Growth Principle #1: Quality Is More Important Than Quantity

I use two guiding principles to evaluate my effectiveness as a leader in Sunday school and small-group work. Chapter 6 will discuss the second principle. In this chapter, we’ll look at the first:

Quality is more important than quantity.

By “quality” I mean the quality of the lives we are producing. Jesus has called us to make disciples, not just converts. If I cannot point to women and men, girls and boys, young people and senior adults whose lives are being changed, then I have failed, no matter how pretty the growth graph might be. I want to see people who are seeking to live the Christian life; who are having regular times alone with God; whose prayer lives are solid; who have a growing grasp of the Scriptures; whose families are hothouses of love, romance, and encouragement; and who are learning to serve in the area of their spiritual gifts. “Do the people I’m leading enjoy God?” is a better question than “How many did you have in class on Sunday?” The most impressive graphs and astonishing statistics in the world are wood, hay, and stubble if I cannot name people who are living the disciple’s life.

We should never be content with impressive graphs and unchanged lives. Discipleship is the point. God­liness is the point. People who enjoy God more than the things of this world—that’s what we’re after. You can draw a crowd almost overnight with some of the strategies I will show you. The point, however, is not impressive graphs—it is godly people.

My father tells the story of a man who, by his own admission, was a bad man, a wicked man. He described himself as one who used to womanize, get drunk, and fight. Then he placed his faith in Jesus Christ. In one of the most telling descriptions I have ever heard, his son (who was not a believer at the time) said of his father that he “had a new man inside of him.” You see, the son had never read 2 Corinthians 5:17. He did not know that “if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation.” But he saw a new man living in his father. That’s what we are after. Do the people you teach show visible evidence of having a new person inside?

We are in the change business. Some people do not like change, but we are in that business. We are making disciples out of pagans, worshipers out of rebels, saints out of sinners, Christians out of heathens. We are out to make the cruel, kind; the haughty, humble; the profane, pious. Our job in Christian education is not to make smarter sinners. Our job is to make disciples.

It has always been curious to me that churches never report this one thing. We measure budgets, building costs, Sunday school attendance, participants in the music program, members of ladies’ organizations, and so on. But we are never asked to answer the question “How many disciples did you make this year?” Perhaps this is because true discipleship is difficult to define, much less measure. There are some things we can measure: attendance, giving, how often people set aside time to read their Bibles, and how many verses they memorize. But externals are not the entire picture. The Pharisees would have done well on this kind of system. What we should seek to produce is people who enjoy God. How do you measure that?

Defining discipleship is a little like defining good music. I do not know exactly what makes good music, but I know it when I hear it. I do not know exactly what makes a disciple, but I know one when I see one. Musicians can define some objective criteria concerning good music. They understand that good music obeys certain rules of music theory. It pays attention to rules about keys and rhythms and so on. But music is more than that. And music can obey all the rules and still be bad.

What is a disciple? What does she look like? What attitudes does he portray? What skills does she possess? How does he spend his time? What are her priorities? Without a clear answer to these questions, we are working in a fog. We are painting a picture without a clear image in our minds of what the picture should look like. We may win with the numbers, but we lose where it really counts. Unless I can point to women and men, boys and girls whose lives have been radically changed by the gospel, I have not done what my Lord told me to do.

In Disciple, Juan Carlos Ortiz observes that if we have two hundred baby Christians one year and six hundred baby Christians a year later, we are not really growing. He warns against promoting the permanent childhood of the believer.1 To avoid this, we need to know what a disciple is and how to make one.

So what is a disciple? Jesus outlines the answer to this question in three passages from the book of John. The first is John 8:31: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.” It is interesting that Jesus says this to those who already believed in him. The Greek word for “hold” is used in other contexts to mean “to abide, to live, to dwell, to be at home.”2 Therefore, those who have a firm grasp of God’s Word and make it their home are on their way to being Christ’s disciples. This is the first mark of a disciple: abiding in Christ and his Word. The second mark has to do with the body.

In John 13:35, Jesus explains, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” This is such a direct statement that it needs no explanation. If the members of your group are characterized by love for one another, you are doing your job of making disciples.

I have asked a number of classes if they thought outsiders perceived believers to be more loving or less loving than the world in general. The resounding answer I have received is that there is little difference, that we are no more loving than the world. In many cases, the world perceives us as being more judgmental, critical, and condemning. No wonder we are not reaching people with the gospel. The world would beat our doors down if they thought they could find love here. You couldn’t build buildings fast enough; you wouldn’t be able to start services often enough—the nets would be bursting if you could create a church that truly loved. I am not talking about some ethereal, high-sounding, out-there love. I am talking about the love that has someone over for dinner. I am talking about the love that gives a cup of cold water...or iced tea.

The first characteristic of a disciple is abiding in Christ; the second is love for other Christians. The third mark of a disciple is found in John 15:8. There Jesus states, “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” Eugene Peterson paraphrases this verse in a beautiful way: “When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing.”3

Included within the idea of fruit-bearing is reproduction. The seed is always in the fruit, and one of the marks of a mature fruit is the ability to produce more of the same. Likewise, you as a disciple should be producing more disciples, who should be producing more disciples, and so on. (More on this in Chapters 26 and 27.)

How about you? Can you give me the names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who are living for God? Can you point to people who are living the disciple’s life Jesus described? If not, don’t feel guilty. The gospel is all about grace, and forgiveness is available. But work on quality before quantity. Make sure you have disciples before you reproduce what you have. The last thing we want is to double a class full of lukewarm or immature believers. Groups reproduce in like kind. If we don’t have disciples, we cannot reproduce disciples. If you have ten lukewarm class members today and twenty lukewarm class members in two years, have you really accomplished all that much?

On the other hand, if you have ten mature believers today and a year later all you have is ten even more mature believers, you have not been obedient to what Christ told you to do. Quantity is also important. We will explore the issue of quantity later on. But before we do, let’s look at the process of producing disciples through our teaching. In order to produce quality disciples, you must produce a halfway decent lesson each and every week; nothing less will do.