Introduction — A Story of Transformation
Greg Ogden didn’t expect much when he started meeting with just two or three people at a time. He came to call these little groups microgroups, and they changed how he understood the way the Holy Spirit shapes people into the image of Christ.
Jesus gave the church its mission statement: “Go and make disciples.” He also staked the future of his ministry on a few people. Why did he choose the Twelve and spend so much time with them? What would it look like if you followed his model?
The answer starts with one line: disciple making isn’t a program. It’s a relationship. But most disciple making never gets past the first generation. If you help people grow to maturity and they never disciple anyone else, you haven’t made disciples. He has lived that frustration, and he has also seen some wonderful breakthroughs.
Three things come together in a group of three or four that reproduces itself: investing in a relationship, multiplying, and a process that actually changes people. Bring honest relationships and God’s Word together, hold each other to the changes you’ve promised, keep your eyes on the mission, and you’ve stepped into the Holy Spirit’s hothouse. That’s where lives change. Turn Jesus’ pattern of investing in a few into a practical plan, and everyone in the church can take part in his mission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). First, though, it helps to see how far the church has drifted from it.
Part One — The Discipleship Deficit: What Went Wrong and Why
Chapter 1 — The Discipleship Gap: Where Have All the Disciples Gone?
One researcher put the problem bluntly: “Most Americans who confess their sins to God and ask Christ to be their Savior live almost indistinguishable from the unrepentant sinners.” There’s a gap between what the New Testament expects of a disciple and what shows up in the church.
It shows up in who does the ministry. Paul wrote, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). Every believer has ministry gifts and is a part of the body that helps the whole body stay healthy. The New Testament describes a full employment plan. But in many churches, 20 percent of the people do the ministry for the other 80 percent. The church has been compared to a football game with twenty-two people on the field in desperate need of rest and 50,000 people in the stands in desperate need of exercise.
Sunday worship makes it worse. Many people arrive at church like reviewers. They think it’s the job of the people on stage to put on a meaningful, entertaining show, and their job is to review it on the way out the door: “Good sermon, Pastor.” Among Christians who have heard about spiritual gifts, nearly two-thirds either don’t know their gift, say they don’t have one, or claim gifts that aren’t in the Bible. They’re unemployed believers.
It shows up in how Christians live. Peter told believers to live so honorably that even people who slander them “may see your honorable deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:12). Yet 66 percent of Christians agree that “the highest goal in life is to enjoy it as much as possible.” David Kinnaman concludes that “many Christians are using the Way of Jesus as a means to pursuing the Way of Self.” The church is meant to be a contrast society that shapes its people with the values of the kingdom. Radical individualism has worn that away. It’s rare to find believers who give a group of Christ-followers permission to keep them faithful to their commitments. Many people like to say, “Jesus, yes. Church, no.” But there’s no such thing as solo discipleship.
And it shows up in witness. “You will be my witnesses,” Jesus says (Acts 1:8). Every believer has their own story and the story of Jesus to tell. Pastor Bill Hybels says people exploring faith look at Christians and ask themselves, “If I become a Christian, am I trading up or trading down?” Is your experience of the love and joy of Jesus worth passing on? For many believers, it seems not. The next question is why.
Chapter 2 — The Discipleship Malaise: Getting to the Root Causes
The Bible’s model for growing disciples is relationships. Jesus called the Twelve to “be with him” (Mark 3:14), because time with him would change them. Proximity produces disciples. Paul worked side by side with partners like Timothy and trained them to carry on after he was gone. Disciples are made in intentional relationships, where “iron sharpens iron” (Proverbs 27:17).
So the first root cause is that the church has tried to make disciples through programs. Programs run on information. They assume that if you know more, you’ll change. But John Ortberg has noticed that two people can hold the same beliefs and live very differently. One is loving, kind, gentle and gracious. The other is judgmental, rigid, brittle and prickly. What makes the difference is far more than what they know. Programs also run everyone through on the same schedule, the way a factory builds cars, and expect disciples to pop out the end of the line. But every person is different. Making a disciple takes an approach that fits the person.
Another root cause is that the gospel has been shrunk down to the benefits you get from Jesus. Ortberg suggests that between admirers of Jesus and followers of Jesus, the church has added a new category: users of Jesus. They use him to get into heaven when they die. As Dallas Willard puts it, most Christians have “no compelling sense” that following Jesus’ clear teachings “is of any vital importance” to their lives. People want abundance without obedience.
A related cause is that discipleship has become something for super-Christians. In many minds, being a Christian is about what Christ has done for you, and being a disciple is about what you do for Christ. Christian is a noun. Disciple is a verb. A Christian gets in on the benefits plan. A disciple has to pay a price. The elephant in the room in many churches is the unstated belief that you can be a Christian without being a disciple. But Jesus set one standard for everyone: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).
Imagine a new person comes to your church eager to grow and asks, “How do I become a fully devoted follower of Christ here?” Would you have an answer? It’s rare to find a church with a clear path. Only 1 percent of church leaders said they were doing “very well” at discipling new and young believers.
The futurist Joel Barker asks what he calls the paradigm shift question: “What is impossible to do in your business, but if it could be done, would fundamentally change it?” For the church, the question becomes this: how can the church grow Christians into self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ? His answer is small, highly accountable groups of three or four that multiply. People haven’t grown because they’ve never been personally discipled. Discipling, in this sense, is “a process that takes place within accountable relationships over a period of time for the purpose of bringing believers to spiritual maturity in Christ.” It isn’t a new idea. It’s the method Jesus used.
Part Two — Doing the Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way: The Bible as a Method Book
Chapter 3 — Why Jesus Invested in a Few
Following Christ takes cost and commitment, and neither one can happen in the anonymity of a crowd. Disciples can’t be mass-produced. It takes time and personal attention. So Jesus focused on a few. They could ask him what his words meant, and he could speak to what was really going on in their lives in a way he never could with the crowds.
It’s worth asking why Jesus didn’t use the usual ways of preserving a legacy. He didn’t write anything down or hire a scribe. When presidents leave office, they open a presidential library and write memoirs to shape how history sees them. Jesus relied on two things instead: the Holy Spirit and the Twelve. The legacy he wanted to leave was the changed lives of ordinary men who would carry on his work after he went back to the Father.
Ogden knows what happens when that kind of investment is missing. As a seventh grader at camp, he heard the invitation to receive Christ and wanted what Jesus offered: rest. Putting his trust in Christ opened the floodgates, and oceans of love seemed to roll over him. That evening he timidly raised his hand and told the group about meeting the living Christ. He filled out a decision card and turned it in. Back home, he tried hard to read his Bible every day and waited to hear from someone at the church. He heard from no one. The silence was resounding.
As a shy seventh grader, it never occurred to him to ask anyone, “Okay, now what?” So he drifted for years, grateful for Jesus but with no idea what to do next. His heart had been ripe for growth, and he lost those years. God later brought people into his life in high school and college who discipled him, but the church never did. That should never happen. The way to keep it from happening is to look closely at how Jesus trained the people he chose.
Chapter 4 — Jesus’ Preparatory Empowerment Model
Real multiplication only happens when disciples take the mission so deeply into themselves that they want to pass it on. Robert Coleman writes, “Better to give a year or so to one or two men who learn what it means to conquer for Christ than to spend a lifetime with a congregation just keeping the program going.”
With Jesus, the message couldn’t be separated from the man. When the Buddha was dying, he told his disciples it was his teaching that counted, not his person. With Jesus, everything centers on him. Training the Twelve wasn’t a course. It was a shared life. And look at who he chose. An investor in first-century Palestine would hardly have been reassured by a letterhead that read, “Peter and Andrew, James and John, fishermen. Matthew, tax collector. Simon, religious zealot.” They were hicks from the hill country of Galilee, “uneducated and ordinary men” (Acts 4:13).
And they didn’t pick him. He picked them. Disciples in that day usually checked out different rabbis and chose one to follow. Jesus issued the call himself: “Come and follow me.” It required a yes or a no. There’s no formation without submission.
Once they said yes, Jesus took them through four stages. In the first, he was a living example. The disciples watched quietly from the side and absorbed his message, his manner and his ministry. As Coleman puts it, “Knowledge was gained by association before it was understood by explanation.” Jesus said, “Everyone who is fully qualified will be like the teacher” (Luke 6:40). Discipleship isn’t passing information from head to head. It’s imitation, life to life. Even at the end, the disciples still hadn’t grasped that greatness is measured by going down, not up, so Jesus knelt and washed their feet.
In the second stage, Jesus was a provocative teacher. Class was always in session. The disciples watched him teach and heal in public, and then he’d turn to them to explain or ask questions. He didn’t hand out easy answers or fill-in-the-blank workbooks. He troubled them on purpose, challenging what they held dear, so they’d have to think things through. This stage is “I do. You help.”
In the third stage, Jesus was a supportive coach. He sent the Twelve, and later the Seventy, on a short-term mission with clear instructions: announce the kingdom, heal the sick, carry nothing, and walk away from any town that rejected them. Like baby birds, they had to be pushed out of the nest to see if they’d fly. But they knew the nest would still be there, and Jesus would be waiting to cheer their successes and sort out their questions. This stage is “You do. I help.”
In the fourth stage, Jesus handed his ministry over. By then the disciples had taken in enough to survive being scattered at the cross and to be empowered by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. A ministry is measured by how well it does after the leader leaves. Jesus prayed, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). Then he prayed for the people who would believe because of them. They were sent to reproduce. This stage is “You do. I watch.”
Pastors today are often satisfied when people depend on their teaching and care. Jesus wanted self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers. What Coleman wrote in 1963 is still largely true: “Jesus’ plan has not been disavowed; it has been ignored.” If you want your ministry to produce disciples who reproduce, you have to build it on Jesus’ method of investing in a few. Paul did the same thing, though he described it in different words.
Chapter 5 — Paul’s Empowerment Model: Spiritual Parenting
Paul never talks about having disciples. The phrase “make disciples” runs all through the Gospels and Acts, but it’s nowhere in his letters. After Pentecost, his focus is on the Holy Spirit living inside believers, so he talks about being “in Christ.” Discipleship is still there. It’s just said differently, and his main picture for it is parenting. He calls the people in his care infants and children, and he describes himself as a nursing mother, a mother in labor, and a father. The goal is to grow up in Christ, “so that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).
Maturity means reflecting the character of Jesus, but it doesn’t mean everyone ends up the same. C. S. Lewis says the opposite is true: “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.” There’s so much of Christ that millions of “little Christs,” all different, still won’t be enough to express him fully.
Like a family, Paul’s picture has stages. In childhood, disciples need to know their welfare is someone else’s deepest concern. Paul called Timothy “my beloved and faithful child in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:17). The adolescent stage is a lot like raising a teenager. Confidence grows through trial and error, so the parent rescues less and supports more. The discipler becomes a coach. Tom Landry, the legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, defined coaching as “making men do what they don’t want, so that they can become what they want to be.” People need that. It’s easy to slowly turn down the heat until you go lukewarm. People wind down unless something stirs the coals again.
The goal is adulthood. As Jack and Judith Balswick put it, “God’s ideal is that children mature to the point where they and their parents empower each other.” Healthy relationships are mutual. Whatever your maturity, you have something to give as well as receive. Paul called Titus “my partner and co-worker” and Epaphroditus “my brother and co-worker and fellow soldier.” Paul didn’t see himself as the sage on the stage but the guide by the side.
Many Christian leaders know all of this. Where the church usually fails is in turning the Bible’s vision into something that works in an actual church.
Part Three — Multiplying Reproducing Discipleship Groups: Church-Based Strategy for Disciple Making
Chapter 6 — Life Investment: It’s All About Relationships
Think of your ministry as a door. Without hinges, it just leans against the frame. Three hinges have to be attached: relational life investment, multiplication, and transformation.
The first hinge means moving from programs to relationships. Right now, people tend to come to church for what they can get, not what they can give. If you’re a pastor, picture ten years of producing weekend services for consumer Christians. You’re exhausted, and what do you have to show for it besides a bigger audience and the pressure to put on a bigger show? Disciple making isn’t a six-week or even a thirty-week program.
The difference starts with the invitation. Pray first, and ask the Lord to put certain people on your heart, the way Jesus called his disciples after a night of prayer. Then say something like this: “I am putting together a new group whose express purpose it is to help each of us become better followers of Christ. My role is to be on this journey with you. I need a group like this in my life as well.” The person should know they weren’t picked at random out of the church directory. One woman wrote her own invitation to a few friends: “This isn’t a coffee or gossip group or even a Bible study group. I’m stuck right now spiritually, and maybe you are too. Yes, it is one more thing to do each week, but oh how it could change the other hundred things you have to do.”
A program asks you to sign up, attend and finish the assignments. A relationship invites you into mutual love, honesty and accountability. A relationship is personal. That’s harder than it sounds, because it’s easier to give someone an outline than an hour. Everyone shares the work of preparing and opening up. A person in a pew isn’t accountable for anything. It fits each person, because no two people grow at the same speed. And it holds you accountable for life change, not just content. There’s a huge difference between knowing that Jesus said to love your enemies and actually loving them.
One definition pulls it all together: “Discipling is an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ.” Intentional means you meet on a regular schedule, not “Let’s get together when we can.” Walking alongside means no hierarchy. Challenge means your partners will sometimes push you to keep the commitments you’ve made together. And all of it has to be wrapped in love. The moment you suspect someone is trying to control you, you pull back.
The ultimate goal is reproduction, and that expectation needs to be planted at the very start. The biggest hurdle is turning receivers into givers. In real estate, the mantra is “Location. Location. Location.” In disciple making it should be “Relationship. Relationship. Relationship.” Programs give the illusion of productivity, because you can count the graduates. David Platt admits that making disciples is slow and messy, because it’s relational. As Platt puts it, Jesus hasn’t given an effortless formula. “He has given us people.”
Chapter 7 — Multiplication: Through the Generations
The second hinge is multiplication. Figuring out how to grow people who reproduce is one of the great frustrations of ministry. The math shows why it matters. Picture an evangelist who leads one person to Christ every day. After 16 years, that’s 5,840 people. Now picture a discipler who spends a year with one person, until both of them are ready to disciple someone else. After one year there are two, then four, then eight. For the first decade the evangelist is far ahead. But in year 13 the discipler pulls ahead, and by year 16 there are 65,536 disciples. Adding one person at a time can’t keep up with multiplying.
Multiplying doesn’t come easily when one person disciples one other. That setup puts the whole responsibility on the discipler, creates a hierarchy that tends toward dependence, limits the conversation, and gives the disciple only one model to follow. Do you really want your life to be the only picture someone has of following Christ?
Add a third person and things change. The group becomes the focus, and the discipler becomes a fellow participant. That’s why groups of three or four work so well. You show you’ve really received grace by passing it on. Discipling is paying it forward. But multiplying only matters if people are actually changing, and that takes the right conditions.
Chapter 8 — Transformation: The Four Necessary Ingredients
The third hinge is transformation. A hothouse is a greenhouse, a place where the conditions are set so things grow faster. A microgroup brings together four conditions that create that effect. When you open your hearts to each other in transparent trust, around the truth of God’s Word, in a spirit of life-change accountability, while you’re engaged in your God-given mission, you’re in the Holy Spirit’s hothouse of transformation.
The first condition is transparent trust. How much you’re willing to show others the parts of your life that need God’s touch is how much you’re inviting the Holy Spirit to make you new. People have an almost endless ability to fool themselves. “The heart is devious above all else,” Jeremiah wrote. “Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
Trust grows gradually, the way you wade into deeper water. A new group is anxious. Everyone wonders whether they’ll like these people and whether it’s safe. So start with fun storytelling that gets people laughing, because laughter is the ultimate icebreaker. One good opener is to ask each person to tell the story of their courtship, including something funny that happened. From there, trust grows through encouragement, because the world does a much better job of beating people up than building them up. Then it grows through carrying each other in hard times. Ogden has been in the trenches with men facing long unemployment, shaky marriages, runaway children, foreclosures, addictions and life-threatening illnesses. It’s a rare week that he doesn’t leave his microgroup thinking, “What a privilege it was to be with these men today. Where else would we be able to unload our burdens?”
The deep end is confessing sin and addiction to each other. Until you can say out loud what has a hold on you, you live under the tyranny of that darkness. James writes, “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed” (James 5:16). Once something is admitted in front of others, it begins to lose its power to control you. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Sin demands to have a man by himself.” Some of Ogden’s most powerful moments in a microgroup came when he could look a brother in the eye after a confession and say, “I want you to know in the name of Jesus Christ you are forgiven!”
The second condition is the truth of God’s Word in community. Why is Scripture second? It is primary, but it needs a setting where it can be worked through. Most churches have Bible studies, yet there’s little life change, because so many add information without application. Trust is what lets the Word take root.
The third condition is life-change accountability. For most Americans, letting others hold them accountable goes against what they hold most dear, their freedom. But a disciple is someone under authority. A clear covenant gives the group something to hold each other to. If you’ve committed to memorize Scripture or put a command into practice, you’re far more likely to do it when you know you’ll report back. The covenant also makes people decide at the start whether they’re ready for this.
The fourth condition is being engaged in your God-given mission. The group shares the good news of Jesus with coworkers, family, neighbors and friends, and each person asks God to show them the need in the church or the world that he has gifted them to meet. Knowing the conditions is one thing. Putting a group together is another.
Chapter 9 — Practicalities of Disciple Making
Have you ever had the nagging feeling that there’s something you’re supposed to do, but no picture of how to do it? Leaving a legacy of changed lives can feel that way. Here’s the plan. Invest in a relationship with two or three others for about a year. Meet weekly for about ninety minutes. Then multiply. Each person invites two or three others and does it all again. Same content, different relationships.
Start by praying about whom to invite. Jesus didn’t rush to name the Twelve. Six to nine months may have passed before he named his apostles, and he chose them after a night in prayer. Look for two qualities above all: loyalty and teachability. Jesus had a wonderful sense of humor. The day he made Peter the most successful fisherman on the lake, with nets so full they began to tear, was the day he called Peter to walk away from fishing. Peter left everything and followed him (Luke 5:11). That’s loyalty. Teachability is a hunger to learn and the humility not to care who you learn it from. Jesus turned the world upside down with fishermen, a tax collector and a religious zealot. Never underestimate what loyal, teachable people can do.
Ask the Lord to put on your heart the people he’s already working on, and keep praying until you’re settled. When you invite someone, don’t let them answer right away. They need time to weigh the cost: about four hours a week of preparation and meeting, plus the risk of opening up and the expectation of real change.
In a ninety-minute session, spend about thirty minutes on sharing, catching up and prayer, and an hour on the questions everyone prepared ahead of time. Take turns leading, so each person gains confidence that they could lead a group someday. The group will go about as deep as the leader does, so the leader goes first in sharing struggles and sins. And you don’t need every answer. It’s fine to say, “I don’t know, but I will find out.”
If you’re a pastor, ask how you want to measure your ministry. By sermons preached and hospital calls made? Or by the number of self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus? The church is in its present predicament because it doesn’t have enough leaders with the vision to think small. Start with the most grounded, respected followers of Jesus in your church. They probably have never been discipled themselves. In one church, a group of women was highly regarded for their spiritual depth, yet not one of them had ever been intentionally discipled or discipled anyone else. As the groups multiply, resist the urge to turn them into a program. In Ogden’s churches, they never made a public announcement recruiting people for discipleship groups.
At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, the American 4x100 relay team was set to break the world record. No one thought it could lose. Then, as the final leg approached, the Americans dropped the baton. In an instant the race was over. They had relied on their speed and hadn’t practiced the handoff enough. Jesus never made that mistake. He moved through his ministry with a relaxed urgency, knowing he was born to die, and all along the way he trained his disciples to carry on after he left. The baton had to be passed.
A legacy isn’t leaving money to your children or getting your name on a building. When you reach the shore and there’s a boat waiting to take you to Jesus, all that will matter is the names of the people who follow him because you walked with them toward maturity. There’s no better eternal investment. That kind of legacy isn’t built from a pulpit alone, which raises the question of what preaching can do.
Chapter 10 — The Role of Preaching in Making Disciples
If you could make disciples by preaching to people, the job would have been done a long time ago. Good preaching takes a lot of effort from the preacher and very little from the person in the pew. On the way out, people shake the pastor’s hand and say, “That was the best sermon on that subject I have ever heard!” That might keep a preacher going for another month. But no one holds the listener accountable to live it.
Most people don’t have anyone who asks them, “What did you hear today? What was the word from God that spoke to you?” Unprocessed preaching can even harden you. Unless you have a way to stay with what you heard, it’s too easy to close your heart. Jesus couldn’t pass on his character, message and mission to a crowd. It took life investment, teachable moments and practice runs on mission, and none of that happens by addressing an audience.
Preaching still has a job to do. The word Christian appears only three times in the New Testament. In the first five books alone, disciple shows up 268 times. The faithful preacher puts Jesus’ call in front of people the way Jesus said it: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Said that way, it becomes clear that you can’t be a Christian without being a disciple.