All successful disciple-makers seem to work from a common list of best practices and, over time, learn when and how to use each one. 

I expected Bob would be a great businessman. After all, he’d been doing business internationally for 30 years. I’d heard stories of his success, watched video clips of the man in action, and now I was about to meet him in person.

But from the moment I stepped through the door of his manufacturing company in East Asia, I knew he was about a whole lot more than producing what rolled out the doors of his warehouse.

Bob’s company produced lamps, but Bob reproduced life. His commitment to honest, profitable business was clear, but his passion for life was downright contagious. Being around him was energizing! And it wasn’t because he was some extroverted superman that I could never be. It was just that … well, that Bob knows Jesus. He really knows Him. Bob seemed to be in regular conversation with Him. He referred to Jesus as the CEO of the company, and he wasn’t just trying to sound spiritual. He’d just given away a quarter-million-dollar piece of the business to one of his trusted employees because the divine CEO had told him to.

Rarely have I met a person like Bob, who so exudes Jesus. It seemed he couldn’t tell a story about the business without some biblical truth finding its way into the narrative — and it wasn’t contrived or forced. It was natural, genuine, unpretentious; it left you wanting to know his God more than when you began the conversation. And I’m not the only one who felt this way, because hundreds of Bob’s employees have become Jesus-followers!

Bob’s story illustrates the first essential ingredient of successful spiritual reproduction — which also happens to be the desired outcome of the whole discipling process. Simply put, it is life. Effective spiritual reproduction must have something worth reproducing. And Jesus said that something is life — thirst-quenching, soul-satisfying life as it was meant to be. 

The goal of disciple-making is life. Jesus did not come that we might have disciples and have them in abundance. He did not leave the unfathomable glories of heaven and come to earth to start a denomination named after Him. He came that people might have life and have it to the full (John 10:10).

Do you have it? I don’t mean, “Do you have eternal life that starts after you die?” I mean, “Do you have a full, meaningful, life-worth-living life right now?” When people encounter you, do they feel like they’ve just had a close brush with life?

Do you remember Amy, the young stock trader who wondered what she needed to do to make a disciple at work? This is my answer to her question. Experiencing life as it was meant to be is the starting point of reproducing it.

View the full blog series, watch the video and download The Discipling Tree infographic.

Dale Losch joined Crossworld as a disciple-maker in France in 1988, and has served as Crossworld’s president since 2009. He loves to motivate people to use their God-given passions to make disciples wherever life happens. Hear more from Dale.


Italicized names were changed to protect identity.