Defining “Discipleship”

By Justin Rossow

In my work for Next Step Press, I get to talk about “discipleship” with different people from across the country and, sometimes, even around the world. I’ve noticed that the concept of “discipleship” tends to be slippery; as soon as you think you have a handle on what someone is saying, you discover they are talking about something else.

Depending on your agenda for the day or what you had for breakfast, you might think about discipleship in one of several different ways. While those different definitions share some common ground, they are also quite unique. So what do you think you are doing when you go to “disciple” someone?

“Discipleship” is at the heart of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), and therefore central to what we think we are supposed to be doing as Church, both collectively and individually. But do we have a clear idea what “discipleship” actually means?

Discipleship as Outreach

If you put the emphasis on the “go and make” part of the Great Commission—“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…”—then discipleship is clearly about mission work and evangelism. “Making disciples” comes to be shorthand for the local outreach or even foreign mission work of the local congregation. You A) go; then B) you make disciples. It seems rather intuitive.

One natural outcome of treating “discipleship” as a synonym for “outreach” is that many “Discipleship Pathways” tend to be steps you take to become a Christian, or to become a member, or to find belonging at a local church. That kind of pathway or program usually has a series of steps that lead you to a final destination or status. You often have a class that culminates in a kind of graduation ceremony, a baptism or New Member Welcome.

“Discipleship” by default becomes either what you do to people who aren’t members (mission work) or what you have to do before you can become a member (pathway to membership). But what happens after you join that local church?

Discipleship as Education

Another option is to emphasize the “teach them” part of Matthew 28: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations … teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you.” That emphasis on teaching doesn’t mean you are against making new members; just that you are focused on what do with them once they get into (or graduate from) your new member class.

Way back in the ‘80s, my dad become a “Minister of Discipleship” at our local congregation. He was kind of a DCE (Director of Christian Education) before there were DCEs. I served for seven years as the “Pastor for Adult Discipleship” at a church in north Texas. Positions like Youth Pastor or Director of Family Life Ministries similarly seek to address the same need in the local congregation: how do we help the people who are already here grow and mature in their faith?

This definition of “discipleship” naturally focuses on things like curriculum, mentoring, and passing down the faith for both adults and kids. The adage that “discipleship is the engine that drives outreach” makes sense when you see discipleship as equipping the saints: education-discipleship (helping believers mature) leads to outreach-discipleship (reaching new people). Those who have been better equipped and have a deeper knowledge of Scripture will (so the thinking assumes) be more likely to reach out to people who don’t know Jesus.

“Discipleship” in this sense can still have outreach as an end goal, but it is decidedly focused on education or formation. At its best, discipleship as education really does help people grow into a deeper relationship with Jesus and a fuller understanding of the Bible and of their own role as everyday missionaries. When it’s not working right, discipleship as education creates a closed system of information that can separate the study of God’s Word from real life, and therefore from real people. Maybe we need a definition of discipleship that includes more than just education…

Discipleship as Everything

Perhaps you have heard that the “go” part of the Great Commission is dependent on the primary directive: “make disciples.” That’s why you sometimes get translations of the Great Commission like, “As you go, make disciples of all nations…” Such a broad phrase certainly includes both outreach and education; but it doesn’t stop there. If you focus on the “as you go,” it’s easy to turn “discipleship” into everything you do, all the time.

Now, that’s not entirely wrong. Discipleship is intended to be something woven into the fabric of your everyday life. As you get up, as you lie down, as you sit at home, as you walk along the road (Deuteronomy 6)—that’s where discipleship takes place. It’s what you do, and can’t help but do, all the time.

Everything in your life is discipling you into something; either into a deeper dependence on Jesus or into something else. So there is truth to the assertion that “discipleship is everything.” But as a way of guiding your direction or shaping your life together as a local congregation, that definition is too broad to be helpful.

Have you ever been in a church budget meeting where you are trying to decide which programs or initiatives or opportunities are going to get paid for next year? With finite resources, you can’t invest in everything. So what do you choose to do, and what do you let go for another time?

If you want to align the mission and direction of your various ministries, then you’ll want to focus your budget on a clear expression of how your congregation disciples people. If discipleship is everything, however, then everything belongs in your budget.

I don’t think I have met a church mission statement that couldn’t be bent to fit any given ministry. Or perhaps better, I have never met a ministry that couldn’t be contorted to match the shape of any particular mission statement.

Is your mission statement about “sharing the love of Jesus”? Well, that’s exactly what our Tuesday night golf league is all about! Does your church want to “make disciples who make disciples”? What better way to do that than our Advent Tea? Do you want to “disciple the nations”? Why, that’s just what we do on the Board of Evangelism!

If discipleship is everything, then anything can be framed as discipleship.

Which, up to a certain point, is probably OK. You are discipling people into something at golf league, Advent Tea, and Evangelism Board meetings. The question is, do those activities form the kind of values, habits, and attitudes for following that cultivate dependence on Jesus in relationship with others?

Discipleship could happen in just about any church group or activity. But if your definition of discipleship is so broad that it automatically includes everything we do around here, then you can easily miss the question, what kinds of disciples are we actually forming around here?

If your definition of discipleship is going to serve as a way to focus and align what you do as an individual or congregation, then we’ll need to dial in and get a little more specific than “everything.”

Discipleship as Walking With

I recently got to work with a small group of congregational leaders who were tasked with creating a clear “discipleship pathway” at their church. Almost immediately, these questions of definition became crucial to understanding what they were trying to do, and therefore what options they saw as relevant.

For one person on the team, “making disciples” naturally seemed to mean outreach, so “discipleship” was primarily about evangelism. Other people identified the church’s education ministries as “discipleship.” It didn’t take long for all of the programs at their congregation to get added in, and soon we were left with the “discipleship is everything” model, which didn’t actually help them decide what their task force was supposed to be doing in real life.

I could relate to their frustration! Been there; done that.

So we talked some more. We discussed what values and attitudes are essential for disciples. We talked about their own personal experience with coming to faith, or growing in faith, or walking with others as they began to engage with following Jesus in new ways.

Pretty soon, we were talking about “reciprocal mentoring” or “sharing life together.” The team recognized the organic and relational aspect of an experience of “discipleship.” One man tentatively suggested this definition: “Finding a small way to need Jesus today.”

When we focus on the “making” part of “make disciples,” we naturally assume the “disciple” is the end product of an evangelism or education process. The “discipleship is everything” model simply expands that “making” process in all directions: everything we do adds to the end product we are trying to create.

But the Great Commission is not about a production process. “Disciples” are not the things we are supposed to be “making.” What Jesus actually said in the Great Commission was something closer to, “As you go, disciple all nations…” And when you focus on “disciple” as an action verb, not an end product, you create a very different set of expectations around discipleship.

The verb “to disciple” would have meant to walk with someone, over time, and let them listen in to your conversation and eavesdrop on your prayers. You would eat meals together, and talk together, and debrief after a debate with another teacher.

In our industrial culture, the most efficient (and therefore best) way we know how to reliably manufacture an end product is an assembly line; the values and assumptions of that standardized and professionalized process can infiltrate our assumptions about “making” an end product called a “disciple.” (For more, see the 2025 book Escaping the Assembly Line.)

The walking with paradigm, in contrast, emphasizes ongoing movement in an organic, inefficient process over time. Key elements of a Walking With definition of “discipleship” include things like:

• Directional orientation and dependence on Jesus
• Small next steps and movement over time
• An adventure mindset, experiment, and exploration
• Communal, relational experience, with someone on your rope

That’s the kind of “discipleship” my new friends were trying to put their finger on as they went to plan a discipleship pathway at their church. Because it is non-standardized, it gets messy. But it’s not impossible to describe or cultivate. And the energy in the room went up significantly whenever these leaders started imagining a Walking With kind of vision for equipping people and aligning their congregation’s discipleship efforts.

Conclusion

What did Jesus mean when he gave the command, “Go therefore and disciple the nations…?” He probably wasn’t focused on a standardized end product called a “disciple.” And he certainly didn’t hold the industrial values of efficiency and standardization.

From the calling of the first followers to his post-Easter appearance on the Emmaus Road, Jesus seems to live out a Walking With kind of relationship when it comes to discipleship. I suspect that an ongoing Walking With relationship is what Jesus had in mind when he ended the Great Commission with a promise: “Behold! I am with you always, to the end of the Age.”

So is outreach a part of Walking With? Certainly! Jesus walked with his disciples into places like a Samaritan village or a tax collector’s house for the sake of reaching the lost. Jesus sent the disciples out with the Gospel (but still in community) to go to places he himself was about to go.

Evangelism and mission work, local and abroad, can be vital parts of discipleship; as long as the focus is on needing Jesus, and looking for what Jesus is doing, and inviting people into an ongoing adventure rather than coming up with an efficient and reliable process to turn the raw resource of the nations into an end product of a standardized disciple (that unsurprisingly looks just like you).

Is education a part of Walking With? Of course! Jesus spent lots of time teaching not only the crowds but his most intimate circle of disciples. Often what they were doing as they walked along the road was interpreting Scripture or relearning things like prayer. The teaching ministry of the Church is a vital part of discipleship; as long as it doesn’t leave the learning in the classroom and wall off Scripture from the messy complexities of daily life.

Is everything discipleship if you are focused on Walking With? In a sense, yes; or at least, everything could be. When you are actively looking for where Jesus is speaking into your life, when you regularly wonder what response the Spirit is shaping in you, when you move forward with a sense of adventure and confidence knowing that the Father’s promises cover this next step, then all aspects of your life become the playground for faith and following.

But that doesn’t mean everything in your life automatically cultivates the kind of attitudes, habits, and relationships that help you grow in dependence on Jesus.

Ultimately, that’s what I think my friends on that discipleship task force are actually trying to do: find ways to use the people, places, and programs of their church to cultivate the heart and mindset that cultivates discipleship. Their experiments will have to include both outreach and education. In fact, they will try to describe how almost anything could fit with their vision for cultivating dependence on Jesus—though it’s just as important that they describe how to tell when something doesn’t fit.

But mostly, I think the team is well on their way to defining discipleship as intentional relationships in support of the ongoing adventure of walking with Jesus in your everyday life. That’s a definition I could get behind.

It seems to me, that’s the kind of definition Jesus had in mind all along.

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