Podcast: How Do I Disciple Others? (Garrett Kell)

January 20, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

What Does Discipleship Actually Look Like?

In this episode, Garrett Kell talks about what it looks like to disciple another Christian, addressing how age, knowledge, and other qualifications factor into a discipling relationship, and he shares encouraging stories and insights from his own experiences.

How Do I Disciple Others?

How Do I Disciple Others?

J. Garrett Kell

In this addition to the Church Questions series, J. Garrett Kell explains why discipleship is essential and shows readers how to intentionally invest in the lives of fellow believers.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:00 - Pursued by God

Matt Tully
Garrett, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Garrett Kell
Yeah, brother. Great to be here. Always happy to talk to you.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about what it looks like to be a good discipler—this task that all of us feel, I think, as Christians. We have a sense that this is something that we’re all called to do to some extent—to disciple other people. And yet I think it’s one of those things that can feel pretty intimidating to most of us. It seems like there’s a 10 percent out there, and they are disciplers. They get it. They love it. They do it. They talk about it all the time. And the rest of us 90 percent are kind of like, Am I really called to do this? What is that supposed to look like? So we’re going to get into all of that, but maybe to start us off, Garrett, can you think back and tell us who was the first person you would say truly discipled you in an intentional way? And what was one thing that that person did that really stands out to you even today?

Garrett Kell
That’s a great question, Matt. Thanks. It is sweet for me to look back on my life from right now, having been a pastor for twenty-five years, and look all the way back to when I first followed Jesus and to see how God has brought people into my life at every stage of my journey to disciple me and invest in me. So this is a sweet reflection of God’s faithfulness. The first guy that I can think of, his name was Shelby Abbott. Shelby was working with CRU, a parachurch ministry at the university that I was studying at and where I came to know the Lord. Shelby took interest in me. He saw me at some meetings in a church service and said, “Hey, let’s get together. It seems like the Lord’s been doing some stuff in your life.” He heard my story, he heard where I’d come from, and then he just started asking questions about what I sensed the Lord wanted me to grow in. He would take me to the word, open the Bible, challenge me. I kept falling into sin as a young believer. I came out of kind of a crazy background. One of the things he challenged me with is don’t give the devil a chance—that’s from Romans 13: “make no provision for the flesh in regards to its lust.” He saw me continually putting myself in stupid situations, and he’s like, “You’re giving Satan an opportunity to just tempt you.” And he helped me to see that and to make some wise decisions to get out of that.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that you came from kind of a crazy background, and maybe some people listening have read some of your story. You’ve been pretty open about sharing that story. You wrote a whole article for the Gospel Coalition a couple years back. Give us the short CliffsNotes version of the basics of your conversion and what led you to that meeting with Shelby?

Garrett Kell
I grew up going to church. In that sense, I would have said I was a Christian because I wasn’t an atheist, a Muslim, a Jew, Hindu or whatever. But I was not a believer. I went off to college and very much just lived a party lifestyle—drinking, drugs, and everything that comes with that. And during the middle of my junior year, I threw a party at our house. It was a Halloween party. I invited an old buddy named Dave down. Dave got there, I welcomed him at the door, brought him back to my room, and I said, “Hey, I got a bag of weed for you here, I got a sixer of your favorite beer, and I got a girl for you to get to know for the weekend. It’s going to be a great time.” And he closed the door and sat on the bed and he said, “Hey, listen. Thank you for that. That’s really kind of you. But I don’t do that stuff anymore.” And I said, “You all right?” And he said, “Yeah. I love Jesus now, and I think he wanted me to come here to tell you that he loves you too and that he wants you to follow him.” And I just thought he was trippin’. I thought he was crazy. I kind of mocked him a little bit and blew it off.

Matt Tully
Did you think he was joking, or did you think he was serious?

Garrett Kell
I knew he was dead serious. It was uncomfortable for me as a non-believer, because this was a guy that used to do all the same stuff that I was doing, and he used to love it and we used to love it together. And now he was different. He was the same guy, but he was a different guy. Something had happened to him, and it spooked me a little bit. Darkness doesn’t know what to do with light. The aroma of Christ is offensive to those who don’t love it. So it freaked me out. Through that party and through the next couple of weeks through some emails, I would email him back and forth and he would challenge me to read the Bible and try to answer some of my questions. And I would just mock him and be like, “Bro, you need to settle down. You’re going off the deep end here. We’re just trying to have fun. I’m not a bad person,” and all that kind of stuff. But it really provoked some spiritual curiosity in me, and I think I saw a light for the first time in a way that I really had ever seen in the darkness I was living in. I think God started to haunt me. A holy haunting is what I call it. I couldn’t stop thinking about stuff. I would see my sin and didn’t know what to do with it. I remember going back in my room, I sat down—this was during a party a couple of weeks later—and I was feeling convicted. I didn’t have that word for it, but I knew something was wrong. And I looked down and saw a Bible that was peeking out from underneath my bed. My parents had given me one, and I used to hide it under my bed because it would cramp my style. So I picked it up, sat down at the desk, I was high, and I just played Bible roulette and opened up to Ezekiel 18. In the New Living Translation it says, “The one who sins is the one who dies. A father will not be judged for the son’s sins, nor a son be judged for the father’s sins, but each one will be judged according to what he has done. But do you think I’d delight in the death of the wicked? No, but that they would turn and live, says the Lord.” And it freaked me out. Because all of a sudden it was like the Bible was talking to me. I didn’t hear an audible voice, but whatever voice I heard through those words was louder. So I shut it and I was like, “All right, there’s gotta be something else.” So I started reading the New Testament because I figured that was better than the Old, and got into Romans 2, which says, “Don’t you realize how kind, tolerant, and patient God is with you? Or don’t you care? Can’t you see how kind he is that he’s been giving you time to turn from your sin? But no, you’re storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God would judge all the people according to what they’ve done.” And that’s where I felt trapped. I was like, I have nowhere to run. God and I are not cool. I’m in trouble. And I didn’t know what to do with that. So for a couple of weeks I was really bothered by it. I went back home, reached out to Dave, and he came over to my house. It was like two in the morning. He says, “Do you know what I was doing when you called me? I was praying for you. And I’ve been praying for you every night since we had our conversation.” And I went back to school the next semester very different. That was the middle of my junior year. I went back and my roommates didn’t know what to do with me because I’m reading the Bible and trying to evangelize everybody.

Matt Tully
Would you say you were a Christian at this point?

Garrett Kell
I think there were six months where something was happening. I used to smoke weed and turn on my black light and get the Bible out with a highlighter and be like, This is amazing! But then I would feel convicted because I couldn’t remember what I just read. So I’d flush my weed down the toilet, but then two weeks later I would buy some more and then I would do it again. So I was struggling, but I wasn’t being discipled at that point until about Spring Break. I went on a Spring Break trip down to Panama City Beach, Florida. I went with some friends, and the whole time I’m there I felt like God was following me around everywhere. And there are some funny stories about God’s providence that go with that, but the last part of that is I went into a Waffle House with a friend. We had just smoked some weed and we were hungry, so we went to the Waffle House. I sat down there, and I was feeling so convicted. I knew what I did was wrong. And he told me, “Dude, I think you’re just doing too many drugs. You need to stop.” And then this group of people walked in, and this guy Shelby was one of them. And he walked over to me. He was there with CRU on a beach reach, reaching out to people like me. And he came up and introduced himself and said, “Hey, do I recognize you from Virginia Tech?" And I was like, "Yeah, I go there.” We exchanged information, and that’s when he reached out to me, and that led us to Taco Bell, which is where we used to go to meet.

Matt Tully
This is a great story.

Garrett Kell
And he started investing in me. We would go there—I think it was probably taco Tuesday or something. I’m probably making that up. But I remember we would go weekly and sit down and we would talk about what was happening, and he would have Bible verses that would apply to what was going on. He was trying to challenge me to read the word, which I was doing. I was devouring the Bible, and he was answering questions as best as he could and trying to help me think about relationships, trying to help me think about everything. And God brought that man into my life at a time where I don’t know what would have happened to me had somebody not started investing in me. Because I was very ambitious for the Lord. I think I was probably uniquely gifted and was having opportunities to tell people about the Lord and was having influence. But without accountability and shaping, that’s really dangerous. And I think God used Shelby to put me on the track to see how much I needed godly, wise, humble, loving people who were willing to put up with my mess and to walk me toward Jesus and with Jesus. So I’m forever thankful. He and I still talk regularly.

Matt Tully
All your comments about the way that God was clearly pursuing you and just that there was this sense of conviction that was following you around makes me think of that poem (I think it’s by Francis Thompson) “The Hound of Heaven.” It’s a picture of this hound just following you wherever you go.

Garrett Kell
Yes. Hunting. Yes. Praise the Lord.

Matt Tully
It strikes me as such a great segue into this whole conversation about discipling because, at every step of the way, these guys who took a step to reach out to you, to pray for you, to talk with you, to encourage you, they were doing a simple thing—maybe a hard thing still, but a relatively simple thing—not always knowing all that God was doing in between, all that God was doing in your heart apart from them. And I just think that’s such a helpful thing to remember as we talk about this discipling call, because we have a job to do, but just knowing that God is at work as well changes the whole flavor of it.

Garrett Kell
It really does. If you’re just willing to walk with the Lord with somebody else, that’s most of it. Because if you’re really trying to follow Jesus and you really just want to help somebody else follow Jesus, you’re two imperfect people who are both leaning on Jesus for his grace according to his word and by his Spirit. And it’s messy. Discipleship is messy. If it’s anything, it’s messy, because it’s two sinners trying to follow the Lord together. But if it’s anything else, it’s really hopeful because the Lord loves to work in the midst of our mess. So I completely agree with that. As I even think about some of the things I wrote in this little booklet, as I was reading back over it, all I saw was faces of people who have done that for me, who have cared for me, and there are fingerprints of God’s people all over me who have helped shape my life. I’m so thankful that people didn’t look at it as just a task or that you had to be a perfect person to do it, because that I don’t know that anybody would have been there.

11:38 - What Is Discipleship?

Matt Tully
That’s one of the things I love about your teaching on discipling and what you’ve written is it really does strip away a lot of the mythology and the intensity almost around discipling, and it really does present it as walking alongside another believer as a Christian, as an imperfect person. If you had to boil down a definition of what it means to disciple somebody, how would you state that succinctly?

Garrett Kell
I think most basically it’s helping somebody else follow Jesus. That seems so simple, but I think that’s what it is. There are two ways you can think about it. If it’s somebody who doesn’t follow Jesus right now and they don’t know him, then the first part of the discipling process is evangelizing them, helping them to understand who Jesus is, the good news of what he’s done, and what it means for us to respond by turning from our sin and trusting in him and following him by faith. Then, for those who do know Jesus, it’s helping them to follow him more faithfully, to learn to obey him in everything he’s commanded in every arena of life. And I think that’s what discipling is. It’s helping somebody else follow Jesus as you’re following Jesus

12:44 - Don’t Be Possessive

Matt Tully
In your book, you highlight seven pitfalls that disciplers can sometimes fall into. As we think about this task of helping someone follow Jesus, there are some things that we can sometimes do that can go astray a little bit. So I wanted to talk through some of those and maybe have you share what you were getting at with them. The first one you mentioned is don’t be possessive. What do you mean by that?

Garrett Kell
This may harken back to some of the early days of discipling that I witnessed. Sometimes it’s with parachurch and sometimes it’s with just strange church leaders, where they would just be like, “That’s my disciple. I’m investing in them. I’m pouring into them. So you don’t need to get advice from anybody else. You don’t need to spend time with anybody else. You don’t need to read the books that anybody else says you should read. You listen to me.” I think at worst it felt like a cult-like, controlling, potentially abusive situation. There’s some of that. But then there’s just some people who I think, for whatever reason, they get possessive of other people. It could be well intended—they just really care about them and want them to do well and feel like a lot of voices could be confusing. And sometimes a lot of voices are confusing. But I just think we need to remember that these are not our people. They’re the Lord’s people. And we also need to remember that we don’t have everything that somebody else needs. Only Jesus does. In the body of Christ, we’re all many members, many parts. So I’m really hopeful that the people I’m investing in are being invested in by other people who have what I don’t have—other views and perspectives or experiences or gifts or insights into the Scriptures. So I think we’ve got to remember these are Jesus’s disciples, not ours. We can’t stake down territory on them.

Matt Tully
Have you ever wrestled, though, with a sense that someone that you were investing in, someone that you genuinely care about, maybe there are voices speaking into their lives that aren’t giving them good advice, aren’t helping them to follow Jesus better? How do you deal with that?

Garrett Kell
I think that’s where there’s a very big difference between the first thing that we’re talking about and what you’re talking about. There are times that you can see that somebody is a double-minded man or woman because they’re listening to two very different sorts of counsel that are confusing them. And that’s where I think you may need to just come in and say, “Hey, listen. I just want to say something to you that may sound hard or may sound harsh or maybe even sound prideful, but I think that the other voices that you’re listening to right now are unhelpful for you. And the reason is because I don’t think they’re saying to you what the Scriptures are saying. Can I just show you an example or two?” And then be very specific and say, “You told me this person said this. For instance, they said it’s okay for you to date this person even though they’re not a believer, because it does seem like they’re making some progress. I just wanted to show you that this is really dangerous, and here’s why.” And open the Scriptures and show some of the Scriptural teachings on that. Say, “I think in the end, you have to make your decision, but I feel like this is not becoming a healthy relationship. You need to decide what voices you’re going to listen to. And it doesn’t have to be me, but I just want to encourage you to listen to somebody who’s telling you what the Bible says.” So you always want the Scripture and Jesus himself to be the standard and help them to sift. You don’t want them to pick between them and you. That’s not the goal. The goal is you want them to choose Jesus. So always be pointing back to the Bible, because the more the Scripture is your guide for everything, the more that people will rightly trust you and be able to grow in discernment, which part of spiritual maturity is growing in discernment, and you want to help them to do that. And that’ll happen only by the Spirit helping them to see the Scriptures.

16:20 - Don’t Circumvent the Local Church

Matt Tully
That’s helpful. Another pitfall that you highlight is don’t circumvent the local church. For many of us, that’s going to seem very obvious. You already mentioned parachurch organizations and college ministries. I’ve heard this critique at times in that context, that the local church doesn’t actually do discipling very well, that a lot of these other parachurch organizations have built their whole organizations around the idea of discipling, of making disciples who make disciples. The local church just doesn’t do that very well in that context, and that’s why they feel the need to pursue discipling relationships and strategies outside of the church. What would be your response to that as a pastor, as someone who even was saved in the context of a collegiate ministry? How do you think about that?

Garrett Kell
Well, first thing, we need to examine whether or not that critique is true. So it might be good to look at our local churches and ask, Do we disciple people? Are we doing this well? And if so, are we making it clear for people how they get involved and how they can grow in that? Because somebody may be like, “Hey, I’m getting discipled by somebody at this parachurch ministry because nobody’s going to disciple me.” And it may be that we’ve just not done a good job at the church of connecting them and showing them, “Hey, this is what discipleship looks like here, and here are ways you can get involved.” Or we may hear that and say, “You know what? I think you’re right. I think this is an area where we’ve abdicated our responsibility, and I want to ask you to forgive me for that. And I would love for you to follow a pathway that we can develop together. Let’s talk about what would it look like for this to happen well here, and let me invest in you. And let’s think about how we could change the culture here at the church and invest all the more.” So it might be true, but it might also not be. We have parachurch ministries at our church that we work with, but they support the local church and they are aiming at finding areas where maybe we are not as developed, but they’ve got a really good ministry, for example, with college students. We have a parachurch ministry that we work with, and it’s been a huge blessing. But every Sunday morning, the first few rows are filled up with those college students because it’s always pointing toward a local church rather than pulling away from it.

Matt Tully
So that sounds like you’re saying there’s a way for us to say yes to both—both the parachurch discipling kinds of ministries and also yes to the local church. They can go hand in hand.

Garrett Kell
Yep. I think they just have to be a healthy parachurch ministry and a healthy church. And I think if both those things exist, they should be able to work together in really helpful ways that can maybe find areas of weakness that we need one another in.

18:56 - Don’t Fear Inadequacy

Matt Tully
The next pitfall you highlight is the fear of other people. You say, “Discipling is not a mission for perfected Christians,” and yet I think sometimes our fear of people realizing how weak we are, how inadequate we are, how unsophisticated we are, can cause us to hold back from actually wanting to disciple others. So could you just share, is there a moment from your own past or your own history of when you feel like your own fear of being rejected or fear of being exposed prevented you from really discipling someone the way that you should have? How did you get through that?

Garrett Kell
I think this seems to be something that many people wrestle with. I may have always had an overconfidence that I could find a way to do it, but I do want to say that I have learned to be more honest about my shortcomings. I think I used to disciple people and not be discouraged to the point where I wouldn’t do it. But I think I would hide my failures in a way that was unhelpful for others. So I think one of the ways that I’ve grown in this over the years is to try to be more vulnerable, more open, more honest, and to invite people into the mess rather than pretend that there’s no mess. And that has proven to be uniquely helpful. And when I think about the people in our church who I’ve been most encouraged by their faith, it’s not the people who are just killing it for Jesus. It’s the people who are being crushed and are looking to Jesus. There are faces coming to mind right now of people who have trusted Jesus through horrendous circumstances, really heart-wrenching situations, and to see the way that they allowed me to walk alongside them. And I’ve learned over the years to regularly thank them, saying, “I just want to say thank you for letting me in right here, because in the midst of the tears and the snot and the mess and the devastation, all I see is I see the Lord sustaining you and you trusting him. And that makes me want to trust him more. So thank you.” Whatever it may be. So whether it be ways that we’re feeling tempted. On Wednesday mornings, I work out here at the house. Our garage is a gym, and guys come over. And at the end of the workout, we take a moment to all share something that we’re trusting God for right now. And during that time, I’m regularly just being honest. “Hey guys, right now in this season, I’m being short with my kids. I’m irritable. I feel a lot of pressure or stress, and I’m not as gracious and I’ve been harsh. Would you pray that I would be tender with my kids?” And that helps the guys. It doesn’t help if I’m like, “You know, guys, I don’t really have any needs, but I’ll pray for you.” That’s not it, right? They need to know what it looks like to be honest and to lean into the grace of Jesus and to pray for one another in those sorts of things. So I think your weaknesses actually end up being some of your greatest strengths in discipling, because that’s where Jesus shines brightest.

Matt Tully
That can run so counter, though, to maybe our default way of thinking. When we’re in a discipling relationship, we can think to ourselves, I’m supposed to be the teacher. I’m supposed to be the leader, the spiritually mature person. If I share that I’m struggling with this right now, something that maybe I thought I had down and now this is back in my life, it’s going to make them not respect me, not trust me, not think that I actually have anything to offer them. How do you counsel someone who’s worried about that?

Garrett Kell
I certainly think there’s the reality that leaders are to be above reproach in ways that are honorable. But the way I explain to our elders and people who aspire to be elders is that elders are not perfect people, but we are to be examples of both resisting sin and repenting of it. So we’re not going to be perfect Christians, but we are going to be models of how you resist it. And when you give in, how do you deal with it? If you lose your temper, how do you repent well? What does that look like? Because we need models of that as well, not just people who are always doing it perfectly. So we have one model like that, and his name is Jesus. Right. So I do think there could be a realistic concern of, I don’t want to undermine my ministry, so I think part of being a leader is that you have to be qualified and there needs to be some maturity there. But that maturity isn’t the same as perfection. And I do think that as you grow as a believer—I can just think about my life for the past year. It’s been a really different kind of leadership than I prefer. We’ve had a lot of really hard things with one of our children being in the hospital a lot, and then my mother dying of a horrific cancer, and a number of really hard things that we’ve walked through. So my congregation—not mine, but Jesus’s—but the congregation I’m a part of and help to serve, it’s been weird for people to be so thankful. They’re like, “Thank you for trusting the Lord through this. It’s helped me.” And I’ve just felt like a hot mess of being useless. So I’ve never felt more useless as a pastor over this past year, but in some strange way, it seemed to help people more than when I’ve got it together, from my perspective, because I’m trying to trust the Lord. I think for most people on this planet, the longer you live you just realize life is really, really hard and we need models of how to trust the Lord in it. So that’s why I’m so thankful for all the people the Lord’s brought around me who have shown me how to do that well. Ultimately, Jesus, of course, who suffered perfectly, but they model it well for me.

Matt Tully
There is something so encouraging, so helpful when we see another Christian who we respect and trust and love trusting the Lord, pursuing the Lord clearly, even in the midst of their own pain, their own weakness, their own frailty. There is something that’s uniquely helpful as we realize, Hey, I’m not alone in my own weaknesses and failings. He’s pursuing Christ, and I can do that too. I can do that too.

Garrett Kell
Yeah, I think there’s hope there because so many times suffering, sinning, and all of that, it feels isolating, like nobody else is dealing with this. Nobody else feels like this. Nobody else has doubts. Nobody else wonders if God’s good. All those kinds of things. And I’m like, I think we need to talk about that because basically everybody’s going to struggle with those things at some point in their walk with the Lord. So how do we do that well?

25:01 - Don’t Be Rigid

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about one more. Even though there are a number of other ones that you listed in the book, we’ll do just one more here today. Don’t be rigid. What do you mean by that?

Garrett Kell
I remember there was a guy, and he and I were going to go through Ephesians. We had agreed to meet for ten weeks, and we were going to go through Ephesians. And so what that meant was I divided up Ephesians into ten slots, and every time we came, we were going to cover that. And that’s what we covered, no matter what happened. And I remember it was about the third meeting that he came in, and he was a mess. He was upset. He was struggling. I asked him what was going on, and he started sharing about some really hard things that he was doing. And I was like, “All right. We’ll pray about that. Let’s go into Ephesians.” And I didn’t serve him.

Matt Tully
When did you realize that? When did you first realize that wasn’t the way to do it?

Garrett Kell
When he said he didn’t want to keep meeting about two weeks later. He’s like, “Man, I know what you’re trying to do. I think I just need something different right now.” Which I took, in my pride, as he’s not ready to study the Bible. Twenty-four years later, I look at that and I realize that he needed somebody to love him. He needed somebody to walk with him. His legs have been shot off, and I needed to not be rigid. I needed to change my approach. In the moment, he needed something different than Ephesians 2. Ephesians 2 is great, but that’s not what he needed in that moment. He needed some other scriptural applications, and he needed somebody to weep with him. And he needed somebody to take him to the throne of grace to show him that there’s grace and mercy in a time of need and to go out to his house and to help with the situation that was going on there. He needed something different, but I had a plan. And that’s because my school of discipleship that I was coming out of in that season was here’s how many meetings, here’s what you do, and then when it’s over, it’s over, and you go and you do the same. It was too formal, at least from my perspective, for what life often throws at us. It’s real life discipling.

Matt Tully
It’s the difference between a seminar that you’re putting on for the person and a relationship where you’re actually responding to what they’re saying and doing.

Garrett Kell
Hundred percent. I think discipleship is life on life. It’s word centered. Yes, we need the Scriptures. Yes! But that’s not always just teaching verse by verse through something. I think largely that should be a part of what’s happening in normal discipling relationships. There should be and attitude of let’s get into the word together and talk about it and all these kinds of stuff. But it’s got to be more than that because life is more than that. It’s showing how those principles now apply in whatever valley of the shadow of death you’re going through.

27:35 - How Do I Get Started?

Matt Tully
Garrett, maybe as a final couple of questions, I can imagine someone listening to all this who has been a Christian for a long time, has some level of spiritual maturity and experience. They know the word. They’re serious about their walk with the Lord. But they just still look at themselves or maybe look at their personality or have had some really bad experiences in trying to disciple somebody. And they’re just thinking right now, Look, I know that this is something I should be doing. But I just don’t feel like I’m ready to do it. I don’t feel like I have the confidence. I’m afraid. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do from here. What word of advice or encouragement would you offer to somebody who’s feeling that way right now?

Garrett Kell
First, I would praise the Lord that somebody is even wrestling with that. So if you’re actually wrestling with that kind of scenario, praise God. You’re thinking about the right sorts of things. There are so many other fleeting, foolish things that people waste time thinking about. So you’re thinking about the right thing. I would say just in God’s providence, the fact that you’re hearing this and feeling that, I think God is up to something and desires to use you. So if that person were in my church, I would want them to come to me and say, “Hey, can we set up a meeting? I need to talk to you about something that has to do with discipling.” And if that person came into my office and was like, “This is how I feel, but I would like to be used,” I would say, “Man, I love you. Let’s do this.” And that’s where I’m going to say, “Okay, tell me what you think is strange about your personality, and I’ll shoot you straight.” And if they’re like, “Well, I do this” I’d be like, “It’s a little weird, just to be honest. So let’s talk about it.” And then what I would want to do is I would say, “I’ve got a guy that I don’t have time to meet with, but I think he needs somebody to meet with him. Would you be willing? How about I take you guys out to lunch? Let’s go to lunch. I’ll introduce y’all, and we’ll put a plan together and then you guys keep in touch and let me know how it goes.” And then why don’t you, in your first meeting, just share with him and be like, “Hey, listen. I’ve been praying that God would bring somebody into my life I could invest in. And I just want to tell you out of the gate why it makes me nervous to do this. I’m this, I’m that.” And then show them how you’re trying to trust Jesus in the midst of all of that. And then ask them to share their story and how they are trusting Jesus. And then you both come to the table humbly, as beggars looking for bread, and Jesus is the bread, so let’s feast and then you’ll help each other. We’re not here to impress anybody. We’re helped to be impressed by the Lord.

Matt Tully
That’s so good. It removes so much of the stigma, so much of the fear that we can often feel. Garrett, thank you so much for sharing this with us and helping us to think through what it really means and what Scripture actually is calling us to when it calls us to make disciples, and maybe clearing away some of the things that we can tend to bring along with that. We appreciate you taking the time.

Garrett Kell
Matt, thanks for all that you’re doing. It’s always a joy, brother.

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