But what if it wasn’t so far-off after all?
What if there was an efficient way to reach the roughly 3 billion people in the world who still have never heard the Gospel (based on estimates from joshuaproject.net)?
Create Relationships, Make Disciples
Disciples are followers. Because a disciple cannot exist without someone to follow, a relationship is intrinsic to discipleship. As Christians who are trying to make disciples to finish the Great Commission, we are essentially asking others to walk alongside us as we follow Christ.
But if relationships are truly necessary to discipleship, when looking at international missions, how can we bridge the cultural divides and language barriers that seem to impede relationship-building?
The answer? We don’t have to bridge those obstacles ourselves.
Instead, we can equip those who already have horizontal relationships established with their neighbors. At T-Net, we train indigenous Christians to make disciples who make disciples because they already share a common language, space, and cultural value system with their neighbors. This is not to argue against traditional mission methods, but simply to illustrate a more efficient way to work at finishing the Great Commission.
We could spend time learning a remote language dialect and then go live in an unreached village ourselves trying to get a strong, disciple-making church going.
Or, we could train someone who lives in that village; equip them with disciple-making training and tools; fan their passion to reach their neighbors for Christ; and watch the Gospel spread.
Indigenous Leaders Matter
We at T-Net have already been able to see the amazing impact of equipping indigenous leaders around the world.
Just hone in on Burkina Faso, over half of whose population is Muslim. T-Net entered the country in 2017 and began training just 20 pastors in 1 training center. These pastors received a practical education, such as how to make a disciple, how to plant a church, and how to teach the Bible. They worked hard to implement what they learned as they learned, all while continuing to work in their existing ministry positions.
Now, fast-forward to 2021. In only four years, the numbers exploded from 20 pastors to 1,500 pastors and church leaders in training across 70 training centers.
And what does this growth mean practically?
Part of T-Net’s training involves students actively planting new churches. These 1,500 pastors and church leaders are in the process of starting 1,500 brand-new church plants in Burkina Faso alone. Each one of those church plants has been founded with discipleship in mind, with a focus on going out into the surrounding region to make even more disciple-makers in order to win that region for Christ.
How long would it have taken us to plant those 1,500 churches without indigenous disciple-makers?
Indigenous leaders are and will be essential to finishing the Great Commission because the Gospel travels quicker from their lips than ours due to their preexisting relationships with their neighbors, ones which would have taken us years to develop. Not to mention that indigenous disciples can go into restricted areas with the Gospel much easier than we personally ever could.
All About Finishing
Training others how to make disciple-makers is like teaching a man how to fish instead of simply giving him one to eat. It’s like what Jesus did. He said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19, ESV).
Equipping indigenous leaders is a biblical and efficient approach to disciple-making, an approach centered on finishing the Great Commission.
