Actually, what we really need is a return to the model of Jesus, which will feel completely new.
The church in America is not lacking for resources. We have conferences. We have curricula. We have podcasts, platforms, and personality-driven programs that can fill a calendar twelve months of the year. We have more tools for discipleship than any generation of Christians in history.
And we are producing fewer disciples than almost any generation before us.
Something is wrong. And I don’t think it’s complicated.
We have forgotten how Jesus made disciples.
I have been thinking about this for a long time — decades of church planting, pastoral ministry, seminary teaching, and now the work of shepherding pastors in crisis. In all of that time, one pattern keeps surfacing. The churches that are actually producing disciples — men and women who are living passionately for and like Jesus — are churches where someone is doing what Jesus did. Not what our best conference speaker recommended. Not what the latest church growth model prescribes. What Jesus did.
What did Jesus do?
He spent time with people. Intentional time. Purposeful time. He called twelve men to be with him, and he let that nearness do its work.
Three words in Mark 3:14 have stayed with me for years: “so that they might be with him.” Not so that they might attend his lectures. Not so that they might complete his curriculum. Not so that they might fill his weekend service. But with him. In his presence. Watching how he moved through a crowd. Listening to how he talked to Pharisees. Watching how he prayed. Seeing how he treated children and lepers and Roman soldiers and weeping widows, and questioning young men, and women of the street.
That was his method. I have a name for it: Intentional Withness.
Over the next series of posts, I want to unpack that concept — what it is, why we need it, and how to get it. It is not an academic treatment. I am not a scholar. I am a practitioner. A church planter. A pastor. A shepherd of shepherds. I write the way I talk, and I talk like a man who has been in the middle of this work for a long time and has learned some things the hard way.
If you are a pastor or a ministry leader or a missional Christian who wants to actually make disciples — not just manage attenders — read on.
This is for you.
One word before we begin. The term ‘intentional withness’ is my own coinage — a deliberate pairing of two words to name something Jesus was doing that we need to do better. If it helps you think more clearly about the work of disciple-making, use it. If it annoys you, use your own word. The concept is what matters.
Add your comments to the mix.
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