[This is a story from Ryan Sudsberry, one of our missionaries in the Dominican Republic.]
My family and I serve as missionaries with GO Ministries. Our role is to accomplish the vision of seeing one thousand new churches planted, starting in the Dominican Republic. We have served in church planting ministries for the last eighteen years in the United States, United Kingdom, and, for the last eight years, throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Our ministry vision comes from the Bible. 2 Timothy 2:2 says, “Be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others.”
Simply put, we empower local leaders in their country and ministry context through training, providing tools, pastoral care, and accountability all around making disciple makers. When those disciples make disciples and the gospel spreads throughout a community a new church is born.
Going back to 2 Timothy 2:2, we see four generations of discipleship: Paul to Timothy, Timothy to teachers, and teachers to others. Paul, Timothy, teachers, others.
Have you experienced this? Have you ever made a disciple? Has someone ever intentionally discipled you?
The passage goes beyond evangelism as we understand here that Timothy, the teachers, and the others already believe. As followers of Jesus, we must have a long-term mentality of discipleship. We must continually be looking down the road. It is essential for church leaders and pastors to have this mindset.
That’s the mentality I try to have. When I take on a new disciple, I ask them to coffee. During this first meeting together, I let them know that I will disciple them over the next six months to a year until they have found who it is that they are going to disciple. It is a slow process of walking through the Bible, talking about Jesus in every facet of our life, and obeying what it is that God expects out of us as believers.
There is a quote by Dan Spader that is hard for me to shake. He says, “If your disciple has never made a disciple, have you really made a disciple?”
If we look at the community of Gurabo in Santiago, Dominican Republic, we can see this playing out with our leadership and disciple makers. Amado Batista discipled Odalis Rodriguez. Odalis Rodriguez discipled Elvis Jaques. Elvis Jaques is discipling Alan Martinez. That is four generations at present and just last month I learned of a couple others getting involved.
Through this culture of discipleship, our team has gone from eighteen churches to well over two hundred churches over the last several years. This is rapid growth and multiplication of disciples and thus churches.
This is possible for you as well. It starts slow. It begins with you praying and asking God for the person you should invite to discipleship. Then coffee and an invitation to walk together for a season. Then the Bible, life, marriage, parenting, finances, work, all of life and how God is involved in it all. Then they repeat the process and you do as well.
Now the big question: Who is it that you will ask to disciple you or will you choose to disciple?
May God do a similar work in Plainfield as He is doing all around the world!