World Mission and Disciple Making

Is the key of Matthew 28:18-20 to share the Gospel as a global mission or to make disciples? More and more people are asking this question in recent years. From my limited experience, when I was young, Matthew 28:18-20 often was cited in within-church or across-churches mission conferences with a singular emphasis on sharing the Gospel as a global mission. However, in recent twenty or thirty years, while the global mission is valued more and more, Matthew 28:18-20 has been cited more often when addressing the necessity of making disciples. Grammatically speaking, the main verb (in the form of a command) in the original text of the scripture indeed is to make disciples. Even some mission conferences emphasized more on the importance and necessity of making disciples in recent decades, rather than merely focusing on cross-cultural missions overseas.

Objectively speaking, a large proportion of churches did not value mission, nor disciple-making. Overall, western churches valued the global mission much more than Chinese churches, and participated much more as well. Even though Chinese churches participated less, God led a few waves of spiritual revival among Chinese in the recent century and many more people joined church. Many new believers desired to grow and were more malleable than western churches. Take Austin Chinese Church as an example. Although our participation in global mission still lags behind western churches quite a bit, we have witnessed significant growth in the past forty years. In addition, since the members and leaders are more teachable, Chinese churches are able to avoid the lack of vitality and motivation in disciple-making, or avoid the restriction of the old model. These are positive signs.

In fact, Matthew 28:18-20 emphasizes the global mission as well as disciple-making. The core of Jesus’ proclamation of the great commission is to make disciples of “all nations.” In the original text, “all nations” refers to all people groups (ethnicities). The modern challenge to churches is to remain faithful to the two aspects of the great commission: the global mission and disciple-making, and to balance them well.

A few years ago, a group of Christian scholars analyzed western churches and concluded that “We don’t have a missional problem, we have a discipleship problem.” (Our problem was not that we did not value global mission enough, but rather that we did not emphasize disciple-making enough.) The root cause was that western churches overlooked the spiritual renewal and growth of church members while overemphasizing external actions when members were actively pursuing global missions. Strong advertisement and powerful push could garner church members’ cooperation and participation via external actions. However, if church members’ internal lives were not consistently growing through long-lasting disciple-making, their passion would gradually subside and dissipate.

We can see the similar phenomenon in Austin Chinese Church or other Chinese churches. Many were encouraged and joined short-term mission trips. They were enthusiastically sharing the Gospel to non-believers during the short-term mission trip. After their return, they lacked the passion and actions to share the Gospel in the Austin area. The reason is that the church values disciple-making less than external actions.

In recent years, some churches started focusing on “missional discipleship” which is translated to Mandarin as “disciple-making with a strong sense of mission.” This certainly is a worthy effort. One expert in this area lamented “…the fact that we have to put qualifications on the word discipleship means that we’ve probably gone very far from what an understanding of what the bible means by discipleship—it should be a stand-alone term… It’s kind of weird we have to qualify it with adjectives.” What he means is that “being missional” should have been intrinsic to Christian discipleship.

I want to conclude with two points to encourage all of us.

First, avoid disciple-making that overlooks the global mission. Such disciples are a group of selfish individuals seeking more blessings for themselves.

Second, avoid pursuing the global mission that overlooks disciple-making. Those programs cannot cultivate proactive kingdom servants for the future.

God inspired me to ponder on the disciple-making model between 2004 and 2008. With my professors’ encouragement, I present the main points of my essay in the diagram below. This diagram truly reflects my philosophy as I have pastored churches the past decades. I also shared this with the Chinese congregation. I would like to share with brothers and sisters from other congregations here.

Whether this diagram is worth considering for others or not, may God lead Austin Chinese Church to continue to grow into a God-pleasing church and be used by God much more.