📖 Radical Christianity: The Ten Commandments of Jesus — Unit 12: Be Disciplemaker

1. The Church's Marching Orders

These are the last words of Jesus before He ascended, and last words carry weight. He did not leave His church a vague encouragement to be religious; He left a commission, a marching order: go and make disciples. Everything else the church does — its worship, its teaching, its gathering — finds its purpose in this. The risen Lord, to whom all authority in heaven and earth has been given, sends His people out to reproduce His followers in every nation, and promises His own presence to the very end.

Notice carefully what He commands. Not "make converts," not "make crowds," not "make church members," but "make disciples" — disciples taught "to observe all things" He commanded. The goal is not a decision and a handshake; it is a life remade in obedience to Christ. To be a disciple-maker is to take seriously that the whole point of the Christian life is to follow Jesus and to help others follow Him too. This unit is about answering that commission.

2. All Believers Are Disciples

We must clear away a common misunderstanding before we go further. Many people imagine that "disciple" is an advanced category — that there are ordinary Christians and then there are a special few "disciples." But the New Testament will not allow this. Before the followers of Jesus were ever called "Christians," they were called "disciples," and not just the Twelve — all believers in Jesus are called disciples in the New Testament. The word simply means "one who learns," one who follows a teacher to become like Him.

This means that radical discipleship is not an elite track; it is normal Christianity. There are not two forms of the faith, a casual version and a committed version. It is impossible to be saved and yet not be in a living relationship with Jesus, following Him; those who teach a cheap grace that promises salvation without repentance and discipleship are leading people astray. Jesus said you cannot pour new wine into old wineskins, and genuine discipleship will never develop inside the brittle old skins of mere tradition and religiosity — what we might call "churchianity." The new wine of following Jesus requires a new wineskin: a life actually surrendered to Him.

3. Disciples Cannot Be Mass-Produced

If the goal is disciples and not merely crowds, then the method matters enormously — because disciples cannot be mass-produced. There is certainly a place for large gatherings; Jesus Himself taught the multitudes. But notice where He invested His life: in twelve men, and sometimes only three of those twelve. He preached to thousands, but He poured Himself into a few. That is not an accident of His ministry; it is the pattern of how disciples are actually made.

Making disciples the way Jesus did means spending large amounts of time with small numbers of people. You cannot disciple a stadium. Real formation happens up close, life on life, where someone can see how a more mature believer prays, handles trouble, loves a spouse, forgives an enemy, and walks with God day by day. This is why small groups are such a proven and biblically sound method: as the numbers get smaller, the odds of genuine discipleship go up. The disciple-maker is willing to think small on purpose, investing deeply in a few rather than shallowly in many.

4. Every Christian a Minister

Here is one of the most freeing truths in the New Testament, and it is essential to disciple-making. The goal of all Christian teaching is to produce ministers. Ephesians gives church leadership essentially one job: to equip the saints — that is, ordinary believers — to do the work of ministry. God's goal for every Christian's life is that they contribute, that their efforts make a real difference for the kingdom.

This overturns the common picture in which a few professionals do the ministry while everyone else watches. The purpose of God-appointed leaders is not to do the ministry themselves, but to equip the saints to do it. A pastor's real job is to make ordinary believers effective as ministers. All Christians are ministers, priests, and witnesses; leaders exist to train and release them. A disciple-maker, therefore, is not trying to create an audience dependent on him, but to raise up other ministers — people who will in turn serve and disciple still others. The measure of success is not how many come to watch, but how many are sent out to work.

5. The Disciple-Maker Takes Up a Towel

But how does a disciple-maker lead? Not from a throne, but with a towel. On the night He was betrayed, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, Jesus rose from supper, wrapped a towel around His waist, and washed His disciples' feet. In the upper room everyone saw the dirty feet, but only Jesus saw an opportunity to serve. He took up a towel, not a title. That is the posture of every true disciple-maker: leading by serving, seeing the needs that others overlook, and stooping to meet them.

This is the great correction to every worldly idea of leadership. We are tempted to think that to lead and shape others is to rise above them; Jesus shows that it is to kneel before them. The one who would make disciples must first be a servant, because he is reproducing not his own importance but the character of the Servant-King. You cannot disciple people into Christlikeness from a posture Christ never took.

6. Serving Even the Undeserving

The towel reaches further than we would like. On that same night, Jesus washed the feet of every disciple in the room — including Judas, the man He knew would betray Him within hours. The Lord knelt before His betrayer and washed his feet. Love served even the undeserving. This tells us that the disciple-maker's service is not reserved for the promising, the grateful, or the deserving; it is poured out even on those who will disappoint us.

Jesus taught this directly: when you give a feast, invite those who cannot repay you, and you will be blessed, because they have nothing to give back. That is precisely how God served us, for we could never repay Him. So we serve not to be thanked and not to earn a reward, but out of gratitude for having been served by Christ. As Jesus said, when we have done everything we were told, we should still say, "we are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty." We serve from redemption, not for recognition.

7. Multiplication: Faithful to Faithful

Disciple-making has a forward momentum built into it: it is meant to multiply. Paul tells Timothy to take what he has received and commit it to faithful people who will be able to teach others also. Count the generations in that single verse: Paul, to Timothy, to faithful people, to others also — four links in a chain that is designed never to stop. A disciple-maker does not merely gather followers; he raises up people who will themselves make disciples, who will in turn raise up still others.

This is how the gospel was always meant to spread — through lives reproducing lives, whether that happens in a home, a small group, or a church with a full program calendar. The early church multiplied this way too: when a group meeting in a home grew too large, they simply began to meet in two homes — one simple, faithful way to expand, though certainly not the only one. Multiplication is the natural fruit of real discipleship: a disciple who has truly been formed will, sooner or later, begin forming others.

8. From a "Bless-Me Club" to an Army

All of this calls for a fundamental change in how we think about the church. It is easy to slip into treating the church as a "bless-me club" — a place concerned mainly with meeting our own needs and ensuring its own comfortable survival. Too often the church has taken a defensive posture, functioning like a hospital that exists only to care for the wants of those already inside, while the great needs of the world and the unfinished Great Commission go unaddressed. But that is not why Jesus left us here.

It is time to take the offensive — to stop being a fortress and start being an army, going out to evangelize the world and to make disciples of all nations. A fresh breeze is blowing, calling the church back to the humility, simplicity, and mutuality of the New Testament believers, and toward the final fulfillment of the Great Commission. God is not looking for spectators; He is looking for soldiers — ordinary disciples who will give themselves to the mission of making other disciples. The question for each of us is whether we will remain consumers of religious services or become reproducers of the life of Christ.

9. Whose Feet Can I Wash Today?

So the great commission comes down, in the end, to something surprisingly humble and daily. The disciple-maker holds two things together: the towel and the mission. He serves the few God has placed near him — washing their feet, bearing with their faults as Christ bore with Judas, investing his life in them up close — and in doing so he reproduces in them the very life of Jesus, who then reproduce it in others, and so the kingdom advances. It is not glamorous work. The world crowns achievers; heaven crowns servants.

A good way to begin is with a simple daily question: "Lord, whose feet can I wash today?" Take one towel moment this week — serve someone who cannot repay you, invest in someone younger in the faith, share Christ with someone who does not yet know Him. The Lord who gave the commission also gave the promise that seals it: "lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." We do not make disciples in our own strength or alone. We go in His company and His power. And He said it plainly: "if you know these things, blessed are you if you do them."

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