Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – Beyond Evangelism: Authentic Disciples

By Rose Dowsett
May 2007

Some Sobering Stories
In Singapore, a young woman happily signed up to The Four Spiritual Laws and prayed a prayer “to receive Jesus.” This delighted the foreigner who had met her on the street. The young woman then went home and added an offering to Jesus to her already well-populated god-shelf.

In London, an evangelical church elder insisted that he was glad to be a Christian; however, he said he could not possibly believe in the resurrection or miraculous conception of Christ, nor in the miracles recorded in the New Testament.

An African told me how good it had felt to smash a machete through the skull of a tribal rival, why he had put spirit strings on his baby son and, all in the same breath, how happy he was “to belong to Jesus” since his own childhood.

In China, where the Church has grown enormously in many areas in recent years, there is also an explosion of wild deviation from historic Christian faith, with cults and sects abounding. Many house churches do not have a single Bible among their members, and leaders are frequently eager but ignorant of the scriptures.

Facing the Facts
All these and a thousand more similarly depressing and disturbing stories can be replicated all around the world. On the one hand, the twentieth century saw unprecedented geographical expansion of the Church as previously unevangelised people groups began to respond to the gospel. On the other hand, it is arguable that never has the Church been so shallow and so vulnerable in country after country—and that evangelicals are as compromised as any other stream of the global Church.

In fact, some would argue that in our haste (which we could regard as commendable) to carry the gospel far and wide, in our urgency to “reach” as many people as possible, evangelicals have been the most guilty of all in tragic gospel reductionism. In the most terrible irony, evangelicals—our very name means “gospel people”—have too often betrayed the Lord by adopting ministry patterns that are deeply flawed and fail to produce authentic, truly transformed, life-long disciples. This has especially been a problem in the last forty years, when the evangelical world has been awash with confident strategies by means of which the whole world could be reached within a given time span, with too much faith placed in human endeavour and too little humble recognition that only the Spirit of God can bring life out of death and we do not know where and when he will choose to blow.

Perhaps this sounds rather judgemental and miserable; however, I believe it to be true of all too much of the world Church, especially where it has grown rapidly, and especially where cultures are not challenged. We need to face the fact that numerical expansion is not the same as deep-level conversion and life-long growth in discipleship.

Being an authentic disciple, essential if we are also to become authentic disciple-makers, is rooted in a deep relationship with the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which governs every part of our lives. This is far more profound than assenting to a handful of propositions, and is entirely different from the self-centred therapeutic approach which too often passes for evangelism. (“Do you want peace and joy/healing/prosperity? Then just ask Jesus into your life!”)