The biblical foundation
of disciple-making ministry

Before Jesus rose from the dead and ascended, he entrusted the Great Commission to the disciples he had himself called and trained, and then he was taken up into heaven.

We thank the Lord that today, in obedience to this Great Commission, many of his servants in the Korean church are labouring and sweating not only for home mission and church renewal in their own country, but also in foreign lands for cross-cultural mission, having left their own country, their own people and their father's household. And we greatly praise God that countless young people are giving themselves to the Lord's service and preparing in all sorts of ways for mission at home and abroad.

Many are asking what direction world mission in the twenty-first century should take, and who should carry it. The eyes of the world are turned toward the Korean church, and many mission specialists agree that the Korean church must carry a large share of world mission. At such a moment, both for pastoral ministry and for world mission, it is of the highest importance that we recover the true meaning of the Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20 — the words the Lord spoke to his disciples almost as a last will — and at the same time apply it effectively in our pastoral and world mission work.

Look closely at Matthew 28:19-20 and four important verbs appear: “go”, “make disciples”, “baptize” and “teach”. What must be noticed, however, is that three of them — “going, baptizing, teaching” — are all participles, and only one verb, “make disciples”, is written as a second person plural, present, imperative. The three participles therefore support the main verb “make disciples”, and we reach the conclusion that the actual heart of the Great Commission lies in “Make Disciples”.

Yet many people, when they read this commission, think of it as though it were made up of several successive commands: the first command “Go”, the second “Make Disciples”, the third “Baptize”, the fourth “Teach them to obey” — and they interpret and teach it as a sequential interpretation.

But when we read Matthew 28:19-20 according to the sense of the original, we can conclude that the fitting translation of the three participles is “Going, Baptizing, Teaching”, with the single imperative “Make Disciples”.

Moreover, the true sense of the Great Commission “make disciples of all nations” is that all peoples are to be made disciples of Jesus — that is, disciples of Jesus who influence the world as salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). It can therefore be understood as the Lord's commission to develop Christian leaders (Christian Leadership Development). So we are to go and, on our mission fields, develop local believers into disciples of Jesus, that is, into leaders; and then to send those local leaders to their own peoples to preach the gospel, raise up leaders and plant churches, so that they not only evangelize their own people but also lift up their eyes to the fields and take part in the world mission of making disciples of all nations.

The concrete content of this “Make Disciples” can be seen in the ministry and life of Jesus. Looking at his ministry in Matthew 9:35-38, Jesus went through all the towns and villages 1) teaching in the Jewish synagogues, 2) preaching the good news of the kingdom, and 3) healing every disease and sickness. But when he saw the crowds he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd, and he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

He did not only ask his disciples to pray for workers for the harvest. As Luke 6:12 shows in the same context — “One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles” — we see that Jesus himself took this matter to God and prayed all night over it, discerning his will. If so, what is God's answer, the solution, to the urgent need of the hour in which the harvest is plentiful but the workers for the harvest are few?

It lies in the method Matthew 10 shows us: calling the twelve disciples, setting them apart, training them and sending them out. From the Synoptic Gospels we know that after calling the twelve, Jesus spent much time with them, teaching them the secrets of God and training them. Through a public ministry of living together and travelling together to preach, he himself set the example of a training ministry for workers. And after he had accomplished on the cross the whole work of redemption for sinful humanity, and died, and risen on the third day, before he ascended he charged the disciples he had himself trained to “make disciples of all nations”, and was taken up into heaven — a ministry Jesus had already carried out and modelled himself. What, then, did the disciples who received this commission do?

The Holy Spirit whom Jesus had promised came at Pentecost upon the 120 believers praying in the upper room of Mark's house. When Peter, one of Jesus' disciples, preached the gospel, three thousand and then five thousand repented, the early church was established, and the Lord's twelve disciples carried the ministry like pillars of the Jerusalem church. The gatherings of the church in those days were marked by small group dynamics — meeting in private homes to praise the Lord, to share fellowship with one another, and to share the word and the bread (Acts 2:42-47) — and as many disciples of Christ were raised up in that way, the church grew in power.

Paul's letters also speak of the house church: “The churches in the province of Asia send you greetings. Aquila and Priscilla greet you warmly in the Lord, and so does the church that meets at their house” (1 Corinthians 16:19). Church history likewise records how, following the twelve apostles, the church fathers who had been taught directly by the apostles — the apostles' own disciples — carried on the gospel and the tradition of the church.

In Acts 16 the apostle Paul met Timothy and took him along on his missionary journey. From that time Paul cared for Timothy as a spiritual son, taught him, and trained him by ministering together with him. When Timothy had come through his season of testing and was serving as a pastor of the church in Ephesus, Paul wrote to him in his last letter, the pastoral epistle of 2 Timothy 2:1-2.

As we all agree, 1 and 2 Timothy are pastoral epistles. Within that passage appear four spiritual generations teaching and training one another — “Paul”, “his spiritual son Timothy”, “reliable people”, and “others” — and a small group (cell group) form centred on a leader. Paul is eagerly looking for exactly this kind of spiritual nurturing relationship, this teaching and learning relationship, to take shape in the local church, and for small group dynamics to come alive so that each individual church grows in health.

On this point above all, the Korean church, which has grown with pulpit preaching at its centre, urgently needs such ministry if it is to grow in a healthy way, balanced in quality as well as quantity. And such ministry is not only for the local church as a whole or for its small groups: the personal one-to-one mentoring ministry that follows the example of the apostle Paul — who admonished and taught “each person” and laboured with all the energy of the Spirit's working to present “each person” mature in Christ (see Colossians 1:28-29) — must also be applied in our pastoral and mission work.