The last I checked the Holy Spirit doesn’t charge an admission fee!

Again, I am not discounting education or budgets or buildings. I am saying that what is often our default, go to, may not lend itself to the outcome we desire, but rather the outcomes we are used to and comfortable with.

Pray with me for fresh movements among the people of God. Pray for God to use the simple, the foolish, and the organic to show the corporate institutional structures our churches are mired in, a new (old) way forward where disciples make disciples.

More soon!