Dietrich Bonhoeffer memorably wrote on the cost of discipleship, but he’d be the first to insist that the Christian life involves more than simply following Jesus by being his disciple. Better put, Christ’s call to discipleship (Luke 14:26–33) includes his call to disciple-making (Matthew 28:19).
And yet we live in a day in which everything else in life seems to be going in some direction other than life-on-life disciple-making. Let’s be honest, disciple-making isn’t rocket science. The vision is simple enough. Our need isn’t for more information but to do what we already know we should do, and in some ways want to do, but simply haven’t or aren’t yet. Most of us know enough; we’re just not doing it. Because we haven’t yet been willing to embrace the costs. We intuit the costs, but we haven’t embraced them.
Perhaps what might help us over our hurdles is not to hide how costly disciple-making is, but to be utterly honest and explicit about the costs, and hold them out in the light for us to see, and then find whether something in us might just rise to the peculiar glory of it all. God makes foolish the wisdom of the world, with its shortcuts and mass production, through the folly of disciple-making. As he did when his Son took a rag-tag band of uneducated peasants, invested in them at depth, and launched them out to change the world. Read More
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