What is discipleship? And why every church answers it differently

What does the Bible say about discipleship?

The Bible gives the command and does not give the manual.

The command is in Matthew 28.19-20: make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to obey. The main verb there is an imperative. It is not advice.

Except that mathēteuō, the Greek verb for making disciples, appears 4 times in the whole New Testament. 3 in Matthew, one of them in the Great Commission, and one in Acts 14.21.

4 times. It is on those 4 verses that many churches built a ministry.

Discipleship is the base of Christianity.

What the Bible does not say is how to do it.

It does not say how often. It does not say how many people per discipler. It does not say whether the meeting happens at home, at church or in a coffee shop.

What does the word disciple mean?

A disciple, literally, is a learner. The Greek word is mathetes, and it comes from the verb manthanō, to learn.

“Discipleship” does not appear in the biblical text. The disciple does.

Mathetes was already in use centuries before Christ for the apprentice who walked alongside a master, like the students of philosophers and of physicians.

The word appears 261 times in the New Testament, in 246 verses. The count varies a little depending on the Greek text used: by the Textus Receptus it is 269.

Manthanō is scattered through the New Testament, and almost never about conversion. The passages below are from the NIV.

• Matthew 9.13, “go and learn what this means”
• Matthew 11.29, “learn from me”
• Mark 13.28, “learn this lesson from the fig tree”
• John 6.45, “has heard the Father and learned from him”
• John 7.15, “without having been taught”
• Romans 16.17, “contrary to the teaching you have learned”
• Galatians 3.2, “I would like to learn just one thing from you”
• Ephesians 4.20, “not the way of life you learned”

Seven of them say learn. The eighth, John 7.15, turns the same verb into taught, because the question there is about schooling.

One word, and look at how much work it does.

Learning the sense of a text you already knew by heart. Learning from a person. Learning a lesson from nature. Learning a trade. Receiving a teaching. And, in Ephesians, learning Christ himself.

That is the family of words the New Testament chose. It belongs to the classroom and to the workshop, not to the rescue.

What is the difference between a disciple and a discipler?

Disciple and discipler are positions on the same walk, not kinds of person.

A disciple is someone who follows Jesus. Every Christian is one by definition, and there is no second tier of Christian that is excused from it.

A discipler is the disciple who walks alongside another. It is not an office, it requires no diploma, and it does not assume he has arrived.

The most common confusion in church is to treat “discipler” as a step above. When that happens, discipleship turns into hierarchy, and the person being discipled starts expecting answers the discipler does not have.

The American philosopher Dallas Willard preferred to call the disciple an apprentice. And what the apprentice learns, for him, is not to do what the master does: it is to lead his own life as the master would lead it.

In 2015, the Barna Group, an American institute that studies churches, asked church leaders whether they themselves were being discipled.

40% were not. Whoever is discipled by nobody tends to be the first to burn out.

Who discipled the apostle Paul?

Several people discipled Paul, and that is what makes his story the most complete example in the New Testament.

Jesus discipled 12 men for 3 years, and that is the model everybody knows. With Paul there were several disciplers, at different moments of his life.

Notice who holds this story up. A believer we know very little about, who told God he was afraid and obeyed anyway.

Then notice what comes next.

In Antioch, Peter eats with the Gentiles and then draws back from them, afraid of what the others will say. The one who confronts him in front of everyone is Paul (Galatians 2.11-14).

In the same episode, Barnabas is carried along with Peter.

The man who opened the door for Paul is on the wrong side of the table, and the one holding the truth of the gospel is the one who arrived last.

It is the most uncomfortable thing this story shows. Whoever is discipled is not bound by the size of the one who discipled him.

The Bible describes. It does not prescribe.

Why does every church define discipleship differently?

Because the Bible hands over a command and not a manual. There is no closed definition there, and each church fills that space with its own reading.

Paul's own story shows the size of the space, because it has no recorded ending.

A prisoner in Rome, he was still being cared for. Onesiphorus searched hard for him until he found him and was not ashamed of his chains (2 Timothy 1.16-17).

At another moment, only one was left: “Only Luke is with me” (2 Timothy 4.11, NIV).

And he kept discipling by letter, sometimes with a velvet glove. To Philemon he writes that he had every freedom to order, and prefers to “appeal to you on the basis of love” (Philemon 9, NIV).

There, discipleship is not a stage that ends. It is the way of relating until the end.

With no manual and no defined ending, space is left over. And each church occupies that space in its own way.

Today “discipleship” is the name of at least 4 distinct things, and several churches use more than one of them naturally, without planning it.

1. Discipleship as a course. A sequence of classes or workbooks that a person goes through after conversion. The course ends, and the person carries on.
2. Discipleship as a one to one relationship. Two people who meet with some regularity, read together, pray together and give an account of themselves.
3. Discipleship as the small group itself. The care happens in the cell group, and the leader of the group is the one who disciples.
4. Discipleship as a track. A journey with named stages, in which the person advances from one to the next.

None of the 4 is wrong. It is the church's reading, it is the pastor's reading.

The problem is not the choice, it is the mixture with no name. When the pastor speaks thinking of the track, the supervisor hears thinking of the cell group and the leader hears thinking of the pair, the 3 of them do 3 different things on Wednesday.

And the mixture produces a wrong perception inside the church: whoever has just come to faith assumes that whoever leads no longer needs to be discipled.

It is worth asking whether the people in your church are actually being discipled, or whether there is a process on paper that nobody is living.

The command to make disciples is biblical. The “how to do it” is with each pastor, according to what he understands works best for the reality of his church.