Bill Hull’s book “The Disciple-Making Pastor” is dedicated to the ways of encouraging people to join the church and helping them to initiate a positive change in their lives. Across nine chapters and 300 pages, the author discusses and shows evidence for the issue of disciple-making. The book was first published in 1988, but the newer edition contains reflections from the author he makes 20 years later. It is quite interesting to juxtapose the insights of younger Bill with those he develops in his 60s. The present paper is intended to provide a more detailed summary and review of the writing.
Primarily, the author notes that the church is enduring a crisis associated with the multiplicity of ideological influences on the average citizen and the problem of choosing among them. The church itself has also weakened and now depends upon artificially built relations with the parishioners, which can even be categorized as marketing: “The evangelical church has become weak, flabby, and too dependent on artificial means that can only simulate real spiritual power. We have proliferated self-indulgent consumer religion, the what-can-the-church-do-for-me syndrome. We are too easily satisfied with conventional success: bodies, bucks, and buildings” (Hull, 2000, p.12). As one can assume, the author rejects the existing institutional model of church as the “value in itself,” whereas the church and actually its parish as well are postulated as the means to end, in which the end is a harmonious society that lives in accordance to the Christian principles.
The author indicates that the major problem with the local churches is the lack of training for Christians, which originates directly from the lack of means of helping parishioners learn and comprehend God’s word and prepare them for using it in their secular life. According to the book, “In the relationship between clergy and laity, the clergy have become professional performers and the parishioners the audience. The better the show, the larger the crowd. All this proves is that outstanding performance attracts people. It means little more than that; in no way does it faithfully reflect the priorities of Christ for His Church” (Hull, 2000, p.25). At the same time, few priests appear to be authoritative and strong personalities in managing relationships with their community, so the author places focus on the pastor’s personality and role in bringing new disciples.
However, there are several major areas of challenge local church leaders should struggle with within their disciple-making practice. First and foremost, modern people have a number of lifestyle options and appear to be distracted from the church and community. However, Hull notes that involvement with community and spiritual life are amongst human psychological needs, so the majority comes to the necessity of the involvement either sooner or later. The lack of motivation for and interest in spiritual search is another set of problems many local church leaders often face, and the training program for prospective disciples is offered as a solution. Another set of challenges refers to consumerism or each person’s conviction that the producers of goods and services are concerned about meeting his/her specific needs. This asymmetric participation in church life, which creates no true involvement, can be fixed by forming the image of the charismatic church leader. The author warns parish leaders against employing consumerism as a foundation of church promotion due to the fact that it fails to develop a full commitment to the institution as well as to religious principles and practices. Furthermore, Hull assumes that the modern church is still excessively centralized and bureaucratized, so local pastors normally spend a fair amount of time communicating and coordinating with the higher authority instead of putting to practice their decisions directed to the good of the community. In this sense, the author believes it is necessary to allow greater decentralization of the institution because this step is likely to give more freedom to local churches and decrease the pressure of formalities in disciple-making. However, evaluating the last assumption critically, one can assume that de-centralization underlies a serious threat, which consists in the loss of ideological and spiritual uniformity. In fact, pastors should always remember that they are primarily formal leaders of the local church are expected to deal with spiritual issues in the community in a highly professional way, using those methods which they learned in the seminary.
Furthermore, the author switches to the Biblical foundations of discipleship and disciple-making. Hull considers disciple to be more important than simply a person being taught and to play a more active role, i.e., a disciple is a learner who follows their tutor first and foremost spiritually and ideologically. Each disciple matures psychologically and behaviorally in their personal relationship with Jesus and seeks to establish mutually beneficial relationships with other community members. Therefore, the presence of disciples in the pastor’s life is an enormous lifelong responsibility since the leader becomes a role model for a number of people and either explicitly or covertly transmits to them his own behavioral patterns and beliefs.
The sacred Scriptures imply several principles of disciple-making, as the author observes. Primarily, the modern pastor should take into consideration the fact that time is the most needed commodity in the contemporary environment, so time planning and time allocation in disciple-making should be approached very carefully. Disciple-making should become the primary priority, as Jesus Christ was able to dedicate 24 hours per day to the twelve persons who joined Him, although there was a lot of work to do in His life. Many outstanding spiritual leaders taught their disciples on the go without interrupting their existing routines. However, it needs to be noted that the existing consumerist lifestyle might make the pastor lose suspicious in his effort to make disciples, so the excessive concentration on this task might nowadays bring converse results.
In addition, bringing disciples is an intentional process, i.e., it is not necessary to stop all other processes and start making disciples, but conscious focus on this activity is vital. It is also necessary to remember that disciples are not converted instantly, so the pastor should not rush and impose his decisions on people who are not yet motivated and prepared enough. It needs to be noted that Jesus Christ actually used daily situations to encourage others to join him: for instance, when He was confronted or was answering questions, people showed increasingly deeper interest in His views and gradually took His side. Finally, church leaders are supposed to relate their disciples to God as a force, which supports and guides them in critical or confusing situations. It is possible to agree with the above-outlined suggestions, due to the fact that the church as a large organization basically originated from Christ’s philosophy and prescriptions, which appear to be most authentic and reliable in the church building, due to the fact that they directly derive from the early Christian thought and are not yet influenced by the epochs of clerical domination (the current state-of-art implies secular rule and government’s independence from the church).
Further, the author proposes a strategy he used Evangelical Free Church he has been running till the present day. Firstly, it is important to understand the general mission, which consists in making every person a healthy and reproducing behavior by this person’s voluntary choice. The first stage of the realization of this mission refers to the first contact with parishioners and the first considerable intervention into their lives. The main objective of the stage is to introduce people to Jesus and His legacy. The specific tactical steps Hull suggests include Sunday worship service, Velcro ministries, which encompass secular activities like hobby classes for children or clubs for sports lovers, and, finally, small congregations or more detailed scrutiny of God’s word. Secondly, Hull recommends that discipleship be established, and people be trained. This stage involves outreach in the small group of disciples, fellowship (i.e., nurturing true fraternity among the followers) as well as deeper training in the Word of God. At the end of this phase, learners grow into mature disciples. Thirdly, the pastor is supposed to train their disciples as effective leaders by conducting classroom lessons aimed at developing six ministry skills and providing their learners with sufficient practice, during which they learn to lead small teams. Finally, it is necessary to organize professional leadership in ministries and appoint leaders in the local church authorities. Disciples ultimately need to be promoted to pastors and establish their own churches, serve as missionaries, deacons, and lay leaders.
Each stage should include four important elements or four points to focus on. Primarily, all processes should be purposeful rather than imposed so that the future disciples willingly accept the new religious doctrine; only, in this case, they are likely to get new spiritual experiences and insights. Orientation to the process, to here-and-now, is also an important component of fostering discipleship. It involves reading Scriptures together, recording ideas and experiences, discussing all related materials, supporting one another in the commitment to God, addressing life changes and the positive influence of the Word of God on each of the members. In addition, it is highly important to maintain the connection to the community due to the fact that all changes affect at first the relationships with others, so the strong leader should engage their students with joint activities within the community. The community represents social pressure, so the overall mood of the “social ambiance” is an indicator of the success of the disciple-making program. Finally, pastors should always pay attention to the purely didactical principles, according to which people remember only 10 percent of what they read, but 90 percent of what they say, so the channels of communication with disciples should remain diverse.
As one can conclude, the book generally provides time-honored and workable tools for turning parishioners into disciples, but the author himself appears to be critical about those pastors and deacons who do not share his views. At the same time, it is quite difficult to de-formalize the duties and responsibilities of the average person who serves the church, as the institution has certain expectations concerning the performance of its leaders. Hull also, to a certain degree, overlooks regular preaching practices, proven to strengthen community spirit and morale, so some of Hull’s principles are applicable exceptionally in the cases of newly emerging churches.
Bibliography
Hull, B. 2000. The Disciple-Making Pastor. Revell.