Welcome to the for the gospel podcast, where we're all about providing sound doctrine for everyday people. I'm your host, Costi Hinn, and on today's episode, I've asked my friend Grant Castleberry to join me for a discussion on why discipleship is not optional in your life today. Grant is a for the gospel contributor. He's a pastor in North Carolina of Capital Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. I got the chance to preach there and spend some time with Grant previously this last fall. Love him, his wife, their kids, their family, and their church so much. Grant, welcome to the podcast, brother. Man, it's great to be on again. Well, let's get right into it. Discipleship is the topic. You are one of the brothers I view as a discipleship enthusiast. I know we're all supposed to be, but you are an avid learner when it comes to discipleship. And recently you took a trip with your team to Denton Bible Church to learn from Tommy Nelson, who's a stalwart leader in the church today, now I believe in his 70s and has been running a great race and still has juice in the tank, of course, but they were imparting wisdom. I know you love this stuff, and you're doing it at your church, but I want to ask you, what is a disciple? And then maybe add on this: why are you so passionate and focused on discipleship as a pastor?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, just a little background. Um, you know, I I know you've been a pastor for a few years. I've been a senior pastor now for almost three years, associate pastor for a number of years before that. I'm I'm about to turn 38 years old next month. So as a discipler, I'm still learning. I'm still learning what it means to be a disciple maker. I'm still learning what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. So we're all in this process of learning here. And um, you know, so I hope that what I what I'm gonna say can be helpful for people. But I I just want to put that out there. I I'm still in this process of learning what it looks like to make uh disciples. And uh, like you mentioned, there's there's guys a lot farther down the road than me. I think of uh Tommy Nelson and um other guys that I've been influenced by, like Alistair Begg and RC Sproul and John MacArthur. You know, you look at these guys and and just look at the fruit of discipleship in their lives. It's just really momentous to look and see where they're at. And so so much of what I've learned, I've learned uh one, just by studying the word, and I've learned by looking at these models, right? You know, Paul says 1 Corinthians 11, one, uh, imitate me as I imitate Christ. And so so much of what we see in discipleship now in the church and and in our experience is uh caught and seen through the models that we uh look to. So just just in what I have learned in my experience, I think I learned early on, uh, and this was something that hit me in high school uh very hard, and that is this truth that a Christian is a disciple. So if you read the gospels, there's no distinction in Jesus' mind between a Christian and a Christ follower. So you can't claim to be a Christian if you're not following Christ. And you see this very clearly right in the Great Commission when Jesus says, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples, um, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I've commanded you, so on and so forth. But he uses that word disciple there, uh Mathetes. The lexicon meaning is a learner. But um, the the cultural idea there is that in that ancient world, that ancient uh Judeo world, a lot of different people had followers or learners that were uh learning from them. And normally there would be uh a leader who would give teaching and and um would call people to to follow his teaching and also follow his way of life. So if you think about it when you read the New Testament, you see that uh the Pharisees had had rabbis that had disciples. You think of uh Gameliel and Paul, you look at John the Baptist, John the Baptist had disciples, you have uh a whole number of people that had different disciples. So when Jesus is talking about making disciples, that's the context he's talking about. He's talking about people that are following him. And he's clear to be a Christian, you must be a disciple. And I think of texts like Luke 9:23, where Jesus says, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. That verb follow is the Greek word, akoluthio, and it and it's this idea of discipleship. It's this idea of I am intentionally following Christ, I am becoming changed into his character, I am I am thinking the way he thinks. That's uh 1 Corinthians 2, right? We have the mind of Christ. I am loving the things that he loves, I'm doing the things that he does, I am living Christ's life. That's what it means to be a disciple. And so as we think about this, I and I think this is something that we haven't quite always gotten right in the in the modern church, because so much of what I heard growing up was is that you become a Christian, and then later on, you take a step of discipleship. So, okay, I've believed the gospel, I'm I'm a convert, I'm a Christian now, and then I need to take this second step later on to become a disciple. In fact, one time I organized basically an evangelistic event in South Carolina when I was on my father-in-law's staff, and we called in a famous preacher. If I said his name, everybody would know who he is because he's been preaching on the radio for a number of years. And this preacher came in and there was so much fanfare, and you know, people were lined up at the door before he was going to preach, and every seat was filled. It was one of those nights, you know, a couple thousand people were in the room, and he preached a good message on the gospel. And basically at the end, he gave an altar call and he said, Okay, if you want to become a Christian, I invite you to come forward. And of course, you know, 40, 50 people come forward. And then I was really surprised with what happened next. He said, Okay, some of you are Christians, but if you want to take a step of discipleship and become a disciple of Christ, I want you now to come forward. And I remember I was standing up there at the front because I was kind of help processing everybody that was coming forward. And all these people that I knew that I knew were Christians, you know, people that were in my Sunday school class, young adults that I've been, that I'd already been discipling for a year. All these people started to come forward to take this step of quote, discipleship. And I just started telling, hey, go back to your seats. You you're already, you're already, you're already a disciple. You've already taken this step to follow. We don't want to inflate the numbers, man. So yeah, I think there's, I think there's confusion there. And I'm sure you've seen that in your in your own life and in your own ministry. But what we need to be really clear, though, is that that Jesus doesn't make that distinction. You know, in Luke 9, um, the the next verse in 24, he says, look, if you lose your life for my sake, you will find it. It, but if you're not willing to lose your life for me, you're gonna lose it, right? So he's talking about salvation. Uh, this call to discipleship is a is a salvation thing. So if you're a Christian, you are a disciple, whether you even knew that or not. You are a follower of Christ. And if you look at the the call of the gospel, that's why the call is repentance and faith. It's a call to repent of your sin and to trust Christ and trust Christ to the degree that you'd be willing to follow him.
SPEAKER_01I love that. That's so helpful and an important distinction to make. I'm glad you brought that up. So, with that, how should then a Christian go about being discipled? In other words, what do Christians do? I was gonna say, what do disciples do? But what do Christians do? Christians are disciples, disciples are Christians. No distinction. Right. How should someone then go about taking that next step, if you will, they're a believer and they go, okay, now how do disciples live? What do we do?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I I think for the listeners, the most important thing, you know, you want to start at the most foundational basic level. And that is is to not even assume that you're necessarily a Christian or a disciple. Like start, start there. And I tell this to people all the time that come and visit our church, is do you actually trust Christ? Have you actually repented of your sin and begin to follow him in your life? Have you actually begun that journey, or have you just been swimming in this whole realm of cultural Christianity where you've been doing, you know, Christian things, where you've been in Bible studies, where you've you've visited churches. Uh and and the problem is, Cossi, is as you know, so many churches aren't actually preaching the gospel and calling people to repentance and faith. So that that's the beginning step is to realize, okay, I am a disciple, I have trusted Christ, I have believed. And and with that, you know, when when Jesus talked about this, there's a sense where God deals with you. Where you know, Jesus told all these people in John 6, he says, you did not um, or um you did not come to me, but the father must draw you. That's John 6, 44. The father has to draw you. Uh John 15, he says, You did not choose me, but I chose you. So God must deal with you. And and this begins, you know, this is the whole um divine work of God and discipleship. Really, Christ is the one who makes disciples, Christ is the one that calls people in. And then our journey begins. And that journey, God's design is for that journey to take place in the local church. I I think as you're talking about, okay, what what's this next step after I make sure that I'm a believer? Well, that next step is to be part of a local church where you're underneath elders, where the word of God's being taught, where the Holy Spirit is present. And that life of discipleship is to be lived in that community, and you're gonna grow as a disciple in the church.
SPEAKER_01I love that. So helpful. The recent trip you took to Denton Bible Church, Tommy Nelson, you dug into something called the power sweep. I want to spend some time here, and I want you to help us understand what it is, and you could even give us the version that you've customized for Capital and your church where you pastor, and help us understand, you know, the basic principles of what Denton Bible Church calls the power sweep, and then also perhaps the unique way that pastors, leaders, and people should look at their own context before just taking like a one-size-fits-all, like here's the system we used. If you do this, your church will explode. We want to be careful with cookie cutter stuff that's like a thing to make your church grow. But help us understand you know that philosophy from older, wiser men like Nelson and then how that can impact the local church.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like I said earlier, I'm still in this process of really understanding how to implement discipleship ministries and a culture of discipleship in the local church. And so I wanted to get around one of the guys who's been the best at it for a number of years. And one of those guys is Tom Nelson, who's the senior pastor at Denton Bible Church down in Texas. And for those of the listeners who don't know, he's had just a number of discipleship programs. He's got one called Young Guns, which I think he's trained over 500 guys. Uh, it's probably more than that, but 500 guys in intensive discipleship uh over a number of years. And so he's just been really effective at doing that. So I wanted to just kind of go spend some time with him and and just hear his heart and hear uh their strategy. And it was really interesting. He introduced myself and and our elders to this strategy that he's implemented at Denton Bible called the power sweep. And he said, Look, I didn't, this isn't necessarily original with me. I gave it the name the power sweep, but I got this from Howard Hendricks, who taught discipleship for years and years and years at Dallas Seminary. And he said, When I went to Dallas Seminary, Howard Hendrix stood up in class and he said, Look, forget all the church growth stuff, forget all the, you know, all the pragmatic strategies that are out there. We we you have to come to church and focus on doing it according to the New Testament. And and one of the things that you want to do when you're thinking about discipleship in the church is not just to begin doing stuff, uh, not just to begin, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna start having uh services, we're gonna start having these programs, we're gonna have a men's ministry, we're gonna have a women's ministry, we're gonna do these things. No, no, that's not what you do. The first thing that you do is you start with the end in mind and you begin by asking the question, what type of disciple do we want to produce on the backside? In other words, if somebody comes to our church and they're gonna be here for five years, and then they're gonna go out as a missionary or maybe they get a new job in another state and they leave here, what type of disciple do we want them to be? And of course the answer is a biblical disciple. But what is that? What is a biblical disciple? And and and quantifying exactly what we want that person to look like. And this is just a compilation of what Tommy has and just kind of my thinking through it. But we said, look, we want our disciples that we make to be Christ-like in character. We want them to display the fruit of the spirit, the beatitudes, uh, the virtues that Christ displayed. We want them to be committed to the things that Christ was committed to. We want them to be committed to to God, to God's word, to the church, and to Christ's mission. We also said we want the people that we make to be competent. And that means that they know certain doctrines, they know sound doctrine, they know how to do the work of ministry through their spiritual gifts. They know what their spiritual gifts are, and they're using their spiritual gifts in the life of the church. They know how to proclaim the gospel. And then here's another one that we thought uh was really important. They know how to be a godly father, mother, and uh spouse. Another one, I'm just looking at our list right now. I don't want to leave this one off either. We want them to know how to suffer well for the sake of the gospel. That's good. So those are the things that we're looking at in terms of okay, this is who we're trying to create as a disciple. And we think these things are found in the New Testament. And then taking a step back, you ask the question, okay, if that's the disciple that you're trying to produce, you next ask ask the question, what type of church produces that type of disciple?
SPEAKER_01That's good.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00And, you know, I could go in uh a lot a lot of detail here, but just just for us, we want our disciples to be otherworldly transcendent. And so that means that in some ways, that the church needs to be transcendent. When I say that, I mean, you know, Jesus called us to a kingdom, but that kingdom isn't something that's seen right now. It's a kingdom that's coming in the future. And so these types of disciples need to be formed in a church that's pointing them to those great realities, those transcendent realities. And the way that we do that is through Sunday morning and evening worship, we want the whole Lord's Day to be the Lord's day and to bring uh believers there where a whole day is dedicated to worshiping God. We want to have routine prayer meetings where we're where we as a congregation are dependent upon the Lord and seeking the Lord's help both personally and as a congregation, uh, relying on his strength and his power. We want to observe the sacraments or or the ordinances regularly, baptism and the Lord's Supper. We want to provide frequent fellowship in the life of the church, not just in community or small groups or Sunday school classes, but fellowship where we bring really a cross-section of different age groups together and a large number of people together, where people get to really feel like this church is a family. And I know the bigger the church gets, the harder that is to create. But there are, you know, I think strategies that you can do that as the church grows in size. And then, of course, this element of holiness and, you know, where we spur each other on in Christ-likeness and really come alongside one another and encourage each other towards godliness. And sometimes that means exercising church discipline when necessary. You know, if someone is teaching false doctrine or if somebody has committed a grievous sin or somebody's causing division in the body, you know, a church that's going to form these Christ-like disciples has to have discipline. And then a church like this that that's going to create these disciples has to teach faithfully the word of God. And Costi, you you and I talk about this all the time, but this is so lacking right now, unfortunately, uh, in the world and in a and across our country. I just have such a burden for so many people. I I can't tell you how many times I'm contacted during the week from a believer and they say, hey, I'm I live in such and such town, and I'm just simply trying to find a church that will teach the word of God and isn't trying to entertain the goats. They're not trying to, you know, pull seeker moves to get people in the door. They just are going to faithfully teach the word of God, you know, and and uh that burdens my heart. I I hate that there is a famine in the land and that people are literally, in some cases, driving over an hour to find a faithful church, or maybe they're too far and they're just trying to get together with a couple families to listen to a sermon online. You know, I feel compassion for these people, but it shows the importance of a church that is faithfully teaching sound doctrine because that's going to ultimately drive the discipleship. But then we got to do more than that. We got to train the people, right? We talked about these competencies. We want them to know the sound doctrine. We want them to be faithful fathers, mothers. We want them to be able to suffer well, we want them to be able to share their faith. So that means that we have to train. And this is the missing element, I think, in a lot of faithful churches. Is we as we teach the Bible well, we provide fellowship, but we don't always train people well to the competency levels that we want them to be. And and and that right there is, I think, the missing link. You know, when you were talking about just faithful sound doctrine churches, that's the element that's missing is that training and then turning around and trusting the people that you train with ministry. You know, this is something that Tommy really emphasized. You gotta give your all stars a chance to play. If you don't give your all stars a chance to play, they're gonna go bat somewhere else. So you gotta you gotta identify the the spirit anointed people in your church, men and women, and you have to provide opportunities for them to be trained. And then you have to unleash them to exercise their spiritual gifts in the life of the church. And you have to trust them to then do that. You, you delegate ministry to them. You still oversee it, but you trust them to um to carry out those ministries. And then you give them time to succeed or fail. So that's the type of church that we're trying to be. We're not there yet by any stretch of the imagination, but we're, we're really trying to think through okay, how can we, how can we train and trust and really bring up uh these competent disciples that are going to know how to minister the way Christ ministered.
SPEAKER_01I love the way that challenges the conventional model of show up to church and just sit there for 50 minutes, and a guy preaches for 30 of it, you sing some songs and you bounce, and then you go back to work, you do your thing all week, and then you show up again. It sort of churches a checklist. And instead, yeah, there's the gathering of the saints, and yeah, there is that moment where we come together and worship, but there is a raising up of people, and people are expected to be raised up and deployed. They are expecting their leaders to pour into them, and a pastoral team isn't filled with a bunch of yes men, sort of just you know, staff hirelings, and then you got your one superstar. It's about raising people up and deploying them for ministry. It's about Christians doing what Christians do. And I love the challenge of not just, hey, what kind of disciples do we want to make? Everybody could probably make that list. Like you did the competent, the committed, the Christ-like, like, all right, they're gonna do all these things. Yeah. Then you you got to flip the mirror and go, okay, now what kind of disciple-making factory are we? What kind of church do we need to be in order to see that come to fruition? Um, talk to me about now the kind of pastor. I know that there are gonna be a lot of different leaders and people involved in this, but let's go straight to the the leadership of the church in the sense that we would even not say top down, we would say bottom up because we serve upward. We're not on the top of a pyramid, if you will. We're on the bottom as slaves to Christ. But walk me through to close and us as listeners the kind of pastor, leader that you need to be, I need to be, that other people need to be, in order to infuse a culture of faithful discipleship, like guys like Tommy Nelson have done.
SPEAKER_00Well, several things come to mind, and and I and I think just in terms of the life of a church and and and really in terms of of the life of any discipling relationship, you're only going to be discipled as high as the holiness of the leader who's discipling you. So that means as as pastors, man, that we have to be men of God. You know, that's 1 Timothy 6, you know, as for you, oh man of God. Like, you know, if if God's called you to pastor, uh, you must be a man of God. And if you are called to disciple somebody else, you need to strive yourself to be a man of God, a woman of God, because your character, your spiritual life, what you model, all of those things are what your congregation or the person you're discipling is watching. They're not just listening to you, they're watching you. You know, our in the Marine Corps, we had a phrase, do dis exemplo. It means lead by example. You can't just say, do as I tell you to do. You have to say, you know, do as I do, watch me. And and really you see that emphasis over and over in the New Testament, right? You know, Paul, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. Watch me, he says in Philippians. Look at my life, look at my example and and and follow me. And so as pastors, we have to be able to look ourselves in the mirror. Yeah, we're not perfect, we're not, we haven't arrived yet by any stretch of the imagination, but we still have to be able to look at the mirror in the mirror and say, look, can people legitimately follow me in my life? So we have to be men of God. We have to fear God and not men. We have to model the spiritual disciplines in our own life, right? Of a of a faithful disciple of taking time to pray and and study God's word and to spend fellowship uh with other believers. We have to, you know, as Paul talks about in 1 Timothy 3, we have to be able to manage our own households well. That family dynamic is really important, right? I mean, we are called to disciple our families. So if we haven't discipled our own families well, if we haven't led our children to the Lord, if we're not training them in godliness, then how can we call other people to Christ likeness? How can we train other other parents? And then I think this is this is the another missing element, I think, in a with a lot of pastors, is we have to model what it means to be a disciple maker. Right. So after you've done all those things, the temptation, because all those things take a lot of time, and it takes a lot of time to do to write sermons and deliver sermons and evangelize people. But at the end of the day, we have to bring other men into that work with us. So 2 Timothy uh 2 2, what you heard from me in the presence of many witnesses and trust to faithful men who will be able to train others also. So you have those that generational aspect of discipleship. So what Tommy Nelson always says is, Who are your men? If I if I come up and talk to you, who are your men? In other words, who are you discipling right now? Who are you pouring into so that you can turn around and unleash, and then they're going to go and make disciples themselves. So you will not be a disciple-making church if the pastor is not himself modeling this. And if you read Titus 2, it all comes from the pastor, his teaching, his modeling. Titus 2. Titus, uh, verse one is introduced with the sound doctrine uh that's that's Paul's exhorting Titus to teach. And then it lays out how discipleship works in the local church with older men, younger men, older women, younger, younger women, but it's all flowing from from that ministry of that senior pastor. And then older men, older women catching that vision, they're discipled, they turn around and out of the outflow of the word of God, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, begin discipling other people and replicating themselves. Another phrase that Tommy uses is stallions, not mules. Mules do not reproduce, stallions reproduce. And that this call to discipleship, to make disciples, this comes full circle, right? With the with the Great Commission, is a call to reproduce. Is is you don't just grow yourself, but at the end of the day, that's the real litmus test of disciple making is have the people that you've discipled begun to reproduce themselves.
SPEAKER_01Absolute gold. Stallions, not mules. When you say that, even think of the visual of stallions running and the strength of their pace and that striking out and going forward, and then with mules, I think of just loading mules up and to carry stuff and get you to your journey. Uh, there is a huge difference between using people to just manage things and using people to carry stuff, yeah, and then strengthening, raising people, uh, even tempering and taming them sometimes. We I needed that. I had men in my life who needed to test me and temper me before trusting me. And like a stallion, you don't you don't want to break their strength completely, you just want them to become more disciplined, like a wild horse, and then when they get let loose to run, they run. And what a visual. Grant, I'm so grateful for your brother. I know you said uh you're still learning this, but you've been in ministry a good bit. I know you know I'm in my tenth year of pastoral ministry and still learning, and yet I do think no matter how old we are and whatever phase of ministry we ministry we are in, it's pretty simple, isn't it? You make disciples. You don't make a distinction between what a Christian is and what a disciple is. We are one and the same. How would you encourage someone right now who's hearing this and they're all fired up? What do you do next? If you're a person, you're a church member, what should they go do next? Should they go talk to their pastor and say, I just got a fire lit under me, I want to lead a small group. Should they uh, if they're a pastor, do they go into the board meeting this week or next and go, guys, we gotta do the power sweep? You know, give us a couple of next steps and then let's end it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, in church life and and ministry life, you're always being discipled. Like I said at the very beginning, it until glory comes, you haven't arrived in this path of discipleship. So I'm learning right now. A lot of it, I'm being discipled by dead guys that I'm reading, and and Martin Lloyd Jones and Sproll and those guys. So I'm being discipled right now. What I would tell people though, first is, you know, as you're thinking about, okay, I want to be a disciple maker, I want to be a mature disciple. You need to discern if you are at a place where you need to be discipled more. And maybe the next step is I need to get around somebody who knows a lot more than I do about Christlieness and can train me. And I need to be discipled to a higher level. Not that you're not a disciple now, but you need to be discipled to a higher level. And so for you, the next step is identifying who you would like to disciple you and then approaching that person, being like, man or or ma'am, I've looked at your life. I would love for you to just for just me to be able to be around you and for you to teach me what you know. So for some of your listeners, that's the next step is they need to be discipled. Now, for others, maybe they've already been discipled to a degree where they feel confident that they can reproduce, that they can, that they know how to share their faith, they can evangelize, or they can take uh a new disciple and really bring their level of sanctification up to where they become a mature disciple. They're ready to go disciple other people. And by the way, not everybody that wants to do that is ready to do that. So you're, you know, some people, you know, they're very eager, they're ready to go. I'm ready to go disciple other people, I'm ready to start a discipleship group. And you know, as the past their pastor, they're not ready. And you say, hey, I just think you need a little bit more time. But some people are ready. And if you, you know, if if if and the one of the ways that you know you're you're ready is one, you feel the call of the the spirit just pushing you into that, saying, Hey, this you need to you need to be pouring in and investing in other people. And then secondly, other people in your life are saying, you need to do this. Your pastors are saying this, your people are coming to you and saying, I I want you to teach me, or maybe you're already leading a small group or a class or or whatever. And you need to press more into intentionally making disciples. As Tommy said, who are your men? Who are your women? Who who are you intentionally now discipling? And this is what I tell our elders as well is like you have to approach this with purpose and identify those people in the church that that um that you want to disciple. And you know, that that's a whole other conversation. But I would say you you want to figure out where you are on that spectrum, whether you need to be discipled or whether you should be intentionally right now discipling someone else in your local church.
SPEAKER_01Well said, brother. Grant, where do you pastor again and where can people listen to sermons and be blessed by your ministry?
SPEAKER_00So I pastor Capital Community Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and our sermons are on sermon audio, or you can go to our website, Capital Community Church.com. Awesome, man.
SPEAKER_01So thankful for you, brother. And uh our prayer is that this episode would help you make disciples uh get into the right church, a disciple-making church, and then focus on what you need to be doing in your local church. Grant, thanks for being on, brother. Thanks, brother. Love you, man. Appreciate it. Love you too, bro. Thanks for listening to the For the Gospel podcast to check out free resources, meet our team, or even set up a monthly gift to keep us pumping out free resources. And if you just want to watch some more videos or see what we do and what we believe, go to forthegospel.org. If you haven't already, be sure to follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter. And you could subscribe to our YouTube channel for loads of free content as well. I'll be back next Monday with another episode. For now, keep on living for the gospel.