Today I finished preparation for a panel discussion on disciple-making in the local church. I define disciple-making as the process of helping people follow Jesus through the context of relationships. The first section of the discussion includes setting the biblical foundation for making disciples. As I usually do when discussing discipleship, I planned to share the Great Commission from Matthew 28:18-20, highlight Jesus’ relationship with His own disciples, and point to Paul and Timothy as examples of Christian discipleship. It’s a pretty typical presentation of disciple-making, but I realized that I was missing a major component: the Old Testament.

The Old Testament is usually absent from modern discussions on discipleship, including my own. But this should not be so. Even though discipleship is not explicitly mentioned in the Old Testament, examples of Jesus-style, life-on-life disciple-making abound. Many examples are familial relationships, like Abraham and Isaac and Mordecai and Esther. Others include Moses and Joshua, Eli and Samuel, Samuel and Saul, Elijah and Elisha, and Naomi and Ruth, just to name a few. In each of these relationships, one person helps the other follow God through the context of their relationship.

As I studied several of these examples, I came across one that I did not think of: Jethro and Moses. I found an article from Travis Agnew of Rocky Creek Church describing how this relationship shows us what discipleship can look like, and how we can imitate Jethro’s example. He writes,

“As Moses led the Israelites to the Promised Land, his responsibilities were immense.  Along the journey, his father-in-law, Jethro, instructed him in a way of discipleship that is easy to imitate and replicate.[1]

1. Proximity (Ex. 18:1-12): Find a potential disciple from within your existing relationships.
2. Assessment (Ex. 18:13): Evaluate the spiritual health and ministry success of the individual.
3. Initiation (Ex. 18:14-16): Take the initiative to help someone with great potential.
4. Challenge (Ex. 18:17): Identify key areas that the person needs to address.
5. Instruction (Ex. 18:18-23): Provide reasonable and practical wisdom for the person.
6. Application (Ex. 18:24-27): Oversee the person during application until it is passed on to another.”

There you have it. Jethro the disciple maker, who embodied all the aspects of disciple-making that we emphasize in our training, from identifying potential disciples to assessing spiritual health to providing wisdom to encouraging the disciple to pass on what has been learned. In our labor to make-disciples who make disciples, may we follow Jethro’s example!

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[1] See the entire post at https://rockycreek.church/2018/01/discipleship-in-the-old-testament/.