Go into all the world and . . ?

I'm sure that many of us will have continued with the words of Matthew chapter twenty-eight here. The answer is, of course, "Make disciples".

Many years ago I read a great book entitled, "The making of a disciple." It said many things about discipleship (no surprise there I guess) and what being a disciple really meant (again, little surprise here either). What really gripped me was a little bit of mathematics relating to exponential growth. To illustrate exponential growth, the writer recalled an old Chinese folk story regarding a ruler and a fool - it goes like this:

Once there was a rich ruler who had, for his entertainment, a fool who would make observations and provide hours of foolish speaking for the ruler's pleasure. One day the ruler was beset by a problem that could cost him his land and his rule. He issued a proclamation that whosoever could find a solution to the political situation before him would be given riches (up to half of his kingdom), his daughter's hand in marriage or anything else he asked for.

No answer came and time grew short, then the fool opened his mouth and from it was heard the answer to the ruler's problems. Quickly the ruler acted on the fool's words and peace was restored to the land. The ruler called the fool before him and asked him what his reward might be.

The fool, surrounded by nobles and the ruler's court, answered the ruler thus, "I would like a single grain of rice to be placed on a chessboard's square and have it doubled for every square there is." How they all laughed, "The fool could have had anything and he asks for a grain of rice," they cried with tears streaming down their faces. "What a fool!"

The ruler, being a man of his word called for a chessboard and the reward began. On the first row the fool saw one grain, then two, four, eight sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four and finally one hundred and twenty-eight grains of rice. By the end of the next row the number had reached 32,768 and the next 8,388,608 and so it continued until the ruler has sold all that he had to buy rice and the fool possessed all the wealth of the land, the throne and the ruler's daughter too.

We expend large amounts of money and effort evangelising people. We put on big events and have great ideas, yet, this book told me, if we merely made one disciple and nurtured them for a year before the two of us went out and did the same, repeating the process every year, we would see the world become Christian.

I can cram five thousand into a mission event and see (as an example) one thousand come to Christ and ten years later find, say, 250 of those still maintaining their Christian faith. This is excellent stuff and something to be applauded

AND (doesn't have to be an 'OR')

I could disciple one person and at the end of the fist year see us both engage with another and disciple them and so on such that at the end of ten years they would be 1,024 people with a Christian walk - discipled and discipling. All that from one person! If we took one person now, led them to Christ and equipped them to do the same and then repeated that on a yearly basis (two years would be equally great) we'd see the result of our engaging with discipling looking like:

START = 1 YEAR ONE = 2 people
YEAR TEN = 1,024 people
YEAR FIFTEEN = 32,768 people
YEAR TWENTY = 1,048,576 people

Now, sixty million people in the UK - that means that sixty of us could do mission in the UK and (theoretically) see it saved within twenty years! Of course, there's more than sixty of us looking to disciple (isn't there?) so obviously we're looking at much shorter timescales.

No? Why Not - too long a timescale or something I'm missing?

ps. The fool story - square sixty-four works out at about 576,460,752,303,423,500 grains of rice!