Why Your Church's Discipleship Strategy Might Be Working Against You
by Doug Parks
I once sat with a church leadership team that had spent thirty days in prayer trying to decide whether they were going to be a discipleship church or an evangelistic church.
I understand how they got there. Discipleship has become a sophisticated conversation in church leadership. Evangelism has become an awkward one.
The Barna Group's research confirms it: a smaller percentage of Christians than ever believe they have any responsibility to share their faith, and nearly half of millennial Christians say it's wrong to try at all.
So you can see why a church staff would stop pressing the issue. The discipleship conversation gets louder, and the evangelism conversation gets quieter, and over time the two just drift apart.
You invest more in small groups, more in teaching, more in spiritual formation. All good things. But the people in those groups stop thinking about the person on their street who doesn't yet know Jesus. And because the conversations are rich and the content is good, your church feels like it's going deeper.
But Jesus spent his entire ministry reaching people while developing people. He never separated the two. If what you're calling deeper doesn't look like the life he modeled, it's worth asking what you're getting deeper into.
Jesus was pretty clear about this. "Go and make disciples of all the nations... teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you." That's one sentence covering both. You can't make a disciple without first reaching someone. You can't claim to be a disciple without reaching someone.
Greg Holt at Beulahland Bible Church put it as clearly as anyone I've heard. He realized his church had been treating altar calls as endpoints rather than starting points. They had unlinked evangelism and discipleship without knowing it. Most churches that discover this find it the same way Greg did, not through a failure but through an honest look at what was already happening.
If you want to see where your church sits, ask your team two questions.
What percentage of the people in your congregation could name someone they're personally praying for who doesn't yet know Jesus?
And when someone does come to faith in your church, what happens next? Is there a relationship ready to walk them forward, or just a class to sign up for?
If either answer is unclear, evangelism and discipleship may have drifted apart in your church.
The path forward isn't choosing one over the other. It's holding them together. When your people are personally engaged in the lives of neighbors, coworkers, and family members who don't yet know Jesus, it changes how they read their Bible, how they pray, and how they show up on Sunday.
That's what real depth looks like. Not a church that studies more, but a church that lives the way Jesus did.
If you want a more structured way to do that work, the Radical Alignment Assessment (alignmychurch.com) gives your team a common framework to rate where you actually are — together — before you talk about where you're going.