My Most Important Lesson: “Go With The Goers”

The most important lesson I’ve learned about following Jesus in the last 30 years is this. You have to go with the goers.

I call disciples who want to go somewhere deeper in their faith “goers.” They are not content where they are – they want to grow. They have committed their lives to Jesus, so now they want to know how to follow him. They are hungry; they need feeding.

Learning from the World Race

I learned this by offering a journey called the World Race to young people. Beginning in 2006, we tried to follow Jesus by serving the poor in other countries. The impact on racers was profound – it changed lives. Word about the ministry spread. Soon we had nine applicants for every spot on a team.

Our problem is that we didn’t have enough leaders. What to do? We expanded. We handed responsibility to young leaders who may not have been ready for it. They needed more time and mentoring to grow up.

Yes, the ministry continued to change lives. But increasingly, we were taking applicants with mixed motives. And you may say, “Hey, we’ve all got mixed motives.” It’s true, we do. But it comes down to priorities. Are you a goer?

Jesus & Priorities

We see Jesus sending out his disciples in Luke 9. Word gets out and his ministry grows. Three different guys show up wanting to go with him on his journey. They all had mixed motives. And Jesus challenged each of them in this area of priorities. He didn’t take them. They weren’t hungry enough. He knew you have to go with the goers.

It can be confusing. I was confused. But what happened is that we got distracted taking care of those who had not sorted out their priorities yet and weren’t able to challenge the goers as much as Jesus wanted us to. We became like a lot of seeker sensitive churches.

Seekers vs Goers

Seeker sensitive churches may be good at evangelizing nonbelievers, but they end up watering down faith so that it doesn’t offend people. And so the hungry don’t get fed.

The good news is that Covid was a re-set for our ministry. We had to bring 600 people back from overseas within a week. We had a good opportunity to go back to God and ask him to help us sort out our priorities. We took a fresh look at Jesus’s model.

Compared to the popular model of discipleship, Jesus’s way looks radical. He summarizes it like this:

“Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat—I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you?” Luke 9:23-27

Be a Goer

Maybe some of you reading this experienced the disappointment of not having had good leaders, and maybe some of you experienced that on the World Race. If so, I’m sorry – I apologize. I wish I’d been able to understand the implications of this principle earlier.

I thought we could turn seekers into goers along the way. And the good news is, we did. But we also didn’t give the goers as much as we could have.

So we learned our lesson. After Covid, we decided to triple the number of leaders on the World Race and to let that be the cap on how many people we’d take. We wouldn’t take any more racers than we had experienced leaders for. Now we raise up our leaders from those who have proven themselves to be leaders. We just wait for them to mature and pass what they learn on to other goers.

“That’s not practical,” you may say. “People have too many options these days.” And it’s true, most people won’t commit. So let’s do what Jesus did and focus on the goers.

Are you a disciple of Jesus? A disciple is one who does what he did – an all-in goer. Those are the ones I want to go with.