Discipling the nations/Kingdom Gospel

As a young man I was given a prophetic word that I was going to disciple nations. At the time it sounded really nice and important. Anybody who has been in church circles a while will know that something that sounds really nice and important often means, “We have no clue what it really means but it sounds rather important”!

I did what most church going people did; asked the pastor and the elders and the visiting ministers and the pastors mother and anybody who would listen if they knew what it meant to disciple the nations. Most of the time I received the same blank stare back, “disciple nations…what’s that got to do with church or growing our church or pastoring a church?” Now and then, when one of the traveling ministers were part of the revered Church Planters club, I received the answer that to disciple nations meant to plant churches and as many as we could. “Years later when I visited Nashville for the first time I smiled as there was a church building on literally every street corner.” I remember thinking “America, or at least Nashville the city must have been discipled if the definition to disciple a nation was simply to plant churches…not.”

I realized that I was not going to find the answer in church or through the wisdom of pastors or typical ministers. By definition most of what was taught and lived in church life at the time was all about propping up a system we called “church” and actually had very little to do with experiencing the gospel of the kingdom in a way that changed nations in a meaningful and lasting way. The model of church was basically, plant (start) a church, get people saved (another discussion for another couple of days), get people trained up in the ways of the church and eventually you will have a congregation that will love everything about Jesus and the ways of church, but not necessarily Him or the deep ways of the Spirit.

Throw in some sessions on the gifts of the Spirit, some sessions on how to serve the church with these gifts and you have a nation discipling church. And let’s not forget the need to ensure that the church has to have deacons and elders and leaders and some evangelism programs and two fast songs and two slow songs and possibly some teaching on how the local church needs to relate to some Apostolic stream and you have the perfect church. And so the cycle carries on. More church plants with the same formula and unfortunately the same outcome, discipleship of the church, by the church, in the ways of the church.

Let me be clear: not everything that we do or have done in the name of church is unfruitful or bad. In fact there are many cultural practices, teachings and experiences that come through what we term “church” that enables sons and daughters to grow in God, to experience God and to be renewed in their spirits. There are prayer movements, worship teams, gifted men and women who have captured aspects of the heart of God for this moment. They are necessary and the church is necessary! There are good churches across the globe.

But if we are really honest with ourselves we have to admit that as a whole, the body of Christ has not engaged in taking up our responsibility to disciple the nations. I will go into detail into this in later posts but suffice to say is that we have not heeded the call of Jesus in Matthew 28 to teach the nations everything that Jesus taught His disciples. What did Jesus teach? Besides the three and a half years where He walked every day with them demonstrating a life yielded to the Holy Spirit (the agent and enabler of the Kingdom), Jesus spent His last forty days entrenching the reach, the role and the required impact of the Kingdom. In Acts 1:3 we are told that Jesus appeared to His disciples and told them many things about His kingdom. Jesus was aligning their understanding with that of the King and of His Father.

The kingdom gospel aligns and empowers the original intent of Father for His sons and daughters and calls creation to bear witness. Creation groans for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God, why? Because creation was created to reflect the kingdom. The kingdom is in the very DNA of creation and once the sons and daughters align with the kingship of Christ it attracts and restores the beauty within creation.

If we take Matthew and Acts together we see that Jesus ultimately wants nations to be schooled and discipled in the ways of His kingdom. Put another way, He wants what is in heaven to be reflected on earth, through the nations. He not only wants individual Christ-like followers to reflect Heaven and the inspiration of heaven, He wants nations and the whole earth to do the same.

The Gospel that Jesus wants His body to preach, teach and to live should have a profound impact on the way the nations live and move and have their being. It should not simply result in churches being planted, but in families restored, in cities empowered, in righteous governments, in abundance of resources, in mass healings and health, in unexplainable and outrageous miracles, in rediscovery of love over divorce, in pure teenagers who are filled with hope, in laws that reflect the nature of God and not man, and ultimately in the radical discoveries of God-inspired calls and adventurous paths to walk.

Let’s start believing together that what Jesus commanded around discipling nations, can become our reality.

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