Discipleship

Abstract

Missionaries love numbers. As a means of stewardship and of evaluating the progress of the gospel in a specific place, missionaries count such things as number of gospel presentations, number of baptisms, and number of churches planted. In the sameway, resources like Joshua Project present percentages of lostness in various locations and among different people groups. Such numerical analysis can be helpful in determining peoples with the least access to the gospel and locations where organizations should allocate more resources. When considering the task of discipleship, though, such numerical analysis may not give us an accurate picture of progress within the missionary task. In this article, I argue that we need more qualitative analysis to help us evaluate the task of disciple-making.