After three years of hard work and Bible teaching, a tentmaker serving in Asia was speaking at a house church meeting. – It is true that Christians are better than other people, isn’t it? the tentmaker asked.

The tentmaker was surprised to see people in the congregation starting to nod their heads in agreement. After a few clarifying questions, he realized that what he had tried to teach people throughout the last years had been in vain. The believers in this mid-sized Central Asian city really believed that they were morally superior to others in the society.

“If I could have done it over again and retrained the believers, I would have done things in a very different way,” the tentmaker stated a few years after finishing his job in the former Soviet republic. With a lack of knowledge on how to train disciples, the tentmaker focused on Bible teaching and systematic theology.

“For all Christians it is valuable to have a profound knowledge of the Bible, but I understood too late that many of the people I taught did not apply the Biblical message to their own lives. As a result, their lives were not changed,” states the tentmaker.

What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ in my life, at my workplace and in my neighborhood? This is one of the most central questions when it comes to discipleship training. Unfortunately the Biblical message remains head knowledge for many of us, and thus our lives are not changed according to the Scripture. Theological issues, and not the transformation of lives, also remain the focus in many churches.

Jesus called us to make disciples of all nations. In the four Gospels we read how he trained his disciples, concentrating on the few people he knew would be able to teach others. And he focused much of his teaching on everyday challenges and principles in the Kingdom of God.

There is no doubt that a tentmaker can be a good disciple-maker. A tentmaker works and lives under the same conditions as the people he or she has come to train. In this way a tentmaker, like Paul, the tentmaker from Tarsus, can model what it means to follow Jesus in everyday life. 

It is said that when we we aim at nothing, we hit it every time. If we don’t know what the aim of our discipleship training is, we will probably fail. Dawson Trotman, the founder of Navigators, has given us the following guideline that can be of help: “A person is mature physiologically when he or she can reproduce physically; so too, a person is mature spiritually when he or she can reproduce spiritually.”