Discipleship: The Cream of the Crop?

I used to meet regularly with a retired corporate executive to discuss my work in youth ministry. He was on our church board and also a strong supporter of the local Young Life ministry. He used to say to me something to the effect of, “It takes a lot of milk to create a bit of cream.” What he meant was that I needed to build a large youth group to make disciples. The cream on top was likened to the authentic disciples our ministry could produce. The idea did not sit well with me. Not that I did not want to grow the youth ministry large (I did), but the task Jesus gave us is to make disciples. So, having a youth group with 100 students and only expecting 20 to actually be authentic disciples seemed to miss Jesus’ point.

Yet, in my decades of youth ministry experience, I found this was the most common expectation. Draw crowds and disciple the smaller core. We saw it in training seminars and in books on youth ministry. Diagrams of a funnel or concentric circles suggested that the task was to draw a crowd and then move people from the crowd to the core. I first saw this in parachurch ministries and then in seeker-oriented churches.

It’s sadly not different in our churches today. In a congregation of 100, many church leaders would be pleased to see 20 people engaged actively in discipleship, either being discipled or discipling others. Do we have too low expectations? Is it perhaps possible to create a culture of discipleship in our churches so that most people experience intentional, relational, and ideally intergenerational discipleship?

At Engage Discipleship, we believe that creating a culture of generational discipleship is key to being obedient to the Great Commission. There is no higher task in the church than making disciples.