Demystifying Discipleship, Part 1: Introduction

We hear a lot about discipleship in the church these days. Pastors and teachers often point out that discipleship is the focus of the Great Commission (we’ll get to that in a bit), but a recent Barna study (2022) concluded that while about 56% of Christians are being discipled, only about 33% are discipling others. 

A couple of caveats. 

• Accurate surveying is a complicated business; minor inattention can produce huge errors, and every survey that does its statistical work prudently will report a certain “margin of error,” usually 3 to 7 percent, based on sample size and other factors. (The margin of error in this study is +/- 1.5% at 95% confidence.) But even a very large sample size can yield unreliable results—as is the case in virtually every Facebook poll, in which the respondents self-select. That said, Barna is a well-regarded research group. 

• Nowhere does the article report how Barna defined “Christian”; it says simply that the respondents self-identified as Christian. (I didn’t read the study itself, which is behind a paywall.) Given Barna’s history, I think it’s safe to assume that they were interacting with evangelicals. 

• The article also doesn’t define “discipleship,” though I’m sure the study itself does. Given that only 56% percent of Christians are “being discipled,” I’m confident that the definition does not include pulpit ministry. 

With those factors in mind, I think we can take the percentages as reasonably accurate. That said, though the percentage of Christians who are being discipled is significantly higher than the percentage of those who are discipling others, I still think it’s lower than it ought to be; and the number of those discipling others is disturbingly low. 

When a subset of the survey group was asked why they’re not discipling anyone, the most common response was that they didn’t think they were qualified. I rather suspect that apathy and/or fear play a larger role than the survey indicates, but because people are not likely to give answers that find fault with themselves, I doubt that any survey would yield reliable data on that question. 

So then. A large percentage of self-proclaimed Christians are rendering only casual obedience, if that, to Jesus’ last command. 

Maybe we should try to clarify, in a few posts, what discipleship is all about. 

I plan to proceed by tracking the basic journalistic questions: 

• Why should we disciple others? 

• What does discipleship consist of? 

• When should we call for a decision in evangelism? 

• What should we teach the disciple about salvation? (This will consist of a blog series I posted some years ago. A link will suffice.) 

• How should the disciple be enabled to grow? (This too will be an earlier series on this blog.) 

We’ll start down this path next time. 

Photo by Nathan McDine on Unsplash