Sheep Beget Sheep

Everyone quotes the Great Commission. Almost nobody reads the grammar.

“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20). We hang the word Go on banners and build whole ministry philosophies on it, and in doing so we lean the entire weight of the sentence on the one word that cannot hold it.

Because in the Greek, go is not the command.

One Verb

There is exactly one imperative in the Great Commission. One actual command. And it is not “go,” and it is not “baptize,” and it is not “teach.” It is matheteusate: make disciples. Everything else in the sentence is a participle hanging off of that single verb. “Going,” “baptizing,” “teaching” are not four coordinate marching orders. They are the how of the one command. Make disciples, by going, by baptizing, by teaching.

And the “going” is the gentlest of all of them. The Greek is closer to “as you go,” “in your going,” “having gone.” It assumes movement through ordinary life rather than commanding a launch. Jesus is not saying organize an expedition. He is saying: as you go, wherever you already are, going about the life I have put you in, make disciples.

Sit with what that does to the banner. The command is not to go somewhere. The command is to make disciples, and the making is done by teaching them to observe all things Jesus commanded. That is the whole engine. Not a program. Not a launch. A person who has been taught the Word, teaching the Word to the next person, as they go.

The Word Nobody Wants: Increase

Now put the Great Commission next to the clearest statement in the New Testament about how growth actually happens, and watch the model that dominates modern ministry come apart.

Paul is writing to a church that has split into fan clubs, team Paul, team Apollos, and he stops them cold with a sentence that should be printed over the door of every ministry on earth. “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6–7).

Read that again, because Paul says something here that would get you fired from most church-growth conferences. Neither is he that planteth any thing. The apostle Paul, the greatest church planter who ever lived, says the planter is nothing. The waterer is nothing. The Greek word for increase is auxanō, to cause to grow, and Paul assigns it to exactly one Person. God gives the increase. Not the strategy. Not the outreach. Not the launch. God.

This is the fault line. There are two jobs available to a human being in the work of God: you may plant, and you may water. That is the entire menu. What you may not do, what you cannot do, is give the increase, because that job is occupied. The moment a ministry model starts taking credit for growth, measuring itself by growth, engineering growth, it has quietly reached for a job that was never on offer to it. It has stepped into the one role Scripture reserves for God alone.

He Knoweth Not How

Jesus said the same thing in a parable almost nobody preaches, and it is the most freeing thing in the New Testament for anyone worn out by the pressure to produce.

“So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself” (Mark 4:26–28).

The farmer scatters seed and then goes to bed. He gets up, goes about his day, lies back down, and the whole time, underground, in the dark, without his supervision or his strategy or his knowledge, the seed is doing what seed does. He knoweth not how. The growth is hidden from him. It is not his to manage. The earth brings forth fruit of herself, because that is what God built the seed and the soil to do.

That is the kingdom. You scatter the Word and you go to sleep, and God does the thing underground that you could never do and cannot even see. The pressure to manufacture the harvest is not humility and it is not obedience. It is a quiet refusal to believe Mark 4, a refusal to trust that the seed works on its own because God made it work.

Not by Might

When Chuck Smith was asked, over and over, how a chapel of twenty-five people became a movement of hundreds of churches, he did not point to a method. He pointed to a verse. “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6).

And the history bears it out, plainly and on the record. In 1965 Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa had twenty-five people. Chuck Smith did one thing: he taught the Word of God simply, line upon line, verse upon verse, and he fed the sheep and loved them. He ran no church-planting department. In his own words, in 1988: there is no secret formula to church growth, it is the line upon line, verse upon verse teaching of God's Word that produces a healthy, mature congregation, which in turn produces church growth. Those who were there put it bluntly: Calvary Chapel was not a hippie movement; it was a teaching movement. By 1989 there were an estimated six hundred fellowships around the world.

Nobody planted six hundred churches. Chuck Smith fed sheep, and the sheep, being healthy and fed, did what healthy fed sheep do. They reproduced. The Word was sown like seed, watered by the Spirit, and God gave the increase, exactly as He said He would. The largest church-planting movement of its generation happened without a church-planting strategy, because it turns out the strategy was never the thing. The Word was the thing.

And here is the distinction that has to be made honestly, because it is the whole point. When Calvary held the Harvest Crusades, filling stadiums, that was not outreach in disguise. It was not a service project with a gospel bolted on the end, not a soup kitchen hoping someone asks why. It was a man standing up and preaching the gospel plainly and calling people to Christ, out loud, unmasked. Here is the gospel. Come. That is not the thing being critiqued here. That is the thing being commended. The gospel, preached as the gospel, is never the problem.

Sheep Beget Sheep

Here is the picture Scripture keeps drawing, and it is the one that got lost.

Sheep beget sheep. Lambs do not come from the shepherd; they come from the flock. The shepherd's job is not to manufacture lambs. The shepherd's job is to feed the sheep so well, and lead them so faithfully, that healthy sheep do the natural thing and produce more sheep. When Jesus restored Peter, He did not say strategize my sheep or launch initiatives for my sheep. Three times He said one thing: feed my sheep. Feed them. That is the shepherd's assignment. The multiplication is the flock's own doing, under God, because that is how life works.

A model that leapfrogs this, that puts the human in the position of directly producing converts, that measures a servant by the increase only God can give, that dresses activity up as evangelism instead of simply proclaiming the gospel, is not more obedient than the plain way. It is less. It has taken the one command, make disciples by teaching them the Word, and swapped it for a job description God never wrote. It is trying to do God's part and, in the doing, neglecting the human part that was actually assigned: plant, water, feed, teach, and trust.

There is nothing wrong with going. Go, by all means; the “as you go” is right there in the text. There is nothing wrong with reaching people; the gospel is meant to be carried to the ends of the earth. The problem is never proclaiming Christ. The problem is a machine that has quietly replaced the Gardener, and a shepherd who has been told his worth depends on manufacturing what only the flock and the Spirit can produce.

The Freedom in It

If this lands as criticism, look again, because underneath it is the most freeing news a tired servant of God can hear.

You are not the increase. You were never supposed to be. The crushing weight so many believers carry, that the growth depends on their strategy, their cleverness, their tireless engineering of results, was never a weight God asked you to lift. He asked you to plant. He asked you to water. He asked you to feed the sheep in front of you and teach them the Word simply and love them, and then He asked you to go to sleep and trust that the seed works in the dark because He built it to. The increase is His job, and He is very good at it, and He has never once needed your anxiety to accomplish it.

This is who God is: the God who gives the increase Himself so that no servant has to carry what only He can carry. The God who built a seed that grows while the farmer sleeps. The God who took a chapel of twenty-five and a man who would only teach the Book, and quietly, in the dark, without a strategy, grew it into something no human could have planned, so that when it was done there was no one to credit but Him.

So do the small, faithful, unglamorous thing. Feed the sheep in front of you. Teach the Word simply. Scatter the seed and stop trying to reach underground and pull the plants up by hand. Plant, water, and then sleep in peace, because the field belongs to God and the increase is His and He gives it freely to whoever will simply sow.

Not by might, nor by power, but by His Spirit. He said it. He meant it. And He has been proving it in the dark, in ten thousand hidden fields, since the day He first told a man to scatter seed and go to bed.

And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely. Sow that. God will do the rest.

Darren ReinhardtAuthor of Whosoever Will · whosoeverwill.bible