Francis Chan says he gets it.
“Sharing your faith is hard. It’s very, very difficult. I don’t like offending people, and I hate being rejected,” he said. “I get it. I understand why we don’t do it.”
But Chan, bestselling author and founding pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, Calif., said we don’t understand the gravity of coming before God one day and telling Him we didn’t make a single disciple.
“To know that those words (Matt. 28:18–20) came from the mouth of Christ, and we can’t point to any disciples … I think we grossly underestimate God,” he said. “God Almighty, God my Creator said to go make disciples, so I don’t want to sit here and make excuses.”
Chan and David Platt, senior pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham, gave a raw challenge to personal discipleship during the Multiply gathering Nov. 9 at Brook Hills.
The three-hour event — which organizers estimate drew in more than 100,000 people at Brook Hills and via webcast — launched Multiply, a movement urging and equipping believers to make disciples.
It was followed by an identical event in San Francisco the next night. The simulcast will be a once-a-year event from now on.
“If we aren’t careful our Christianity will consist of doing good things in the church but not making disciples with our life,” Platt said. “Matthew 28:19 is not a comfortable call for Christians to come be baptized and sit in one place. It’s a costly command to go.”
Multiply isn’t a program or a method. Nor is it an attempt to begin a pastor-led movement, Platt and Chan both said.
It’s a grassroots effort to share life with people, showing each other how to follow Christ, pray, read the Bible and then share their faith with others as we did with them, Platt said.
“Look back at the moments when the gospel has advanced most rapidly, and you’ll see that it was when the whole church got a hold of each individual’s responsibility to be a disciple and make disciples,” Platt said. “We are all to be involved in a grand global mission.”
Life as a student, stay-at-home mom, lawyer, doctor or salesperson — each is a vehicle for discipleship, he said. The emphasis isn’t on getting people to make decisions but on living life with them and showing them personally how to follow Christ.
“Whatever our calling, whatever our vocation is at the moment, the command is the same,” Platt said. “So we should all ask each day, ‘How can I leverage my job, my life for the sake of the spread of the gospel?’”
Chan said he doesn’t want to “technique this” or make it formulaic — he just wants believers to “pray for God to do something and show up and amaze us.”
But some framework is helpful, he said. Materials available on the Multiply website can offer a basic guide for how to disciple someone intentionally in your everyday life, he said.
The Multiply Material is a 24-session discipleship experience that helps a believer show another person what it means to follow Jesus, read the Bible and live life as the Church.
The Multiply website calls it “a simple, practical, biblical, helpful, and personal tool for disciples of Jesus who want to make disciples of Jesus.”
From the very beginning, the definition of being a disciple meant to make other disciples, Platt said.
“No question, the thrust (of the Great Commission) is to go and make disciples,” he said. “He didn’t say, ‘Alright guys, pair up and disciple each other.’”
It wasn’t complicated back then, Chan said.
“They just started praying, and the Holy Spirit empowered them and they went out and started speaking with such boldness,” he said.
Chan said he just wishes “we as believers would pray more, would spend more time on our faces before God.”
“We’re not trying to start a movement here ourselves; we’re trying to go with what God is doing and how He’s moving,” Chan said. “We want to make disciples who make disciples who make disciples of all nations, just as Jesus commanded.”
For more information, visit multiplymovement.com.
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