Every week I sit down with pastors in coffee shops, at their desks, and over video calls.
When the conversation moves to missions and church planting, I ask them, in some form, three questions.
- What are the outcomes of genuine disciple-making?
- Could you list for me the environments or programs that form those outcomes and how well your church is doing at producing those outcomes?
- How is your church’s disciple-making creating reproduction and pushing back lostness in your community?
The answers I hear form a pattern. The Bible gives us the outcomes of disciple-making, and most pastors are savvy and understand the biblical outcomes that are most needed in their context. The pattern emerges as pastors typically rate themselves high on creating environments that impart teaching but low on disciple-making reproduction and reaching unbelievers. There’s a telling gap.
I’ve been a pastor for over three decades. I know what it costs to keep the lights on, preach on Sunday, visit the hospital on Monday, handle interpersonal conflict on Wednesday, and somehow still pray on Thursday. I ask other pastors these specific questions because I had to answer them myself, and the answers were uncomfortable.
The gap in our answers points to a question every serious pastor eventually has to answer. What kind of church produces disciple-making multiplication, plants new churches, and sends missionaries? The New Testament has an answer, but it is more demanding than the church models most of us were handed.
A Covenant Community
Jeremiah, writing centuries before Jesus, described the new covenant with a striking promise: “They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:34). The author of Hebrews quotes this passage at length—the longest Old Testament citation in the entire New Testament—and argues that this new covenant has arrived in Jesus and is not simply an upgrade on what came before. It is something different.
Notice what Jeremiah’s promise says about the community gathered under this covenant. It doesn’t say that some of them will know God. All of them will, from the least to the greatest. Every member will have a genuine, personal knowledge of God, not inherited standing or proximity to a believing family. Colossians 2:11 further explains that every person in the new covenant has received a circumcision not made with hands; they have a Spirit-wrought regeneration that marks true belonging. The Spirit writes the law on the heart of every believer. Baptism is the outward sign of that inward work already done.
This is an important ecclesiological point. The church, therefore, is a gathered body of regenerated, Spirit-indwelt people. Onlookers may be present in gathered worship, as may children of believers, who occupy a unique place as they are raised within the covenant community, under the preaching of the Word, and surrounded by the prayers and love of God’s people. This is an extraordinary mercy God extends to them. But nominal membership is not new covenant membership, and no multiplication or missions strategy works without the foundation of biblical membership.
The church at Antioch in Acts 11–13 is the clearest picture we have of what this looks like in practice. When Barnabas arrived from Jerusalem and saw what God had done among the Gentiles, his response was not to launch a church growth strategy. He taught. He and Saul spent a full year teaching a great many people. Teaching and worship don’t just come before the mission; they power it.
What followed in Antioch is what always follows genuine spiritual formation. While the community was worshipping and fasting, the Holy Spirit spoke: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them”(Acts 13:2). The first cross-cultural missionary sending in church history came out of God’s regenerated, Spirit-filled people worshiping Him, not by a church growth strategy session. Missions is rocket-fueled for a long-term trajectory by the rightly ordered worship of regenerated, baptized believers on Sunday morning. We can trace that pattern throughout church history. And that’s how you and I got here as believers today.
The Antioch church’s worship and their mission during the week were not two separate activities. One produced the other. A congregation formed around the Word, shaped by barrel-strength teaching, and knit together by genuine covenant life cannot stay contained to Sunday services. The church ignites.
Equipping All of God’s People
This raises another question I keep bringing back to pastors: Why is Sunday so isolated from what God is doing Monday through Saturday? When Sunday stays sealed off from the rest of the week, it’s rarely because the pastor doesn’t care. It’s usually because the congregation has been formed, often over decades, to treat Sunday as an event they attend rather than their time to be renewed through the repetition of the ordinary means of grace that fuel Christ’s mission in the church. That’s not a pastoral failure. It’s a formation problem. And formation problems require formation solutions.
You cannot build a missionary-sending, church-planting movement from a theologically shallow congregation. Equipping all of God’s people is not a luxury reserved only for churches serious about multiplication. It is the precondition. This means everyone, not just the pastor or a few gifted leaders, must be equipped to make disciples. Formation starts in rightly ordered and Spirit-directed worship, continues through the equipping of the church, and launches out into local witness and cross-cultural missions.
Once more, there is a harder implication that rarely comes up in our church leadership meetings. The pastor himself and the leadership team around him must be formed before they can form others. Voddie Baucham, founding president of Founders Seminary, described this principle in his presidential letter: “Such men can only be forged by God in the crucible of healthy churches. Only the living Lord can make a pastor, and such a man is His gift to a congregation.”
I say this as someone who had to learn it the hard way. I spent years trying to lead people somewhere I hadn’t fully gone myself. The gaps in my congregation were often mirrors of the gaps in me. That last sentence was tough to type, but it’s what makes this more than a strategy conversation. I’m thankful for God’s grace.
Good theology alone, while vital, is not enough. The Antioch leaders had been formed by persecution, displacement, and internalizing the biblical teaching that shaped them as disciple makers. Their capacity to hear the Spirit and become the mouthpiece of the gospel in new places was the fruit of their formation.
Leading Pastors and Churches Into Multiplication
This is what The Journey coaching system is for. At ABWE, we leverage over 100 years of ministry and a network of pastoral experience to mobilize God’s people locally and globally. The Journey is a coaching system to come alongside pastors in North America to help them make disciples that reach unbelievers in their geography, raise up new leaders, plant churches, and send missionaries. Pastors who enter The Journey are not enrolling in a church-growth program or learning multiplication techniques. They are walking a 12–18-month formation process designed to do something in them—and through them in their churches—that mirrors what Barnabas and Saul’s year of teaching did in Antioch.
The new covenant defines the community. Formation precedes sending. And the pastor must go first.
The Antioch church displays what the new covenant looks like when it takes root in a people who know who they are, worship God rightly, equip all of his people, become witnesses to their neighbors, pursue kingdom cooperation, and send willing missionaries across the world. The Journey exists to help pastors build that kind of church and to become that kind of leader.
