We've Been Making Christians

I've been sitting with a question for a while now. It started with some reading, moved into prayer, and has slowly become a conviction I can't set aside. The question is this: what is the church actually for?

I know the Sunday school answer. I've given it myself, from more pulpits than I can count. But somewhere in the reading and the reflecting, a distinction I had always half-noticed came into sharp focus — and I haven't been able to let it go since.

Dallas Willard pointed it out, and John Mark Comer picked it up and carried it further. The word Christian appears in the New Testament exactly three times. The word disciple — or apprentice, as Willard and Comer prefer to render the idea — appears two hundred and sixty-nine times. That is not a rounding error. That is a portrait of what the early church understood itself to be doing.

They were not trying to make Christians. They were making disciples.

“The New Testament was written by apprentices of Jesus, for apprentices of Jesus.”

I want to be careful here, because I am not interested in a semantic argument. The word matters only because the concept behind it matters. A Christian, in the way the word tends to be used in American church culture, is someone who has made a decision — prayed a prayer, signed a card, walked an aisle. That decision may be genuine and life-changing. I believe it can be. But the decision is not the destination. It is the door — and John Wesley, who knew something about the journey of salvation, described it exactly that way. The porch is where prevenient grace meets us before we even know we need God. The door is justification — the threshold of faith. But the house — the whole house — is sanctification. A lifetime of growing in holiness. No one moves into a porch.

A disciple is someone who has walked through the door and is learning to live in the house. In the first-century world, that meant becoming an apprentice — someone who had attached themselves to a rabbi not merely to learn his teaching but to absorb his life. The goal was not to pass a theology exam. The goal, as Comer puts it, was threefold: to be with the rabbi, to become like the rabbi, and to do what the rabbi does. You didn't just study the teacher. You followed him. You watched how he prayed, how he treated people, how he handled conflict, how he faced death. Formation was the whole point.

Jesus called twelve men to follow him in exactly that mode. And what he said at the end — what we call the Great Commission — was not "go and get decisions." It was go and make disciples.

We have, in many places, settled for something smaller. We have built systems optimized for getting people in the door and getting them to raise their hand. What we have not always done is build systems for what comes after — for the slow, difficult, beautiful work of formation. Of actually becoming, over time, the kind of person Jesus was.

That work is slow. It is not a weekend retreat or a six-week class, though those things have their place. It is a life reoriented around a different kind of learning — learning that happens in community, in accountability, in the daily practice of the means of grace. It requires effort. But here is what it does not require: it does not require that you earn anything. Grace opens the door — and we would be foolish not to enter the house once it has been opened for us. As the saying goes, grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning. Those are not the same thing either.

I have given a lot of my ministry to preaching. I believe in preaching — I think the sermon, when it is working, is the text speaking rather than a lecture about the text. But I have come to believe that preaching alone does not make disciples. It informs them. It forms them, to a degree. But the kind of formation Jesus modeled happened up close, in the daily texture of shared life, with people who were watching and being watched.

That is what I want to think through in this series. Not as a critic of the church — I love the church, and I have given my life to it — but as a pastor asking an honest question: are we doing the thing Jesus told us to do? And if we've drifted, what does it look like to come back?

The only textbook we need for that journey is already in our hands. Everything else — and there is good everything else — serves the Word. The Word does not serve them.

We'll take that up in Part 2.