I Had Never Actually Made a Disciple

Dear Discipleship-First Friends,

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the research behind our new book—the finding that 95% of churches in North America don’t have a genuine disciple making culture, and the search for the Level 5 churches that are actually multiplying disciples. If you haven’t read that piece, it’s worth a few minutes of your time before you read this one.

Today I want to go somewhere more personal.

Because the data is sobering. The five-level framework is clarifying. The stories of Level 5 churches are genuinely inspiring. But none of it would mean much to me if I hadn’t first had to face something uncomfortable about myself.

I need to tell you about the day I arrived in India.

The Missionary Who Had Never Made a Disciple

I arrived in India full of conviction. I had a seminary degree. I had preached more sermons than I could count. I had studied discipleship, read the books, attended the conferences. I had surrendered my life to God on my knees at a missions’ conference in college, praying with everything I had: “God, I don’t care where I am or what I’m doing. I don’t care if I’m in Haiti for 50 years or working in a gas station for 50 years. Just use me.”

I was convinced I was ready. Then I got to India, and two truths hit me like a truck.

The first: I had never actually made a disciple. Not once. I had done ministry. I had preached. I had studied. But had I personally led someone to faith and then walked with them—life on life—until they could follow Jesus and disciple others themselves? The honest answer was no. Zero times.

I had been preparing to make disciples my whole adult life without ever actually doing it.

The second truth cut even deeper: I wasn’t a disciple worth reproducing.

In India, I met believers who were risking everything for the gospel. Young men who had been expelled from their families for following Jesus. Pastors who had been beaten for their faith. Women who had suffered in ways I couldn’t imagine because of their allegiance to Christ. Their love for Jesus was costly, visible, and daily. And when I held my own love for Jesus next to theirs, what I saw looked less like devotion and more like casual interest.

I remember thinking: If we multiplied a bunch of Josh Howards, we’d have a serious problem.

Being Discipled While “Doing Ministry”

Here is what I didn’t expect: during those first few years in India, even while I was supposedly “doing ministry,” I was mostly being discipled. Faithful Indian believers were teaching me what it actually means to love and follow Jesus. I had come to pour out. Instead, I was being filled—corrected, humbled, and reformed by people who had far less formal training than I did but who were far further along in the things that mattered most.

It was disorienting. It was also one of the greatest gifts of my life.

What I learned in that season reshaped how I think about everything in this book. Conviction—the deep, unshakable belief that making disciples who make disciples is the mission—is not the same as having right theology about discipleship. Conviction isn’t just believing the right things. It’s becoming the right kind of person.

A leader can be thoroughly convinced that disciple making matters. They can preach it every Sunday, build it into their vision statement, and restructure their ministry around it. And still, if they themselves are not a disciple worth reproducing—someone actually following Jesus, being changed by Jesus, and living on mission with Jesus—the culture will not multiply. It will stall at the leader’s own ceiling.

Your church will never rise above your own personal commitment to making disciples.

That’s a hard sentence. I know. But the research behind our new book confirms it again and again. Every single Level 5 church we studied—every church where multiplication is not a goal but a lived reality—was led by someone who had settled this question personally. Not just professionally.

What the Leaders We Studied Have in Common

The pastors and church leaders we profiled in 7 Practices of Disciple Making Churches came from different denominations, different regions, different church sizes and styles. But they share something that goes deeper than strategy or structure.

One pastor described his identity this way: “Before I’m ever a senior pastor, I’m a disciple maker.” Another told his entire staff: “If you get a paycheck, you disciple people.” These aren’t slogans. They’re the kind of settled convictions that reshape job descriptions, calendar priorities, and what a leader actually does with their time from Monday to Saturday.

One of them—Doug Burrier of Three Taverns Church in Georgia—traces his transformation back to a moment in the shower, when God broke through the noise of a busy, successful ministry and asked him a question he couldn’t answer: Are you actually making disciples? That moment of honest reckoning became the spark of a disciple making model that has since spread to other states and other countries, including Sweden and Mongolia.

Brad Daugherty’s church began their transformation with something even more striking: corporate repentance. The leadership team stood before God and acknowledged they had been measuring the wrong things, building the wrong culture, and asking God to reset their hearts. Sometimes the first step toward multiplication is confession.

What every one of these leaders held in common—beyond their conviction—was this: they had stripped discipleship down to its most reproducible form. They had found models simple enough that anyone could carry them. Not just seminary graduates. Not just trained professionals. Teenagers. New believers. Recovering addicts. Ordinary people with no budget and no platform—because when the model is simple enough, it doesn’t need a remarkable person to spread it.

Complexity may impress. But simplicity spreads.

The Question I Had to Answer First

I’ll be honest with you. The question that this book ultimately asks every leader is the same one I had to answer first, alone, on the other side of the world, staring at the gap between what I believed about discipleship and what I had actually done about it.

The question isn’t primarily about your church’s model or your church’s metrics. It starts somewhere more personal:

Am I a disciple worth reproducing?

Am I actually following Jesus—not managing a ministry about Jesus? Am I being changed by him, in ways my family and closest friends can see? Am I living on mission with him, not just speaking about mission from a stage?

If the answer is yes—or even, I want it to be—then the principles in this book will give you a path forward. The Level 5 churches exist. We found them. And the things that make them multiply are learnable, transferable, and already working in contexts as different as a college town in the South, a decentralized micro-church network in Florida, and a hospital in Atlanta.

But it starts here. With you. With honesty about the gap between our convictions and our practice—and the willingness to let God close it.

That’s what happened to me in India. It took a few humbling years and a community of believers who had far more to teach me than I had to offer them. But on the other side of that was a movement—50,000 churches planted, more than 300,000 people coming to faith, twenty-two new churches launched every single day last year—that I could never have imagined when I knelt down at that mission’s conference and told God to use me.

He didn’t need me. But he wanted me. And he changed me enough to be useful.

He can do the same for you, and for your church.

Josh Howard is co-author of 7 Practices of Disciple Making Churches.(RENEW.org, 2026). The book profiles the seven principles shared by every Level 5 multiplying church in North America. You can CLICK HERE to read the first article in this series—”95% of Churches Don’t Have a Disciple-Making Culture—Does Yours?”