My friend Ray, disciple-maker and pastor-coach, and I were discussing a book he was reading in which the guy made two errors. He wrote a chapter insisting that “disciple” is a noun rather than a verb. My first reaction is so what? “Verbing weirds language,” as Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes said. But Ray found four passages of scripture in which “disciple” is used as a verb, not the least of which is Matthew 28.18 – 20.

And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (ESV)

Look it up: the “make” is not in the Greek. It’s the verb “disciple.” Go disciple all nations. How does a guy get to write a book with blatant falsehoods in it?

Then the guy went on to say, “We don’t make disciples, God does.” Really? That’s not what the Apostle Paul believed:

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Corinthians 3.5 – 9, ESV)

“We are God’s fellow workers.”

I don’t get the point of telling people that they have NO part. They’re already not doing anything, and you’ve just given them permission to continue!

We might as well say, “Piano teachers don’t make pianists.” It’s true. Pianists are made when students practice the skills necessary to build the muscle memory and other physiological things which happen via mysterious processes within the body. But they don’t know what to practice unless they have a TEACHER. So it’s all three: the teacher, the discipline of the student, and the processes within the body.

So we do what we can and must do and trust God to make something out of it.

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. (1 Corinthians 15.10, ESV)

I’ll have more on our responsibility to choose wisely in a couple of days. Stay tuned.