It is the responsibility of the church to make Christians. Such a statement will either sound obvious or it might strike you as scandalous. I confess, it was not always obvious to me, but as I’ve developed this conviction, I did not think it overly controversial. As I’ve promoted the idea in the church, what I’ve discovered is that this assertion is off-putting to some, and for others, it sounds borderline heretical. Why does such a claim offend?
“Making Christians is the work of God,” objectors say, “it’s not the work of the church.” For example, I recently heard a pastor preach on John 16, and he was expounding on Jesus’ promise to send the Holy Spirit as our Helper. As the text indicates, part of the Spirit’s job is to convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment and guide us into all truth. It is also the work of the Spirit to convert. The pastor went on to say,
“Friends, the Holy Spirit in the text that we read this morning convinces and convicts and converts. We don’t do that, we don’t make Christians, we give a testimony to the power of God to change us and to forgive us, and it’s the Holy Spirit who enters into the heart of an individual who’s listening who convicts them of their sin and converts them to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Now I agree with every word of this exposition. I affirm the biblical witness that it is the Holy Spirit who convicts sinners and converts unbelievers and brings them to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But I’ve also come to see that this kind of preaching is dangerously incomplete, it is an abdication of responsibility, and the attitude it produces is catastrophic for both the church and the world.
Confusion and Separation
Such preaching is dangerous because it creates a category confusion between conversion and sanctification. Conversion is the first step to becoming a Christian, but not the final step. After conversion, a new convert must grow and slowly acquire the habits, attitudes, and dispositions of a Christian over time. Yes, there is an immediate change, but also a lifetime of change through discipleship.
Unbelievers are converted to Christianity in a moment, but then they must spend the rest of their lives becoming Christians. We cannot confuse or conflate the moment of conversion with the process of sanctification. The Holy Spirit converts, but then it is the responsibility of the church to help converts become more Christ-like. When the church engages in the work of discipleship, it can be rightly said that the church “makes Christians.”
A hyper-focus on conversion is dangerous because it privatizes Christianity. It creates a wall of separation between the life of the believer and the authority of the church; it creates separation between the gospel and the Law of God that even Jesus did not promote (Matthew 5:17). When you separate the Law from the gospel, you end up divorcing conversion from Christian ethics and discipleship from the oversight of the church.
This kind of bifurcated preaching was introduced to Evangelicalism through the revivalism of Charles Finney and later Billy Graham, but it was eventually popularized by the “gospel-centered” movement. Gospel-centeredness prioritizes grace and elevates it as the highest good. Now grace is indeed good; in fact, it’s amazing (as the old hymn says), but it’s not a master category. There is more than just grace in the Bible. Grace has a relationship to the Law, and conversion must be accompanied by training in Christian morality, in which the church teaches Christians to observe all that Christ commanded (Matthew 28:20).
Christians have to do things that are consistent with being a Christian; otherwise, their claim of being a Christian falls into doubt. Faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and when the church fails to require its members to live in a manner worthy of the calling to which they’ve been called, or behave in a manner congruent with Christian identity, then we fail to make Christians and instead produce something that is sub-Christian.
We’ve just come through a generation of “gospel-centered” preaching in the church, and the results are undeniable. In 2024, the Pew Research Center produced a report on Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe. It turns out that the “nones” believe what we’ve taught them. According to the study, most “nones” believe in God or another higher power but describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” Very few go to religious services regularly.
In 2007, only 16% of U.S. adults identified as “nones,” but in 2023, that number rose to 23%. The Evangelical church has happily introduced unbelievers to Christ; it’s even worked for their conversion, but we’ve taught them “nothing in particular,” and so we’ve failed to make Christians. The result is a whole lot of nothing. We’ve run the experiment, and we know the results are not good. What then can be done? What should the church do to turn the tide? For the remainder of this essay, I’d like to offer four suggestions.
Repent
First, the church must repent of its “gospel-centered” approach and avoidance of the law. Gospel-centeredness is an incomplete gospel born of dualism. We’ve seen this kind of dualism before, and the results are usually bad. It’s the same kind of dualism that separates the Old Testament from the New in the minds of many Christians.
Most Evangelicals look at the New Testament the same way they look at their phone. The newest smartphone is always marketed as the best version. It has new features, an updated operating system, sleek new look; therefore, it must be better. No one holds on to their old phone once they have a new one; they trade it in.
We think about the Bible the same way. The New Testament is new, so it must be an improvement on the Old Testament. And just like that, we have our dualism. The Bible is no longer a unified witness to Christ but two separate things: version 1.0 and version 2.0. The Old Testament is law, which is improved upon in the New Testament by grace.
Now it is true that the new covenant in Christ is a better covenant than the old (Hebrews 8:6), but the New Testament’s witness to Christ does not nullify the Old. All of scripture is Christian scripture and is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” (2 Timothy 3:16).
Grace never alleviates our responsibility to the moral law of God; rather, through Christ, we can keep it. But we can only keep it if the church returns to teaching what is required of Christians, reminding them that we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ for good works (Ephesians 2:10).
What I’ve noticed is that the “gospel-centered” approach preaches grace but then relies on what I’ll call “spiritual evolution” as a means of discipleship. Evolutionary theory is a lie that continues to afflict the church, but its damage is not isolated to the doctrine of creation; it’s deformed our approach to discipleship, too.
Biological evolutionary theory relies on a positive conception of energy, time, and chance. The evolutionist believes that energy (which comes from somewhere) fuels an unguided life-giving process. Time (on the scale of billions of years) provides the vast spans needed for gradual change, and chance (change through random mutations) introduces variation, which leads to improvements and adaptation over the years. We might summarize the thinking this way: Energy + Time + Chance = Life.
As a Christian, I reject this theory, and many Evangelicals do too. But while it’s rejected as a theory for creation, I still see many Evangelicals adopt it as a strategy for spiritual discipleship. How does the process work in discipleship? First, you need energy, that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. The Holy Spirit is the energy that enters into the life of a spiritually dead man and converts them.
Second, you need time, and as Christians, the time scale we work with is eternity, so we have all the time we need. Finally, we need chance to introduce change. But Evangelicals don’t like to use the word chance, so we substitute it with the word “grace.” Grace becomes the necessary ingredient that makes improvements slowly over time. And the best part, all of this spiritual evolution transpires through the invisible hand of providence, so, thankfully, there is no need for the church to get its hands dirty. The Evangelical formula for discipleship, then, is: Spirit + Time + Grace = Discipleship.
I’ve heard Evangelicals say that they don’t have enough faith to believe in natural evolution, but they have a surplus of it when it comes to spiritual evolution. But spiritual evolution doesn’t work, and trusting in it, even tacitly, is just plain irresponsible. Evangelicals must repent of this type of thinking; it’s antinomian, sub-Christian, and unbiblical. God has commissioned the church to make Christians, and it’s high time we get on mission.
Get on Mission
Jesus makes it clear that it is the mission of the church to make Christians. After the resurrection and before his ascension, Jesus gave the church what we call the Great Commission. In it, Jesus commands us to join with him in making Christians. He says,
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:18–20)
Some may quibble, pointing out that the text is actually directed at the Apostles and therefore it is not given to the church. But this is an unsustainable objection. Both scripture and church history confirm that the apostolic ministry is taken up by the church. The commission is for the church. Others may object by pointing out that in the commission we are called to make disciples, not Christians. But this is laughable and a distinction without a difference. Jesus commands us to make disciples of him, of Christ, who are called Christians. To make a disciple is to make a Christian.
The church makes disciples the way Jesus taught us to make them, by commanding unbelievers to repent and believe the gospel (Mark 1:15), by baptizing them, and by teaching them to observe Christ’s commands. To observe Christ’s commands means to keep them and to protect them, to guard them and to obey them. Consequently, Christians must be taught what the commands are and how to keep them. This education can’t be left to chance and time, and the Spirit. It is the job of the church to teach and to help make Christians. When we reduce the mission of the church to conversion only through programs of evangelism, we lose the mission and fail to make disciples. The Great Commission requires discipleship, which means conversion and sanctification.
Clarify Sanctification
The church is responsible for making Christians on biblical and theological grounds. The church makes Christians because Jesus commands us to do it in the Great Commission, and because the doctrine of sanctification requires it.
Gospel-centered preaching has lost sight of the distinctions between what is known as definitive and progressive sanctification. Definitive sanctification, as the name suggests, is a once-for-all-moment-in-time event in the life of a believer, whereas progressive sanctification is an ongoing process.
Definitive sanctification is a work of God (closely associated with conversion) in which a believer is united with Christ, spiritually cleansed, and made dead to sin. Progressive sanctification, on the other hand, follows definitive sanctification and is a lifelong process in which sin is more and more put to death and conformity to holiness is progressively attained. Progressive sanctification is growth in Christ-likeness and something Christians must participate in.
And Christians do not participate in progressive sanctification by themselves; they need the church to help nurture them in holiness. The church has a role to play in sanctification because it is through the church that converts are made Christians.
A gospel-centered approach to ministry has a high view of definitive sanctification, but leaves the matter of Christian-making there, at conversion. But if there is more to sanctification than a definitive moment in time, then there is more work to be done by both the convert and the church. The church must train the convert in righteousness. It is the work of the pastor and the elders to make Christians by building up the body of Christ, as Paul said, helping believers to attain the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God.
Build Culture and Pass it on
The church makes Christians through the ministry of evangelism and discipleship, but one of the other ways the church makes Christians is by passing on the faith to the next generation. The church makes Christians when believing parents have kids and raise them as Christians. Numerous other traditions do this all the time.
Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and Amish all raise their children to be Jews, Muslims, Mormons, and Amish. Evangelicals don’t. We raise our kids to be autonomous individuals and empower them with the freedom of choice. We give them no history, no inheritance, and set them loose and say “choose,” and then act surprised, dumbfounded even, when they choose the world over Christ. The Evangelical church’s retention rate is abysmal, so strategies are developed to stop the bleeding and help keep our kids in the faith.
But as the famous business adage goes, “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” meaning that an organization’s ingrained values, behaviors, and beliefs will ultimately determine the success or failure of any plan, no matter how brilliant the strategy is. A poor culture creates resistance and failure, while a strong, well-ordered culture drives engagement and produces success. When children of Evangelicals get more enculturated from the world, social media, and the public schools than from their church, it really doesn’t matter how polished your church’s programs are; you still lose.
I have long believed that the church is culture; unfortunately, it’s not always been a very attractive or compelling one. Too often, the culture of the Evangelical church is derivative of the prevailing surrounding culture. As a result, we don’t have much to offer, so our kids look elsewhere.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. The church has a rich repository of customs, symbols, beliefs, practices, and a way of life that can be recovered and passed on to the next generation. The culture of the church is sourced in heaven, so we really do have much to offer. If the church wants to be successful again in making Christians, then we must once again love and steward the holy culture we’ve received and pass it on to the next generation.
Not an Option
The church makes Christians. It’s not an option; it is our responsibility. We ignore this responsibility at our peril. There is a generation rising that is looking for something substantial, something transcendent and real. The church should give it to them and not leave things to chance. We have a Western culture today that is running a deficit on Christians and Christian morality because the church has failed to make disciples of Christ. The result is undeniably bad. But there is still time, and there is still plenty of good work to be done. So, let’s resolve to do it, let’s make Christians.