Dr Kevin Blackwell

Recovering a Comprehensive Hermeneutic for Future Disciple Making

August 29, 2005, is a day that forever changed the city of New Orleans, LA.  Hurricane Katrina, a powerful category three storm, made landfall near the border of Louisiana and Mississippi. The storm surge of 15 to 19 feet overwhelmed the levee system of New Orleans. In just a few hours 80 percent of the city was flooded with some parts inundated with 20 feet of water. In the early 20^th century city planners along with the Army Corp of Engineers developed and constructed a system of drainage canals and levees to protect New Orleans from just such a disaster. Around 50 percent of the city sits below sea level and to make matters worse it is surrounded by the Mississippi River to the south, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, and marshlands to the east and west.  Though there had been storm events, nothing had ever tested the 350 miles of levee system quite like Katrina did. By the time the storm had passed, there were more than 50 breaches in the levee system which resulted in over 1,000 fatalities. It was one of the greatest disasters in US history. An examination determined that the failures of the levees resulted from instability and erosion at the base of the structures. The integrity of the walls once tested, did not hold up to the deluge of storm surge due to imperfections that had existed below the surface. These imperfections eventually resulted in catastrophic breaches. The lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina resulted in a massive effort to rebuild and strengthen the levees to prevent this tragedy from happening again.

Breaches begin as small cracks that might seem insignificant, but when tested can lead to tragic inundation. Over the past several decades the missional focus of the American evangelical church has suffered from a gradual erosion of its fidelity to make disciples. The decline of Christianity in America, and the Western world in general, is a result of this erosion. What we are now experiencing is the result of a breach of mission and most of it has happened as a slow, gradual erosion. There are hermeneutical cracks that have developed over time in how the church views the Great Commission of Christ as stated in Matthew 28:19-20. These have gone unnoticed until the surge of secularism and postmodern thought inundated Western culture, testing the integrity of the church’s missional strategy. This presentation is a call to strengthen the missional integrity of the church so that these breaches can be fixed, and the church can be more faithful in its disciple making mission.

Evidence of this breach can be seen in the missional strategy of a local church. Somewhere in America this week a pastor sat in his office completely exasperated. Though he has been serving the church for a few years now, it just hasn’t gone as he planned when he took the position. He has been faithful to preparing God-honoring biblical sermons and delivering them with passion and excitement Sunday after Sunday. He has been diligent in visiting his people, loving, and shepherding them, examining the demographics of his community, and evaluating ministries, staff, and administrative structures. He has constructed a vision plan for the church and has worked tirelessly to get everyone on board so that sustained growth will take place in the coming years. Yet, despite all this ministry, planning, evaluation, and effort, the church continues to be ineffective in fulfilling its mission. A couple of years ago the pastor decided to focus on evangelism and spent much time training his people and organizing various evangelistic outreach events. This went well and people were converted, but most of those new believers ultimately did not assimilate into the congregation and have fallen away. As a result, the pastor determined that the church had a discipleship problem, and this became the new focus. The church began new discipleship programs to balance out the evangelistic outreach, but the new programs took time, resources, and attention away from evangelism. It was much harder to find the right balance between evangelism and discipleship than the pastor could have ever imagined. He hoped that his well-prepared sermons, skillful leadership, strategic vision, gifted staff, new church programs, evangelism training, and robust discipleship classes would have jump-started the church into a new season of ministry effectiveness. This, however, has not come to fruition. He now has a church busy with activities, low assimilation rates, and exhausted volunteers without much fruit to show for the efforts.  He sits in his office praying for a fresh, new movement in his church while wondering, what am I missing? What if, however, the answer to the pastor’s dilemma wasn’t nearly as complicated as he imagined it to be?

       A pastor sitting in his office frustrated at the church’s ineffectiveness in evangelism and discipleship must be a strange concept for the Savior, designer, and builder of the church. I don’t believe that Jesus ever intended for any church leader to go through this particular struggle.  If you asked Jesus, “How should the church most effectively do evangelism and discipleship?” He would likely say, “Are you asking me how the church can effectively make disciples?” The question would be foreign to first-century Christians because they viewed their mission as making disciples. The church isn’t commissioned to do evangelism and discipleship, it is only commissioned to make disciples, which encompasses both.

I believe that church leaders spend the majority of their time developing missional plans that focus on one of three primary areas: increasing their audience, increasing baptisms, or creating new evangelism and discipleship programs. Many of these plans are so complex that they drain the church’s energy, and as a result, several churches are struggling today with ministry fatigue. This dilemma epitomizes the missional breach in the twenty-first century. If a church is truly making disciples, then it is accomplishing all three of these without as much effort and frustration. This approach will take a long-term commitment that yields better results incrementally and not instantly, but the long-term investment will be worth it. Simply put, the church cannot fulfill the Great Commission with new evangelism and discipleship strategies that become fads or movements and then fade every few years. In our efforts to fulfill the Great Commission, the church has made converts without making disciples, and that is the great missional breach of the modern-day church. This is what has gone wrong, terribly wrong. Church leaders have sought to mass-produce disciples from the pulpit and design ornate visionary strategies that have yielded only momentary, fleeting results. When church leaders divide the Great Commission into evangelism and discipleship, one will always receive lesser attention, and this dividing missional “crack” has resulted in the breach. It is best to view the Great Commission as one comprehensive process resulting in a fully trained and sent disciple. I argue that the hermeneutically unwarranted bifurcation of Matthew 28:19-20 has led the modern-day church to a place of ineffectiveness and inundation of frustrations.

The present American evangelical church finds itself in a peculiar place where growth, sustainability, and viability are becoming increasingly difficult. We, however, did not get here overnight. Over the past fifty years in American evangelicalism there has been a breach of Christ’s Great Commission and much of this failure can be attributed to wrong doctrine, lack of missional clarity, a truncated soteriology, and over-programmed methodology within three major ecclesial movements that took American evangelicalism by storm. These include the Church Growth, Emergent Church, and Missional Church movements. To turn the tide of declining church attendance and religious activity in the United States, these movements all began with pure intentions. The leaders longed to see a renewal of evangelism, baptisms, and church attendance among the people for whom they felt called to minister. While some good has come from each of the three movements, there has been a breach in fidelity to certain aspects of the commission to make disciples. Since 1970 there has been a shift in American Evangelicalism from the commission to make disciples to a consumeristic pragmatism, a misguided orthodoxy, and a lack of clear agreement on how to define missional. One of the most significant conclusions to be found from this shift was that religious activity does not necessarily equate to the making and maturing of multiplying disciples.[1] Certain aspects of the ecclesial movements in question have led the church to increased activity, but not toward lasting disciple making results.

Craig Ott summarizes the situation in this way, “If current leaders do not develop new leaders who will spiritually shepherd and further guide the movement, it will become susceptible to conflict, false teaching, syncretism, and other problems.”[2] The “movement” Ott calls for is a disciple making movement and this movement is as old as Christendom. It is the movement established by Jesus himself. I often hear church leaders speak of the need for a new movement in the American evangelical church. I have grown weary of these types of discussions because, for a good portion of the past century, the church has been in an endless cycle of “the next great thing.” These new movements often begin with a group of church leaders asking how best to shore up the missional cracks to reach a current and future generation, in other words, most ecclesial movements have been shaped by looking forward. What if, however, the answer is not in looking forward, but rather in casting our reflections on the past to learn and replicate how Jesus began the church? The Gospels and the book of Acts give us insight into the movement that Jesus began through the choosing, equipping, empowering, and sending of a group of followers to make disciples of all nations with the promise of his authority and presence to “the end of the age.” This is the movement. It is not “the next great thing,” but rather it is the only thing that matters.  The disciple making movement of Jesus, as displayed through his ministry methods, and commissioned to his disciples, didn’t come with an expiration date. While methods certainly need to be adapted to best communicate the gospel to cultures, the missional disciple making movement of Jesus remains the primum prioritas for the church. If we are going to shore up the levees, church leaders must recommit themselves to embody this movement and develop other leaders committed to the same cause. The reality, however, is that most church leaders are not committed as disciple makers and are not personally fulfilling the Great Commission, nor do they have a strategy to develop multiplying disciples in their church. As with the pastor mentioned previously, these church leaders are busy with the duties of ministry, thinking about a new vision for the church, or in search of the next thing that will bring new life into their church. The ecclesial movements of the past fifty years lacked a total commitment and comprehensive hermeneutical understanding of what it meant to equip a generation of believers to make disciples. This can be attributed to the fact that these church leaders created missional structures based on what they perceived were the needs of future generations. At times this approach functionally placed orthopraxy over orthodoxy. In other words, there were missional theories that developed into theologies, rather than theologies resulting in missional theories. Today, we are suffering from these missional breaches and the lack of multiplying disciples has caught up to the modern-day church. As we look to the next frontier of ecclesial missions in North America, something needs to change regarding a decades-long bifurcated missional approach. It is time to shore up the levees. Just as the engineers learned lessons from the floods of Katrina, we as church leaders and missionaries to our generation must also learn lessons to assist us in being more faithful in our mission to make disciples.

How did the hermeneutical breach of the Great Commission develop? The separation of evangelism and discipleship that has neglected a full hermeneutic of disciple making can be traced back to the 1850s when philosophical commentary began to be widely distributed in the American church. Mendell Taylor states that the term evangelism was a recent development in the mid-1800s in the American ecclesial culture and was first penned by a man named Charles Adams.[3] According to Carl Wilson, the divide between evangelism and discipleship was exacerbated when a man named Horace Bushnell wrote a book entitled Christian Nurture calling the church back to discipleship. Unfortunately, Bushnell’s liberal view of atonement undercut his intentions and motives. Bushnell, however, did begin a conversation about maturing Christians which emphasized growth in the Christian life and many influential writings followed. Many of these writings were penned by theological liberals, and the topic began to be shunned by those with conservative theological convictions. The tragedy is that the idea of maturing disciples became associated with modern liberal philosophical thinking and many avoided being associated with it. Wilson states, “Hence the area of disciple-building, or Christian education, was abandoned to unbiblical thinkers. This led in practice to treating evangelism and disciple-building as two separate processes.”[4] One of the leaders of the Church Growth Movement, C. Peter Wagner referred to disciple making as “a torpedo to evangelism” even implying that it hindered the fulfillment of Christ’s commission to his church.[5]  The division of evangelism and discipleship was replicated by thousands of churches and more than a few evangelical denominations in the 1990s and 2000s. Wilson states, “The church in general has gone through periods when leaders set evangelism against discipleship. The conditions of the church in general call people back to see that the true presentation of the good news of the kingdom of Christ involves both.”[6] Wilson also sees this unneeded bifurcation as a trick of Satan. He asks the question, “Where in the Scriptures do Jesus or the apostles separate the two ideas or debate one against the other?”[7]

Thus, the neglect of disciple making within the American evangelical church can be attributed to the unbiblical divide between evangelism and discipleship. This bifurcation is one of the greatest detriments to effective disciple making and to the future missional effectiveness of the Western church.  The division is also due in large part to the unintended results of Donald McGavran’s bifurcated understanding of the Great Commission, its pragmatic implications for the Church Growth Movement, and its corollary impact on a generation of church leaders. In fairness to McGavran, when examining his theological understanding of the Great Commission, it is important to remember that he writes as a missionary first whose intent is to reach a “people,” rather than a “person.” The problem incurred when his missionary theology was applied within the Western ecclesial context. The dual nature of his theological understanding of the Great Commission is parsed out in his book The Bridges of God in which he describes his view of Matthew 28:19–20. He believed that the convert must first experience a new birth. McGavran states, “The Christianization of peoples is not assisted by slighting or forgetting real personal conversion. There is no substitute for justification by faith in Jesus Christ or for the gift of the Holy Spirit.”[8] He explains conversion or what he calls, discipling as taken place when people feel “united around Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, believe themselves to be members of His Church, and realize that ‘our folk are Christians, our book is the Bible, and our house of worship is the church.’”[9] McGavran described the second stage of the Great Commission as “teaching them all things” or as McGavran called it, perfecting.[10] In the perfecting stage, the members of the Christian community experience an ethical or moral change. He states, “This is a bringing about of an ethical change in the discipled group, an increasing achievement of a thoroughly Christian way of life.”[11] This two-fold approach to the Great Commission would have a lasting impact on his writings on church growth throughout his life, the Church Growth Movement, and eventually on American evangelicalism in general.

Donald McGavran’s contributions to the missional re-focusing of the North American evangelical church are substantial, and the benefits that sprang from his research and teaching have outweighed the criticisms over the decades. An important question, however, must be asked related to the residual ecclesial impact of his views. Have McGavran’s principles had negative implications on disciple making within the local church in North American ecclesial practice?

         McGavran’s interpretation of the Great Commission plays a significant role in what he viewed as effective evangelism. Darrell Guder argues that McGavran’s distinction between discipling and perfecting demonstrates a reductionist understanding of the gospel.[12] Disciple making is not a two-pronged approach, but rather a comprehensive approach that sees the Great Commission as one comprehensive process. The Great Commission of Jesus is the missiological thrust of his church and the church’s approach to it calls for a full hermeneutic of the Great Commission. A full hermeneutic, process-driven approach sees the Great Commission not as a call to convert and then teach, but rather as a way of connecting the going to the baptizing and teaching into one hermeneutically comprehensive outcome which offers churches a worthy goal. McGavran’s choice of terms to explain his bifurcated understanding of Matthew 28:19-20 is also problematic. He used the term discipling in a way no one else ever has, thus his use of this term has been widely misunderstood. His use of these terms created an unneeded and unbiblical split in the process of people growing as disciples of Jesus.[13]

As the church prepares to be missional to a postmodern, post-Christendom culture, it must rediscover this comprehensive understanding of the Great Commission to make disciples and avoid the temptation to dichotomize the process. Evangelism and discipleship are together disciple making as interdependent commands, rather than independent doctrines and practices. Common sense informs us that when we dichotomize something from a whole to parts, the risk is that one of the parts will be less emphasized or even worse, neglected completely. I believe this has been the story of American evangelicalism for at least the past five decades. For years I have experienced churches that were either good at evangelism or discipleship, but rarely have I experienced a church that placed a priority on both. The church may speak of both, and even hold evangelism and discipleship as a high priority in mission statements or list them as core values, but in my experience, a church rarely embodies a full embrace or understanding of both. This leads to a lack of process-driven disciple making missiology which seeks to replicate the disciple making methods and model of Jesus. Some of this can be attributed to a truncated soteriology that has developed in evangelicalism where conversion, regeneration, and justification are often the focus to the detriment of the essential nature of the ongoing work of the Spirit through sanctification. There is no full biblical understanding of the doctrine of salvation without a commitment to a thorough theology of disciple making. This is why there must be a rediscovery of a full hermeneutic of disciple making as displayed in the New Testament.

Dallas Willard certainly believes this to be true when he states, “This most recent version of evangelicalism lacks a theology of discipleship. Specifically, it lacks a clear teaching on how what happens at conversion continues on without breaking into an even fuller life in the Kingdom of God.”

The bottom line is this: in our passion to see people saved we have neglected a passion to see them embrace God’s full plan of sanctification. Most every sermon I have heard on Matt 28:19-20 places emphasis on evangelism, yet ironically the word evangelism is not found anywhere in the Matthean Commission. The Greek word most often associated with evangelism, euaggelion, is not used by Jesus in this passage. Certainly, the act of telling the good news is implied within the command to “go and make disciples,” however, most homiletical outlines give primacy to evangelism over verse twenty’s call to “teach them to observe.” Herein lies the heart of the issue, when we preach a dichotomous approach to the commission of Jesus, rather than embrace the full hermeneutic of the one imperative verb of the Great Commission “make disciples,” matheteusate, we minimalize one of the most important commands found in the New Testament. Jesus doesn’t command the church to “go on mission to get people saved,” “make converts,” “make new Christians,” or “find new church members.” The commission of Jesus to His church is much more comprehensive and will take much more time and relational investment. Has the church fulfilled the Great Commission of Christ when people are converted? Has the Great Commission been fulfilled in the baptismal waters? What is the real mark of completion? According to Jesus, what is the real mark of missiological success?

The church is called to make followers, disciples, and learners of Christ who are discipled into a deep theological understanding which propels them to replicate this cathartic spiritual experience in the lives of those around them. We do not send out converts to a life of missions, we send out justified, regenerated, growing followers of Christ whose hearts have been fixed on pursuing the one who has given them His righteousness. This is a highly relational process, and it is hard, time-consuming, messy, and exhilarating. A full hermeneutical understanding of the heart of Christ for the lost must include this type of focus. If the church only sees itself as rescuing people from hell, it has minimized the missio Dei. To accomplish this the church must return to the Scriptures and ask hard questions related to its mission in this new postmodern Western frontier. We must not allow our missiology to be constructed by church growth experts, theologians, gurus, pragmatic strategies, sociological frameworks, or popular authors. There has never been a more important time to take a fresh look at the methods and model of Jesus and rediscover His heart for the perpetuity of missional disciple making as well as embrace a full hermeneutic of His commission to the church.

It is not a reach to assert that each Christian generation is in earnest search of a new and better missional future. With each new generation comes an attempt to create a more faithful iteration of the church to better evangelize the current culture and increase church involvement. These attempts will ultimately be recorded by church historians as movements, but movements by their very nature have beginnings and endings, thus the American evangelical church continually finds itself in a state of recovery and discovery. Yet, the American evangelical church does not need a new missional discovery, but rather a re-discovery of the disciple making model and methods of Jesus Christ as revealed in the gospels, and the recovery of a full hermeneutic of the Great Commission as we seek to make disciples in a new missionary frontier. While methodological approaches might vary as the church attempts to find a more effective and faithful way of making disciples within each generation, the original movement of missional disciple making in the New Testament is to be perpetual. The Tambaram report titled, The World Mission of the Church taps into the essence of this truth. It states, “The church exists to continue the work Christ began.”[14] This work of which Christ began is the winning of the world through the making of disciples. The church is sent to the world as a “message” and a “movement.”[15]

The reality is clear, the evangelical church in America finds itself in a skeptical, religiously unaffiliated place and while this is a threat, it can also be an opportunity. Hirsch states:

The result of the Enlightenment period, among many other things, was the secularization of society and the subsequent marginalization of the church and its message. We who have lived in the twentieth century know this experientially all too well. The problem we face is that while as a sociopolitical-cultural force Christendom is dead, and we now live in what has been aptly called the post-Christendom era, the church still operates in exactly the same mode. In terms of how we understand and “do” church, little has changed for seventeen centuries.[16]

To Hirsch’s point, the end of Christendom in America could possibly be the door to a new and better missional approach if only the church would accept the new cultural order and adjust its disciple making approaches in response. Only when the church rediscovers the pre-modern, pre-Christendom disciple making methods and model of Jesus and shores up the missional breach, will it truly be the “movement” and “message” that Christ has called it to be.

Conclusion

“Can the West be converted?”[17] This was the question on the mind of Lesslie Newbigin upon his return to Britain in 1974 after serving forty years in India. He found a church that had accommodated itself to its culture at the expense of its role as missionaries.[18] Perhaps the same question should be asked today in postmodern America. To effectively reach any culture for Christ, particularly a postmodern America, there must be an understanding that being missional, is by its very essence, disciple making. No church can be truly mission-driven without making disciples. Thus, we must embrace a more specific term than just missional, but rather missional disciple making. Conjoining the two terms eliminates the ubiquitous nature of the term missional by giving it a distinctive descriptor. In other words, the true mission of the churchneeded for the current cultural context is making disciples as mission. How can the church today take the Great Commission and contextualize the mission to this current postmodern culture? The Great Commission of Christ is not a call to change culture, it is a commission to change people through missional disciple making.

The unwarranted unbiblical breach of the Great Commission must be shored up and this ought to be reflected in the outreach of the local church. As the waves of secularism, postmodern epistemology, and pluralistic relativism continue to beat against the walls of the ecclesial levees, we must secure these missional breaches and re-commit ourselves to be the movement and to continue the disciple making mission that Christ began. This is the foundation of the New Testament church, and it must not become eroded.

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[1]Central to this conclusion is the results of Willow Creek Community Church’s findings from a multiple-year qualitative study of its ministry. Seeking to find which programs were most effective in helping people grow spiritually, the results were termed by Bill Hybels as “mind-blowing” and “shocking.” The conclusion can be summed up in this way, “Increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more.” This study will be examined more closely in the chapter analyzing the Church Growth Movement. “Willow Creek Repents? Why the Most Influential in America Now Says, ‘We Made a Mistake.’” Christianity Today, (October 2007), https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2007/october-online-only/willow-creek-repents.html.

[2]Ott, Church on Mission, 115.

[3]Taylor, Exploring Evangelism, 19.

[4]Wilson, With Christ in the School of Disciple Building, 311.

[5]Wagner, “Lausanne Twelve Months Later” Christianity Today, 8.

[6]Wilson, With Christ in the School of Disciple Building, 310.

[7]Wilson, With Christ in the School of Disciple Building, 310.

[8]McGavran, Bridges of God, 11.

[9]McGavran, Bridges of God, 14.

[10]McGavran, Bridges of God, 14.

[11]McGavran, Bridges of God, 15.

[12]Suarez, “Donald McGavran’s Understanding of Conversion,” 188.

[13]Van Engen, “Centrist View: Church Growth is based on an evangelistically focused and a missiologically applied theology,” in Evaluating the Church Growth Movement, 142.

[14] World Mission of the Church: Findings and Recommendations of the Internal Missionary Council, Tambaram, Madras, India, December 12 to December 29, 1938, 79.

[15]Goheen and Sheriden, Becoming a Missionary Church, 13.

[16]Hirsch, Forgotten Ways, 61.

[17]Newbigin, “Can the West Be Converted,” 2–7.

[18]Goheen and Sheridan, Becoming a Missionary Church, 68.