Jerald touched on an issue that didn’t seem to get much attention here. He wrote: “I’d love to see the folks at my church getting out of the house … handing out water at the local park just so they could have someone to invite over to their home to talk about Jesus. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have all that comfortable stuff inside our houses that makes us stay in so much.” How do we encourage discipleship among disciplees?

Alan mentioned what he does with people asking to be discipled. I’m curious if Alan also invites people he wants to disciple, even if they haven’t applied.

I’m guessing that Cheryl might say, “Well, a disciplee (is this a word?) needs to know they want discipling. When they want it, they’ll seek to hang out with disciplers, or at least people they want to be discipled by. And maybe that’s enough. Still, Jesus’ disciples were not all volunteers.

I believe there’s a place for encouragement, especially for people not so aware as Cheryl — for the people Jerald would love to see passing out water.

One approach we’ve used is to organize those opportunities. Start small — do one thing to build confidence/acceptance of your church. Maybe reverse-disciple an elder first — ask him to accompany you to the park to hand out water as you do so on behalf of Christ. (While you are asking him to come to support or guide you, most likely you’ll be showing him what he can do.) Then get agreement from the church to endorse a sign-up table for a few others to join you next time. Eventually you can expand into evangelism by letting someone in your group watch you in action, then inviting him to lead it himself.

True, as someone wrote, Jesus didn’t leave His disciples to stand alone (even filled with the Spirit) until after 3 years of exposure. However, He did send them on trial runs as teams of advance men on His way to Jerusalem. This was well before the third year, as I recall.