If you have read much of what I have written about Sunday School and small-group ministry, you know I believe in growth. I believe teachers should invite people, reach people, assimilate people, and work toward doubling their classes every two years or less.
But there is something more important than growing your Sunday School class.
It is what happens to the people once they get there.
That is the subject of chapter five of my book, You Can Double Your Class in Two Years or Less. The chapter is called “Growth Principle #1: Quality Is More Important Than Quantity.” By quality, I don’t mean the quality of our facilities, curriculum, music, or programs. I mean the quality of the lives we are producing.
Jesus did not command us to draw crowds. He commanded us to make disciples.
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The Goal of Sunday School Is Changed Lives
Churches measure all kinds of things. We count attendance. We count baptisms. We count offerings. We measure participation in programs and compare this year’s numbers with last year’s numbers.
There is nothing wrong with measurement. Numbers can tell us important things. But there is one question that is much harder to answer: Are we actually making disciples?
That is the standard that matters most. In the book, I argue that if I cannot point to people whose lives are being changed, I have failed no matter how impressive my growth graph looks. I want to see people who spend time with God, develop meaningful prayer lives, grow in their understanding of Scripture, build loving families, and discover ways to serve through their spiritual gifts.
Perhaps one of the best questions a Sunday School teacher can ask is not, “How many did we have Sunday?” but, “Are the people I teach becoming more like Jesus?”
We Are in the Change Business
My father used to tell about a man who freely admitted that he had once been a pretty bad man. He drank, fought, and womanized. Then he placed his faith in Jesus Christ.
His son, who was not a Christian at the time, noticed the transformation. He didn’t know the theological language of regeneration. He didn’t know 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come.” He simply described what he had observed in his father: there was a new man inside him.
That is Christian education at its best. We are not merely trying to get people to know more Bible facts. We want the truth of Scripture to penetrate their hearts deeply enough that husbands become better husbands, wives become better wives, parents become better parents, selfish people become generous, bitter people become forgiving, and proud people become humble.
As I put it in the book, “Our job in Christian education is not to make smarter sinners. Our job is to make disciples.”
A person can know an impressive amount of theology and still be mean. He can memorize Bible verses and still be selfish. She can attend Bible study every week and still gossip about everyone in the group. Knowledge matters enormously, but biblical knowledge is supposed to produce a certain kind of person.
What Does a Disciple Actually Look Like?
This raises an important question for every Sunday School teacher: What exactly are we trying to produce?
If you don’t know what a disciple looks like, it is difficult to know whether your teaching is successful. It is like painting a portrait without knowing what the person is supposed to look like. You can keep applying paint, but you have no way of knowing whether you are getting closer to the goal.
In the book, I point to three statements Jesus made in John’s Gospel that give us a remarkably useful description of a disciple. These three characteristics give Sunday School teachers something much better to aim for than simply filling chairs.
1. A Disciple Abides in God’s Word
Jesus said in John 8:31, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.”
A disciple doesn’t merely hear the Word occasionally. God’s truth becomes the environment in which that person lives. The book points out that the word translated “hold” carries the idea of abiding, dwelling, remaining, or being at home. A disciple increasingly makes his home in the teaching of Jesus.
This is one reason good Bible teaching matters so much. We are not trying merely to give people an interesting religious talk on Sunday morning. We want to help them develop a biblical way of seeing everything—God, themselves, money, marriage, sexuality, work, suffering, forgiveness, relationships, eternity, and the purpose of life.
Eventually, the Bible should become more than something they study. It should become the truth through which they interpret their lives.
2. A Disciple Loves Other Christians
Jesus gave us a second mark of discipleship in John 13:35: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
That is an astonishing statement because Jesus identifies love—not merely knowledge—as one of the identifying marks of His followers. If our Bible studies produce people who know more but love less, something has gone terribly wrong.
And Jesus isn’t talking about vague sentimental feelings. Christian love has skin on it. It invites someone to dinner. It takes a meal to someone who is sick. It notices when someone is missing. It sits beside the lonely person. It makes the phone call. It gives the proverbial cup of cold water—or, as I put it in the book, a cup of iced tea.
Imagine a Sunday School class that became famous for that kind of love. Visitors wouldn’t merely hear a good lesson; they would encounter a community where people genuinely cared about one another.
That kind of group is attractive because that kind of love is increasingly hard to find.
3. A Disciple Bears Fruit
The third mark comes from John 15:8: “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”
Healthy disciples eventually become fruitful disciples. Their faith begins producing something beyond themselves.
One aspect of fruitfulness is reproduction. Fruit contains seed. A mature apple tree doesn’t merely produce prettier leaves; eventually it produces apples containing the seeds from which more apple trees can grow. In the same way, mature disciples eventually participate in making other disciples.
This brings us back to church growth, but now we see growth differently. We don’t merely want to fill a classroom with people. We want to develop disciples who eventually help make other disciples.
That is multiplication.
What Good Is Doubling a Lukewarm Class?
This leads to one of the most important questions in the chapter. Suppose you have ten lukewarm Christians in your Sunday School class today. Two years from now, through aggressive outreach, you have twenty lukewarm Christians.
Have you succeeded?
You doubled. The graph looks fantastic. The pastor may recognize your class from the pulpit. You might even be asked to teach a conference on church growth.
But what exactly did you reproduce?
Groups tend to reproduce after their own kind. If we reproduce spiritually immature groups, we simply create more spiritually immature groups. If we reproduce loving, Bible-centered, serving, fruitful disciples, we multiply disciples. That is why the book insists that we must pay attention to quality before quantity.
This doesn’t mean quantity is unimportant. The other extreme is to have ten mature Christians who spend the next thirty years becoming even more mature while never reaching anyone else. Jesus told mature disciples to go and make more disciples.
We need both.
We want better disciples, and we want more disciples.
Sunday School Growth Is More Than Filling Empty Chairs
This distinction changes the way we think about growing a Sunday School class. An empty chair represents someone we want to reach, but filling that chair is only the beginning.
We want the person sitting in that chair to learn the Scriptures. We want that person to learn to pray and walk with God. We want him to become a loving husband and father. We want her to become a loving wife and mother. We want people to discover their spiritual gifts and use them in ministry. We want them to develop friendships with other believers and experience authentic Christian community.
Eventually, we want the people we reach to become the people who are reaching others.
That is what Jesus meant by making disciples.
Ask a Better Question About Your Sunday School Class
Next Sunday, count the people in your class. I do. Numbers matter because every number represents a person, and every person matters to God.
But don’t stop counting there.
Look around the room and think about the people represented by those numbers. Is Joe becoming a more loving husband? Is Mary growing in her knowledge of Scripture? Is Bill learning to forgive? Is Susan discovering the joy of serving others? Is the new couple developing friendships? Is someone who has attended for three years finally beginning to reach out to others?
Those are much harder things to put on a spreadsheet, but they are much closer to the heart of the Great Commission.
Quality is more important than quantity because Jesus told us to make disciples, not merely increase attendance. But quality and quantity are not enemies. Mature disciples reproduce. Healthy sheep have more sheep. Healthy groups eventually produce more healthy groups.
The goal is not simply a bigger Sunday School class.
The goal is more people becoming more like Jesus.
That brings us naturally to the next chapter of You Can Double Your Class in Two Years or Less: “The Importance of a Halfway Decent Lesson.” If we are serious about producing quality disciples, what happens during the Bible study itself matters enormously. As I argue there, good outreach may get people into the room, but good teaching gives them a reason to return—and gives God’s truth an opportunity to change their lives.
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