Pre-Discipleship

In their book Breaking the Missional Code, Ed Stetzer and David Putnam point out that emerging generations are taking longer to come to a point of making a commitment to being a follower of Jesus Christ. Many of these people are involved in the life of a church, attending bible study and small group, connecting with believers, and even actively involved in a ministry for six or seven years before they commit to following Christ.

They go on to point out that this extended time of examining the church and Christian faith is actually a good thing:

A number of years ago, we began to observe an interesting trend in many of our new churches that attracted a large number of unreached/unchurched people. It seemed that the longer individuals took to finally go public with their faith, the less likely they were to fall through the cracks or go out the back door. On the other hand, when someone came in and rather quickly expressed a commitment to Christ, they seemed to
disappear just as quickly.

The longer people explore the faith before making a commitment, the greater their commitment. The more they are involved in the life and activities of a Christian community, the greater the likelihood they will stay commited to that community.

For a long time, we have place the emphasis on becoming a Christian at the point of decision. You walk down an aisle, pray a prayer, fill out a card. We emphasize the need to close the deal and want to get people to pray the prayer. But how would it look different and how would it change our methods and our results if we saw evangelism and discipleship as intimately tied to each other, in fact as two sides to the same coin? We tend to think of evangelism as something you do before a person becomes a Christian and discipleship as something you do after a person becomes a Christian. But what if we saw evangelism as pre-discipleship? What if we began "discipling" people before they actually became disciples? Would we see greater commitment and more long term commitment?

After all, Jesus didn't tell us to go into all the world and "make decisions." He said go into all the world and "make disciples." For too long we have tried to get people to make a decision so they will "get saved." But maybe we need to get people to commit not to a one time decision, but to a lifetime of being a Christ-follower.