Lessons from the Field: Protect Your Disciples

I learned a lot on the field. One of the things I reflect on repeatedly is, did I protect my disciples enough? As the years go by and I gain more experience in ministry, I come to realize that protecting disciples in the right way is one of the most important decisions a missionary can make. So, what do I mean by “protecting” disciples? Let’s start by defining terms.

First, I never much cared for self-protection. That was never my calling, and the times I tried defending myself from criticism, I am not sure I accomplished a better result than if I had not bothered in the first place. The call for protection here is not about teaching disciples to look out for themselves. Next, I don’t think we accomplish much by seeking protection from the enemy and the unbelieving world and unbelieving people. Disciples filled with the Spirit, armed with His Word, and fortified with the ability to confess and believe in the forgiveness of Christ, are not threatened by the enemy of the world. They are a threat to them. The gates of Hell cannot stand against such disciples. It is important when a disciple is just a babe in the faith to protect them from many things I am not focused on here. I don’t mean to deny that disciples need time to mature before they enter the battle, but when they are ready, protection is not what they should be seeking.

Instead, I think there is something that tends to sap the will to walk in the good works prepared by God for disciples to walk through, that prevents the use of their spiritual gifts, that stops them from being a blessing to others and discourages them from seeing more and more people come to praise the glorious grace of Jesus. It’s the attacks from within the house that hit the hardest. When believers speak with cynicism instead of hope, instead of sharing burdens, their criticism generally tears down instead of building up. Never did this Scripture ring truer to me…

Ephesians 4:15–16 [15] Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, [16] from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (ESV)

I never realized how important it is for each part to work properly because, often, every part does not work properly at all, and a great deal of pain and damage can be done.

At every opportunity, it is important to remember there rarely is a villain present in the flesh. Most of the time the people from the church who hurt the most have not had an opportunity to be discipled and are often fighting for recognition they had gained from real suffering to not be lost. Even when the problem is their flesh, their pride in the form of not being “surpassed” in ministry is understandable. Thinking about being “surpassed” in ministry has not always been foreign to me, so I am sympathetic. It is easy and it has happened to me many times, to not see all glory going to Jesus as a win and to think about our stream of praise needing to be special and better than others. I get that feeling because I have experienced it before, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is from the enemy, and acting on those feelings hurts the ministry.

When people try to belittle people new to ministry, when people are laying their lives down on the battle line and they find out their back is not safe and attacks are coming from within the church, that can derail a believer’s whole life. In my time as a missionary, I know my time was taken up with absorbing those attacks, taking those belittling remarks on myself, and shielding my disciples from the effects of jealousy and envy. I knew the more I could take on myself the freer my disciples would be to minister in the power of the Spirit, and the more experience they gained the better they would handle their future battles.

In all my time on the field and the scores of disciples I trained I found that perhaps one to five percent of the problems came from outside temptations or persecution. The disciples I trained often thrived when suffering persecution and were ready to face temptations of various kinds. When attacked by their brothers or sisters though, those attacks were the most corrosive wounding over time, damaging their sense of purpose and weakening their endurance against their flesh and the enemy. Despite my very best efforts, I still wonder (seven years after leaving the field) if I did enough to protect them. If had tried harder, would it have been better? When the guilt comes, I rest in the fact that I know I did my best and the rest is in God’s providence, and in that truth, I find peace.

We all need to be careful; people are fragile, and God’s glory is too precious for us to tear down our fellow believers. I pray that you are a part of a church working properly and that you can help others to do the same!