Verse #10: Make disciples of all people

Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:19–20 (NIV2011)

The Great Commission should be the goal of your group. Accept it as your God-given assignment: make disciples of all nations.

Impossible, you say? Never forget that the Great Commission was originally given to a small group.

Let that sink in.

The Great Commission was originally given to a group of twelve. Many of you who read this have more in your group than Jesus had in His group. You teach people every week than Jesus gave the Great Commission to. Embrace the Great Commission and your group’s Commission.

Not only do you have more people, you have better tools. You have Facebook to help you keep up with people. We have smart phones. We have apps on our smart phones that empower us to do Greek word studies that would take hours the old fashioned way. We can call anywhere in the world for a fraction of what it used to cost.

We have Study Bibles. We have cars. We have the Internet. We have all kinds of tools that help us to be and make disciples.

Yes, but how?

The best way I know to be obedient to the Great Commission is through the power of doubling groups. A group of ten that doubles every eighteen months will reach a thousand people in ten years.

Let that sink in. Work out the math for yourself if you don’t believe me. Work out the math for yourself in you do believe me. There is nothing like the power of reproducing groups.

How to grow a group

The gospel spreads best on the bridge of relationships. The most likely people for your group to reach is the friends and family of the people who are in your group. I was blessed to sit under the teaching of Oscar Thompson for a short while during the last semester of his life. He says:

In the New Testament church, the gospel always moved on lines of relationship—to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the uttermost parts of the earth—in waves that seemed to move outwardly. Have you ever thrown a rock in a pond and watched the waves move in all directions until they reached every edge of the pond? Well, that was the pattern I saw. The gospel of Jesus Christ began to spread through relationships in ever-growing circles.

If you read through the New Testament, you will see the centrality of relationship. It is nothing profound, but it is just as natural as anything can possibly be. If something is genuine in my life and your life, the natural thing to want to do is to share it with those we know. Isn't that reasonable to assume?

The gospel spreads best on relationships. There are two ways to take advantage of this principle. The first is to pray for and reach out to friends, relatives and neighbors. Use the existing bridge of the relationships to carry the gospel to people who do not know Christ.

The second way is to build bridges. This is what “inviting every member and every prospect to every fellowship” is all about. The fellowship is not about the fellowship. If it is a bowling party, it is not about bowling. It is about the conversation that is going on while other people are bowling. The stronger the relationships, the more likely the gospel will spread. Bill Hybels’s formula looks like this:

First, in order for salt to have the greatest possible impact, it must be potent enough to have an effect. And second, for any impact to take place, salt has to get close to whatever it’s supposed to affect. So Jesus may have chosen the salt metaphor because salt requires both potency and proximity to do its thing.

That leads us back to the formula:

HP + CP + CC = MI

Having established that the end purpose of the formula is to produce Maximum Impact, we can now move to the front and look at the first two elements needed to reach that goal: HP + CP. HP means High Potency, and CP, Close Proximity.

Research of the results of Billy Graham crusades has revealed similar findings:

A follow-up study to a Billy Graham Crusade showed the importance of focusing on reachable people. The study, conducted one year following a large crusade, looked for the people who had made a decision during the course of the event, to find out how many were then involved in a local church. It turned out that only fifteen out of every one hundred people who came forward to make a Christian commitment could later be found participating in a local church. However, of those people who were active, 82 percent had a friend or relative in that church prior to their decision! Most of the new converts found in churches one year later had been in the Extended Family of a church member, and part of that church’s Potential Congregation. The prior relationship with the church member was the bridge for the new Christian to come into the church and kept that new believer incorporated.

An additional study underscores the fact that friends and relatives are a key in the process of making a religious decision. The Mormon sect keeps accurate records of the successes and failures of its mission endeavors. A study published in the American Journal of Sociology reports that the success rate of the Mormon missionaries, who go from door to door calling, is approximately .1 percent (one conversion per one thousand contacts). However, when these same missionaries present the Mormon message in the home of one of their church members to a non-Mormon neighbor, the success rate jumps to 50 percent! The article “How to Share the Message with Your Neighbors,” published in their national magazine, exemplifies their strategy of encouraging relationships between members and neighbors to convert new people to their beliefs.

Summary

In order for you group to make disciples of all nations, concentrate on two things:

• Doubling groups. A group of ten that doubles every eighteen months will reach a thousand people in ten years.
• Relationship. Invite every member and every prospect to every fellowship every month.