Albert Tate on the Disciple-Making Movement

August 15, 2019

If you are part of church multiplication, you are part of the disciple-making movement. Jesus said that He came because the Father sent him, and then He was sending you and me to pass this on. He wanted to take what was inside of us and have it move from generation to generation. In this, Jesus is saying that He is putting something in us and we were made for more than where we are.

In other words, there is more to come and there is more work to be done. It begins with you receiving this vision and this mission. So as we talk about made for more, it’s important that we understand and have a sobering reality of what more really is, what more really is. 

We can be so consumed with the wrong idea of what more is. I wanted to highlight four important things to know about the disciple-making movement, or four ways we can get the idea of “made for more”wrong.

Four Things to Remember For the Disciple-Making Movement

Something More is Not Something New

Something more does not necessarily mean something new. Some of you get so excited over new innovative ideas. In reality, something more is probably something old. Church planters often start in the same boat. We get our little strategy thing and we try to come up with a way to do it like it’s never been done before. Then, we try to come up with angles that have never been done before. These strategies can get a bit out there.

If you come up with something for the Church of Jesus Christ that has never been done before, you probably shouldn’t do it. Something more. It doesn’t mean something new. Get back to the basics.

Something more is probably something old.

Never Make One Disciple

One day I’m going to stand before God and he’s gonna say, not going to ask me about the moving lights. You’re not going to have to me about the homiletical point in the illustration on the third measure is not going to ask me about the children’s curriculum that I decided what he’s going to say. Did you do what Jesus told you to do?

Did you make disciples? And in that moment, I don’t want to be guessing out of it. That’s not the time for guesswork. Standing before Jesus is not the moment when you want to be like, oh

I don’t want to be like, yeah, I think somebody got discipled over in the children. I think somebody will cause I got an email one time and they said they were really touched. See my concern is that this idea of made for more. We’ve gotten great at building big churches, but we have no big impact. And I’m telling you, if your vision is for a big church and not big impact, you got the wrong vision. You being driven by the wrong thing.

Building big churches is not the same as having big impact.

As part of the disciple-making movement, we need to walk with others as opposed to pointing to next steps

I think we’ve minimized the discipleship-making movement to become so transactional. People come into our store and we point them to the next step on their journey. Instead, we should walk with them in their life. We should lead them to the place where God’s called them to be. 

The vision of the discipleship-making movement is that Jesus is calling us to be on the journey with people, not to just point people. That’s the “more” God is calling us to discipleship. 

Creating Something More Means It Looks More Like the Church, Not More Like You

It is time to stop building churches that look like you and to build churches that look like Jesus. 1 Corinthians 12 speaks about the whole body of Christ. 

If you want the fullness of God, you’ve got to get the fullness of God’s children.

We live in a culture in a world where they don’t know how to deal with diversity. This is because some people think diversity is a division. These people look at it as an invitation to fight. This diversity, the body of Christ, is not an invitation to fight. It is an opportunity to celebrate that all these folks can come together and reach for something greater than themselves, and that’s the love of Jesus Christ. And we put that on display on the wall.

When the body doesn’t work together, there’s no way we can walk and go forward. It’s like if you’ve ever hit your thumb with a hammer. The whole body comes together in an effort to redeem what just happened. We need to come together to create disciples. This is the only way to be successful in this disciple-making movement.

*adapted from Albert Tate’s main stage message Exponential Orlando 2019