When the Machine Outran the Disciple-Making

I loved the community. I just rarely watched anyone become like Jesus.

I want to tell the truth about something I spent years inside of — and helped to build.

The community was real. I'm not going to pretend it wasn't. There was laughter in those hallways and casseroles at those funerals. There were friendships I still carry. People showed up when a marriage was cracking and when a child was in the hospital, and that showing-up was not fake. If you had asked me back then whether I belonged, I'd have said yes without hesitating. I was known. I was in the room. I was on the platform.

But if I'm honest — and honesty is where all real formation begins — the one thing the gospel actually promises, the thing it exists to produce, is the thing I saw least. I rarely watched a person slowly become like Jesus. I watched a lot of people get positions. I watched a lot of gifting get noticed. I watched a lot of activity. What I did not often watch was transformation — the quiet, unglamorous reshaping of a human being into the likeness of Christ.

The currency was visibility

Once I could see it, I couldn't unsee it. Underneath everything we said we believed, there was a quieter set of questions that actually ran the room. Not Are you becoming like Jesus? The real liturgy was this:

Who do you know?

Have you built something big?

Those two questions decided almost everything. They decided who got the microphone and who got the meeting. They decided whose name got dropped and whose calls got returned. People chased titles the way the world chases promotions — not because a title would deepen their apprenticeship to Jesus, but because a title meant you mattered, you were seen, you belonged to the right circle. Being visible got confused with being faithful. Being important got confused with being formed. Being known by the right people got confused with being known by God.

And I have to be honest about where that current started. It did not start in the pews. It started up front — with people like me. The pews were, in many ways, just learning to want what the platform modeled. If the shepherds are measuring their lives by reach and reputation, the sheep will measure theirs the same way. It trickles down. And I'll say the hardest part plainly: in many rooms, it is still the same. I did not escape a problem and then write about it from a safe distance. I am writing about water I swam in, and sometimes still feel the pull of.

This is the oldest temptation there is

Here is what steadied me when I finally started seeing it clearly: this is not a modern failure, and it is not unique to any one church or tradition. It is the oldest temptation in the family of God, and it showed up in the closest circle Jesus ever gathered.

The men who walked with Jesus in the flesh — who watched Him heal and feed and forgive — spent a stunning amount of energy arguing about which of them was the greatest (Mark 9:34; Luke 22:24). At the Last Supper, of all places, they were still jockeying for rank. The mother of James and John came to Jesus to request that her sons get the best seats in the coming kingdom (Matthew 20:20–21). Position. Proximity. Prestige. The disciples wanted it while standing next to the most transformed human being who has ever lived. So let us not act surprised that we want it too.

And when Jesus turned His fiercest words on the religious professionals of His day, this was the machine He named. In Matthew 23 He describes leaders who love the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the assembly, who love to be greeted with titles and to be seen. They had built something big. They knew everyone worth knowing. And Jesus looked at all of it and grieved, because the whole apparatus was running on a fuel that had nothing to do with becoming like God.

Go back further and you find the same hunger at the very first construction project in Scripture. At Babel, the people said, "let us build ourselves a city... and make a name for ourselves" (Genesis 11:4). Have you built something big? Have you made a name? That question is not new. It is Babel, wearing a lanyard.

What the gospel was actually measuring

Set all of that beside what the New Testament says the point of a life in Christ actually is, and the contrast is almost unbearable.

Paul did not labor over the Galatians so they could get titles. He wrote, "I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you" (Galatians 4:19). Formed. That was the goal — not filled seats, not built platforms, but Christ taking shape in an actual human character. To the Corinthians, who had split into celebrity fan clubs — I follow Paul, I follow Apollos — he said that kind of circle-belonging was worldly, fleshly, spiritually infantile (1 Corinthians 3:1–4). And Paul himself had once been the big résumé — the pedigree, the position, the credentials, the name. He looked back at all of it and called it loss, garbage, next to "the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord" (Philippians 3:7–8).

That is the measure the gospel actually uses. Not your network. Not your building. Not your reach. Whether Christ is being formed in you.

I've written before that gifted is not the same as grown. This is the same wound from another angle: visible is not the same as transformed. Connected is not the same as converted. Belonging to the right circle is not the same as apprenticing to Jesus. You can spend thirty years known by everyone who matters and never once be changed into His likeness. You can build something enormous and famous and never learn to love your enemy, forgive your brother, or sit still long enough for God to reach the parts of you no one applauds.

The invitation

So here is the turn, and it is gentler than the diagnosis — because it always is.

There is another question. It is quieter than the two that run the machine, and it will not get you the microphone. It is simply this: Are you becoming like Him?

That question reorders a life. It doesn't care who you know. It isn't impressed by what you've built. It cares about the slow, hidden, mostly unwitnessed work of being conformed to the image of the Son (Romans 8:29) — the work Paul says is happening to us "with ever-increasing glory" as we behold Him (2 Corinthians 3:18). This is the becoming-slowly that no platform can rush and no title can fake. It happens in the ordinary places: the marriage, the small group that will never be a stage, the friendship where you are finally known instead of merely visible, the private repentance no one live-streams.

If you are tired — if you have been in the room for years and are starting to suspect that being seen was never the same as being formed — I want you to hear that it is not too late, and it never was. You do not have to keep earning your place in circles that measure the wrong thing. You are allowed to step off the machine and give yourself to the one work that actually lasts: becoming, slowly and genuinely, like Jesus, among people who are doing the same.

Because at the end, He is not going to ask who you knew or how big you built.

He is going to ask whether you let Him form you. And whether, along the way, you helped anyone else become like Him too.