Disciplemaking: How Do Evangelism and Discipleship Go Together?

By amazon Thursday, December 19, 2019 Comment Edit

If we are going to use the term discipleship to talk about helping believers mature, our focus has to be more mission driven and evangelistically focused.

When we think of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19-20, we often assume the focus is on evangelism. But Jesus commissions us to “make disciples.”

Is that the same thing?

Disciple-making

Evangelism, discipleship, and disciple-making are all important terms for us to understand both in their meaning and in their relationship with one another.

If I could redo our vocabulary in 2019 and beyond, I might encourage a more biblically direct term, disciple-making, which is a little different than the way we commonly use the words evangelism and discipleship.

Disciple-making means the totality of the process from making initial contact with a person who has no knowledge of the gospel, to the steps that lead to hearing the gospel, then from hearing the gospel to responding to the gospel.

The disciple-making process goes on to include Christian growth until ultimately the person becomes a multiplying disciple-maker himself or herself. The way we use the terms now we would say, “In our modern formulation, evangelism is the process leading up to conversion and discipleship means the process from conversion and beyond.”

Bifurcation

However, I think we’ve bifurcated evangelism and discipleship in a way you really wouldn't find in Scripture.

Now, let me be clear. I'm not mad at people who say, “We ought to evangelize,” and then see the next step as discipleship. I say that!

But that’s not the way the disciples understood that reality. When we separate evangelism and discipleship, what usually happens is evangelism gets pushed to the periphery because discipleship is what most people would rather do. The unintended consequence of this is to contribute to the divide between evangelism and discipleship. ...