Skills for Making Disciple Makers!
A disciple-making church has leaders who equip others for multiplication
Alright, team! We’ve laid the groundwork – the big call from Jesus, the right mindset, and the crucial character traits. Now, let's roll up our sleeves and discuss building a skill set. While having a character like Christ is the foundation, there are some practical skills we can develop to effectively make disciples who multiply. These skills are learned and sharpened with good training, practice, and coaching. They fall into four categories: foundational, relational, missional and training skills.
Foundational Skill: Embracing God's Word
First things first: God's Word. The Bible is the "master tool" for disciple-making. The foundational skill for any disciple-maker is being able to study, understand, and share Scripture.5 This is more than just your own quiet time reading; it means studying the Bible effectively, using tools to understand what it means, and praying through the process at every step. With the Holy Spirit as your study partner, you will apply the Bible to your own life and – this is key – become able to teach it clearly to others.
Scripture does so many vital things in the discipleship journey: it increases your love for Jesus, nurtures your faith in Jesus, and helps keep your eyes fixed on Jesus and His ways. When life gets distracting, the Bible presents God's unchanging truth as the standard, calling you back when feelings or culture calls you away. God’s Word calls you to live His will out practically in your everyday life.
So, when we’re equipping disciples, we’re not just teaching them Bible facts but training them how to study and apply the Bible so they can feed themselves spiritually and eventually guide others into the Word.
Relational Skills: Building Trust and Connection
Great relationships are not accidental. They take planning, effort, intention and celebration! You will make very few friends if you wait for people to come to you.
At its heart, making disciples is all about relationships. Jesus demonstrated a deeply relational way of living. He spent heaps of time with His disciples. Developing strong relational skills is essential to being like Jesus. Being able to intentionally nurture relationships for the purpose of discipleship is key.
Listening well is foundational to being an effective disciple-maker – both to God for His guidance and to others to understand them — where they’re coming from, what they need, and what might be stopping them from exploring faith.
Building trust is next. Being trustworthy and trusting others are signs of strong relationship skills. Building trust is massive because it’s on that foundation that people are willing to be vulnerable, consider the Gospel message, and follow your lead.
There are many relational skills great leaders develop and mature in. Skills like hospitality – creating welcoming, open spaces where people feel valued and comfortable – can make a huge difference in connecting with people. And underpinning all of this is the ability to genuinely show love and compassion, reflecting Christ’s heart for those you’re trying to disciple. Relational skills help the disciple-maker create the safe nurturing spaces necessary for spiritual growth and real transformation.
Missional Skills: Evangelism and Leading to Faith
Since making disciples covers the whole faith journey — from someone first hearing about Jesus, all the way to them becoming a mature follower — missional skills are indispensable. Missional skills are related to sharing our faith. Without the ability to share Jesus with others, we cannot be effective Christians. Disciples need to be equipped to connect with people who don’t yet follow Jesus.
Learning how to naturally and appropriately turn everyday conversations towards spiritual things — something people often say is tricky — is essential for leading people to Jesus. How can you introduce them if you can talk about Him? Sharing the Gospel message with clarity and relevance is all about taking it personally. When we’ve taken Jesus to heart in our lives, we can also make Him fit the listener’s context and needs.
With Jesus as the Hero of our story, the core ideas of sin, grace, repentance, and faith, help us guide people to trust in Jesus for salvation and for leadership in their everyday lives. Because we understand the joy of knowing Jesus, we gently but clearly lead people towards making a response to Jesus’ loving invitation to accept His eternal salvation and follow Him.
Training Skills: Teaching, Mentoring and Reproducing
Beyond sharing the Gospel and building relationships, disciple-makers need skills specifically for nurturing believers towards maturity and getting them ready for multiplication. This includes being able to teach the Bible effectively, not just passing on information but helping disciples understand and apply God's Word, leading them towards obeying Christ's commands.
Nurturing skills involve mentoring and coaching. A nurturing leader offers more than just teaching. Their disciple-making relationships are about personalized guidance, asking good questions, listening, offering counsel and helping people navigate their spiritual journey.
If faith in Jesus is real to you, it will show in how you live and breathe. Most people have no use for the Bible if it cannot be applied to the nitty-gritty of daily life. And demonstration and modeling are also crucial training skills; disciple makers teach powerfully by showing, by living out the principles they’re talking about.3
Much like parenting, our children in Christ become us. When something “becomes you” in English, it “makes you look attractive” (eg. That shirt matches your eyes! It really becomes you!). Likewise, when a child or disciple follows in our footsteps, they become like us. Paul says, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” Thus, there’s a double meaning in saying a disciple becomes you — they are similar to you and they represent you well.
In Philippians 2, Paul says as we imitate Christ in the world we “shine like stars.” We make Jesus beautiful to others. The disciples you are nurturing shine like Jesus because you shine like Jesus. As we nurture fellow believers, we all “become Jesus” in the world. And when Jesus is lifted up, all humanity is drawn to Him!
Conclusion
The ultimate aim of disciple-making, especially if we’re thinking about the movement Jesus started, is reproduction. This means pastors and elders need to develop skills focused on intentionally equipping disciples to become disciple-makers. Paul teaches his disciple-become-disciple-maker Timothy: “What you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” It’s a faith chain — all the way from Jesus to us and then through us to others!
This spread of the Gospel requires this core principle of passing the disciple-making torch onto our followers. While all the skills we’ve talked about are vital, the specific ability to train someone else how to make disciples is the lynchpin for exponential Kingdom growth. Lots of discipleship efforts help people grow personally or teach them to do outreach, but they fall short of systematically equipping individuals to reproduce.
This takes more than just teaching Bible content, We must explicitly teach the process of disciple-making. Keep methods simple so they’re easy to pass on. Provide practical tools and resources. Create opportunities for apprentice-style leadership development where disciples can practice leading under guidance. The goal shifts from merely producing a mature disciple to launching a multiplying disciple-maker. That’s where the Kingdom-building adventure picks up momentum!
In the next post, we’ll explore some different models or pathways churches and ministries use to actually train these multiplying disciple-makers. See you then!