There’s a man at my church, and I’m changing some details, who has been coming for about six years.
He’s there most Sundays. He sits in roughly the same spot. He helps stack chairs afterward. If you asked anybody in the building whether they know him, they’d say of course, and they’d get his first name right.
Nobody knows anything about him. Nobody has had him over. Nobody has asked what he actually believes, what happened in his twenties, or whether he prays. Nobody has ever opened a Bible with him. Six years.
He isn’t a special case. He’s the normal case. Every church I’ve been part of has had eight or ten of him, and what makes him so hard to see is that nothing is wrong. He’s not in crisis. He hasn’t stopped coming. There’s no problem to solve. He’s just unattended.
So here’s the question for this article. Who is that person for you? And why haven’t you noticed him?
Thin with everyone, or deep with a few
Last week I asked you to find your three: someone ahead, someone alongside, someone behind. If your empty box was the third one, the next question is obvious. Okay, but who?
Two claims, and the second is harder than the first.
First: go deep with a few instead of thin with everyone.
Second: the person you’re looking for is probably already in front of you, and you haven’t seen him because he isn’t asking for anything.
Most of us default to thin. We’re friendly with a lot of people. We shake hands, ask how the week went, and mean it. That’s good. Keep doing it. But friendliness spread across fifty people doesn’t make a disciple. Nobody learned to rebuild a carburetor from a guy who waved at him across the parking lot. He learned it from the guy who let him hold the parts.
How Jesus chose
Here’s something about Jesus’ ministry that took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. He had enormous crowds. He fed five thousand men plus women and children on a hillside. By any measure we’d use today, he was wildly successful at reach.
And he spent most of his time with twelve.
Not because the crowds didn’t matter. Matthew says, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). He loved them. But he made a decision about where the hours went, and the hours went to a small number of men.
Look at how the choosing happens:
In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles. (Luke 6:12–13)
Three things in that passage are worth slowing down for.
He prayed all night first. I’m not going to make an all-night prayer meeting a requirement. But be honest about the contrast. If the Son of God spent a night in prayer before choosing, and I choose based on who I already like and who’s convenient, one of us is doing it wrong, and it isn’t him.
He chose from a larger group. Luke says he called his disciples, plural and more than twelve, and chose twelve from them. More followers were available. The narrowing was deliberate. He said no to some in order to say yes to twelve. That isn’t a failure of love. That’s what love looks like in a finite body with twenty-four hours in a day.
Judas is on the list. Luke ends with “Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor” (Luke 6:16). Jesus, after praying all night, with full knowledge, includes the one who will betray him.
I find that strangely freeing. You’re going to pick some people wrong. You’ll invest in somebody who walks away, or who turns out to be someone other than you thought. That isn’t proof you heard God badly. It’s in the pattern. Pick anyway.
Mark’s account adds one line worth keeping. Jesus “appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach” (Mark 3:14). Notice the order. With him first. Sent second. The being-with is the training. You don’t need a curriculum to start. You need proximity.
How Paul chose Timothy
Paul’s pick looks even more ordinary. On his second journey he comes back through Lystra, and Luke tells us: “A disciple was there, named Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, but his father was a Greek. He was well spoken of by the brothers at Lystra and Iconium” (Acts 16:1–2).
That’s the whole vetting process. No résumé. No interview. A reputation among people who had actually watched him live.
That’s a good standard, and you can use it this week. Not who impresses me? but who do the people who actually know him speak well of?
Flexible, available, teachable
When Paul tells Timothy what to look for, his word is faithful: entrust it to “faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Timothy 2:2). Faithful means reliable. It’s a character word, not a talent word, and I’ve written about why faithful isn’t a personality type. Faithfulness sits under everything else on this list.
The working filter I use has three parts: flexible, available, teachable. If you’ve read my piece on what makes a good volunteer, you’ll recognize it. Here’s how it looks when you’re choosing one person to pour into rather than filling a slot on a team.
Flexible. Can this person bend? Discipleship isn’t tidy. Plans change, meetings move, the conversation you planned turns into a different one because his week fell apart. A rigid person will treat every change as a reason to quit. A flexible one will roll with it and still show up. Watch how someone handles a schedule change or a curveball. It tells you a lot.
Available. Does he actually have margin? This one gets missed all the time. A person can be godly, hungry, and wonderful, and simply not have three free hours a month in this season: a new baby, a dying parent, two jobs. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a season. Write the name down, pray for him, and come back in a year.
Teachable. Can he receive a correction without needing to be managed for a week afterward? Teachable doesn’t mean agreeable. Teachable people push back. But there’s a difference between a man who argues and then goes home and thinks about it, and a man who makes you pay a social cost every time you tell him something true. If it costs you to be honest with someone, you can’t disciple him yet.
And underneath all three: faithful in small things. If you say “Thursday at seven” and he’s there Thursday at seven, that tells you more than an hour of talk about theology. Jesus said, “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10).
Two people to be careful with
Two people will present themselves early. Neither is wrong to love. Both are tricky to start with.
The most impressive person in the room. The natural leader, the one already up front, the one everybody says has so much potential. He’s usually being poured into by three people already. Everybody is drawn to him. Meanwhile, the man stacking chairs has had nobody in six years.
I’ll be honest about the motive, because I’ve caught it in myself. Investing in the impressive person feels better. There’s a return you can see. People notice. If you’re not careful, you build a little constellation of promising people around yourself, and what you’ve really done is choose the investments that make you look good.
The neediest person in the room. This one is harder, because the impulse is compassionate. But there’s a difference between someone who needs discipling and someone who needs help you aren’t equipped to give. Active addiction, serious mental illness, a marriage in crisis, an abusive situation: those need pastoral and professional care. Walking alongside someone in crisis is good and Christian. Do it. Just don’t confuse it with discipleship, and know who to hand him to.
The person you’re looking for usually sits in the middle. Not impressive. Not in crisis. Quietly there, and unattended.
How to notice the person nobody has noticed
There’s a small story at the start of John’s Gospel that I love. Andrew hears John the Baptist point to Jesus, follows him, and spends the day with him. Then John tells us what Andrew does next: “He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’” (John 1:41).
The whole church knows Peter. Hardly anyone thinks about Andrew. But Andrew is the reason Peter was in the room. He noticed one person and went and got him.
Noticing is a skill, and it can be learned. Here are three habits that help.
Change where you stand. If you stand in the same place after every service, you’ll see the same people every week. Move. Stand by the door. Stand where you don’t know anybody. You’ll be surprised who has been there for years.
Ask a second question. Everybody asks “How are you?” Almost nobody asks the follow-up. “You said work’s been busy. Busy good or busy bad?” The second question is where you find out a man is drowning.
Notice who leaves alone. Stand near the back for two minutes after church and watch the door. Who walks out by himself every week without stopping to talk? You’ll have a list in about ninety seconds. It’s uncomfortable how fast it works.
Under all three, pray to see. When Jesus looked at the crowds, compassion did the seeing. Ask God for those eyes. He gives them, and it’s a slightly uncomfortable gift, because once you can see the unattended people, you can’t stop seeing them.
If you’re stuck, try these prompts. Who sat near you last Sunday? Who works for you, or next to you? Whose kid plays on the same team as yours? Who came to church twice and then stopped? Who walks out alone?
Your practice this month
Here’s the step, and notice what it doesn’t include.
Write down three names of people nobody is discipling. Then pray over that list every day for the next month. Don’t ask anybody anything yet.
Three people you’ve actually watched, who as far as you can tell have nobody investing in them. Not three people you like. First and last names, on paper.
Then pray every day. It doesn’t need to be long. Thirty seconds will do: God, is it him? Show me. And if it’s not, make that obvious.
Why wait a month? Because the next step is the ask, and you’ll want to be asking someone you’ve prayed about for thirty days, not someone you thought of on a Tuesday. If Jesus prayed all night before he chose, a month of short prayers isn’t a heavy burden.
What often happens is that one of the three names starts to stand out, usually through something ordinary. You run into him at the hardware store. You hear something about his job. He says something after church he’s never said before. I won’t over-spiritualize that. I’m just telling you to pay attention.
Somewhere within fifteen feet of where you sit on Sunday is a person nobody has ever poured into. Go find out who he is.
This article is part of The Investors, a two-year leadership track at Living Faith Church for people who are ready to pour into someone else the way someone poured into them.
Previous: Who Are Your Three? Paul, Barnabas, and Timothy · Next: The Awkward Ask: How to Start a Mentoring RelationshipComing November 3
Enjoyed this article?