The Biggest Barriers To Multiplying Disciples In The West and How To Overcome Them

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-climbing-a-wall-7590954/

 

In America, we like to do it big. We like to push the boundaries of what can be and don’t like to be restricted by anything. It’s easy to get caught up in the American belief in the impossible. 

We love to do things big! The culture says to live life with no limits. That’s what they pumped us up with as kids. The sky was the limit. If we could dream it then we could achieve it.

I see how that’s a load of hot garbage now.

Limitations are just a part of life and it’s hitting me real hard now that I’m 47. The older you get the more you are regularly faced with your limitations. When you’re young you feel like you can do anything. But slowly over time, you begin to see that you are not invincible and there are barriers to you doing a lot of things.

At first, it’s just the barriers you were born with. Your height, your allergies, or the dyslexia you discovered in middle school keep you from doing certain things. Then there are the self-imposed barriers of being married or having kids. You have limitations now on where you can go and how much time you can spend on certain things (that is if you actually care about the quality of these relationships but that’s a whole other essay). 

Then there are the limitations of getting older (especially past 35). For men the testosterone drops. There’s also injuries incurred during youth. This is the wear and tear of the body that comes with constant use and misuse. 

These physical limitations can be more and more restricting with different health challenges due to lack of exercise and eating too many double cheeseburgers and strawberry shakes.

All of these limitations get in the way of us changing careers or even doing basic things like working out at the gym. They either put some things out of reach altogether or they force us to be patient with seeing slower progress instead of quick massive gains.

At the same time, barriers can be blessings in disguise. They can cause us to look for different ways to reach our goals and use our barriers as strengths instead of weaknesses. Our limitations can actually help us reach our goals if we work with them instead of trying to push past them.

Even on a group level you can look at black culture and see a culture that cultivated beauty and life by utilizing limitations. Take soul food for instance. Soul food was created by taking scraps from the slave master given out as daily rations and using traditional African cooking techniques. 

The result: mouth-watering deliciousness. The limitation led to a level-up.

Then there’s hip-hop. The obstacle of not having musical instruments led to djing and eventually breaking and emceeing. The obstacle of government funding being cut off for music in poor neighborhoods like the Bronx became an opportunity that made many into millionaires.

This is the same way we can tackle the barriers to movements in the West. Instead of looking at the barriers as giant obstacles that will take a ton of force to overcome (like a miracle from God), we can look at how we can use “ as opportunities for growth. Here are some of the biggest barriers to movement in the West and how we can overcome them:

Comfort and Convenience

One of the biggest barriers to seeing disciples multiply in the West is comfort and convenience. The opposite is true in the rest of the 2/3rds world. The lack of comfort and convenience is an advantage. This is not just in the realm of persecution, but it touches on every aspect of the Christian life. It’s more of an overall low priority and a low expectation of comfort and convenience.

When you look at the places people are willing to meet for worship in the majority world the one word you can use to describe it is: variety. People meet in houses, gyms, cafes, under trees, and in caves. These are a few places I can think of off the top of my head. 

They are willing to endure heat, bugs, and bad seating as long as they are meeting. On the other hand, we as Westerners have to have the best environment or we will not be attending.

This example of a willingness to meet anywhere versus having just the right conditions exposes the difference between the West and the rest. It’s the reality of suffering. For those not in the West suffering is just a part of life. 

For us in the West, suffering is viewed as an intrusion. We are not willing to suffer or endure pain at all. We are not willing to be inconvenienced.

The inconvenience of clearing the schedule to make time for a DBS meeting is for some a price too high to pay. There is also the inconvenience of hospitality. It is too much of an inconvenience to have people in my home. There is also the inconvenience and discomfort of evangelism. 

Most of us in the West don’t experience any real persecution because we are not bold enough to share the gospel with those who don’t believe. We don’t want to experience friends, family, or coworkers side-eyeing us for sharing the gospel. For us, social ostracism is suffering we don’t want to endure.

This high priority of comfort and convenience is often translated into spiritual laziness. We will get up early in the morning to go to the airport. We will get up early in the morning to go to work. But we will not get up early in the morning to pray. It’s too uncomfortable and inconvenient.

There is also the attitude of spiritual offshoring. We would rather put the responsibility of making disciples on the pastor or church staff than roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves. I mean after all, what am I paying my tithes for?

The attitude of comfort and convenience is not only a barrier to multiplication but it’s also spiritual death. It goes against the words of Jesus when he says discipleship amounts to denying yourself and taking up your cross. It’s those who suffer with him who will also reign with him. So our avoidance of suffering is also an avoidance of true lasting success.

And there’s only one way to overcome it. We have to toughen up. In the West, we don’t have the same amount of natural suffering in our environment. Running water, electricity, climate-controlled homes, refrigeration, and the internet are just a few things that keep us comfy cushy, and isolated from pain. But it’s no different than the Christians in the Roman Empire in the 3rd century. 

They were comfortable and enjoying the privileged status of being a part of the state religion. But some folks knew this wasn’t right and moved into the desert to become athletes in God’s arena. They prayed. They fasted. They got up early. They stayed up all night. They spent time in silence and solitude.

Now I’m not advocating moving out into the wilderness but I am advocating for spiritual disciplines practiced in community. This is the process of toughening up our spiritual muscles and rejecting the padded comfort of the Western world.

Weak or Non Existent Social Networks

Another huge barrier to seeing multiplication is the weak or virtually non-existent social networks of people in the Western world. DMM has taken off in areas where the family and friendship ties are titanium-strong. This is usually the case in rural areas. In urban areas, these same family and friendship ties are either weak or non-existent and not localized. 

So a person can be acquainted with one person from work ten miles away. They can be acquainted with another person from the gym 4 or 5 miles away. They can have some good friends who live 20 miles away in the city where they grew up and their strongest tie of family is eight hours away in another state. None of these connections ever meet or intersect and are far from where a person lives. 

That’s also not counting the non-existent relationships many of us have with our neighbors.

Notice I intentionally used the term acquainted with. Many of us do not truly know people. I take knowing someone as having been in each other’s living spaces. This is a huge barrier connected to the first barrier of comfort and convenience. It’s uncomfortable and inconvenient to know someone according to this standard.

For multiplication to happen the gospel needs to be sown in the good soil of a strong network of people. Overseas that is found in rural villages. Here in the Western world, it’s not as simple as the place where you live. 

This is because the life we live is fragmented. Urban life creates divisions for most people. 

They have their work life. Then there’s their recreational life. Then there’s their family and personal life. That’s just the bare minimum for most people. I’m sure there are other ways to divide life up for a busy urban dweller.

All these lives are lived in different locations with different people. Every place of connection requires its own commute. So that eats up the time we have to truly get to know people and make disciples. 

On top of that, this situation creates not only busyness because of commuting but also weak ties because it’s harder for the gospel to jump over cultural barriers. Since there is no connection between the small amounts of people we know who are not believers then there is a barrier to multiplication.

And then there’s the low number of non-Christian friends in the network of the average believer. After so many years of going to church events and spending most of your free time with Christians, you don’t have any non-Christian friends or available time to make any. So if you are a believer not only is your network small and weak but it’s also probably full of Christians.

The way to overcome this is to intentionally spend time in what David Watson calls a silo. Silos are groups of people who are connected to each other through their work or their hobby. That’s how we form connections in the urban Western world. 

Rodger Shull describes it using the language of an urban village where you can BLT. Build relationships with Lost people and Tell them about Jesus. You can read more about that here

The gravitational pull of the traditional church

One of the biggest things that most people don’t realize when it comes to a barrier is the traditional church. It’s not the church itself but the gravitational pull and the problems that inherently come with that. While disciple-making movements explicitly train people to be obedient traditional church implicitly trains them to be disobedient. 

Let’s break that down. In a disciple-making movement every week there is a push towards specifically obeying the passage at hand. The next week there is accountability for obeying said passage. Obeying Jesus is part and parcel of the group meeting. 

In a traditional church setting, there is an hour-long lecture and a general call to obey the passage at hand from the stage with no acknowledged response of obedience from the congregation. The next week there is no call to accountability for the previous week’s message. Most people are accustomed to this and it makes it hard to build a team from pre-existing Christians.

There is also the gravitational pull the traditional church has on the culture. Let’s just say you share the gospel with someone or do a discovery bible study with them and through the process of discovery come to follow Jesus. Naturally, this person who is excited about Jesus talks about their new relationship with God to their coworker. 

The Christian coworker who attends a traditional church is amazed and asks them where they go to church. 

This excited new believer then says “I go to church every week at my house”. 

The Christian coworker is dumbfounded and lets them know “That’s not a church. I mean where are you plugged in at?” 

This leaves this new disciple dumbfounded and feeling deficient.

 “I guess he’s right. We don’t have a building and we don’t even meet on Sundays.”

That’s one scenario but many other similar scenarios are all based on our culture’s understanding of church and their expectation of what the church should provide. In other words, church is a building you go to on Sundays to hear music and a speech and in no way is supposed to hold you accountable except to give your money.

And this also causes hesitation and fear when a discovery bible study or weekly 3/3rds meeting is challenged to take it to the next level and become a church. For some it’s overwhelming. We can’t be a church. We need a board. We need to file a 501(C) 3. We need to get a worship team. 

They assume these are necessary things although we don’t see these in scripture. We do see them in the church culture around us. This leaves them stuck and fearful. 

Others are underwhelmed. So this is church? I mean we need biblical preaching and qualified elders to pastor this church. And so they may even sign on to become a church but after a few weeks or months, it fizzles because there’s no building, no preaching, no light show. Just disciples being obedient.

So how do we overcome this barrier? We work with the church. We walk alongside pastors and leaders and focus them on scripture and what discipleship to Jesus really means. 

Then they can see where they are measuring up and where they are missing the mark. We don’t bash them or act like we are not a part of the body of Christ in any of its forms. This focus on scripture is an opportunity for growth for all of us.  

For me, it’s been a huge growth process when it comes to practicing spiritual disciplines in community. It’s also been a stretch for me to look for and engage places where I can build relationships with lost people and tell them about Jesus. One of the biggest places of growth is for me to work within and alongside the traditional church paradigm after encountering the movement paradigm and still being convinced it’s the right way to go. 

Usually, I am not one to try to press for change in established groups or organizations. I’d rather just do my own thing but in this season God is calling me to grow in relationships, in partnering with others, and in how I relate to leaders and those in authority. A huge learning curve for sure.

So those are the barriers to movement in the West and how to overcome them. If you think I missed a barrier let me know. If you feel like there are other ways to overcome these barriers I’d love to hear about them as well. Let’s keep our eyes on the growth and not on the barriers and limitations. 


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