I had recently the pleasure of sitting down with Gavin Anthony to discuss his disciple making course. Gavin currently serves in the Minnesota Conference as assistant to the president and director for Strategic Initiatives. Since he started working with Minnesota in March 2025, Gavin has been building a course for disciple making that has profoundly impacted multiple lives, including mine.
Savannah: You have been working for the last year on developing a disciple making… program? Module? Way of life? How would you describe it?
Gavin: A course. We are creating a number of online courses. The first part is a boot camp, which is called The Disciple maker’s Journey. It’s like a 10-week introduction, big picture to what Jesus’s method of disciple making is about. Then, we’ll follow that up with a six-month individual coaching time, where we will help people apply what they’ve been learning, discipling people where they are.
What led to this journey? Why build this resource?
Ever since I was a teenager, I have just had a real longing to share how to have personal intimacy with God. Right at the beginning of my ministry, I started teaching people how to have a prayer life and how to study the Bible through different methods, because personal intimacy with God is just the heart of everything. As I spent time trying to create different disciple making, discipling, discipleship resources, I realized that I was not multiplying what I was doing. Just over 10 years ago I had this overwhelming urge to explore and absorb as much as I could on what disciple making was. I immersed myself in everything I could possibly find–books, podcasts, everything—to try and understand how we can create a multiplying culture and what needs to be in the DNA for that kind of thing.
It eventually became obvious to put the curriculum online, which allows us to provide the resources to anyone everywhere. Since I came to Minnesota, it’s been exciting to work alongside a small team of people who are really excited about that same thing.
What is the focus of the course?
It’s called “The disciple makers journey” and the tagline is “courses to help you build communities of image bearers, one life at a time.” The real focus is this idea of image bearing, because that’s what the purpose of disciple making is—creating communities devoted to restoring people into the image of God.
You’ve used a few different terminologies. You said discipling, discipleship, disciple, disciple makers, image bearers. Do those terms differ, or are they interchangeable?
First of all, I don’t like the word discipleship at all. I do use it every now and again, but lots of countries don’t have the word discipleship in their language. It didn’t exist in Icelandic, for example, where I was from. That’s a word that we have created.
But what’s in the Bible is disciple making. Jesus says, “Go and make disciples.” So, I think it’s most helpful to keep with the biblical terminology just to make sure we’re clear. Disciple making, or making disciples, is the most important thing.
When Jesus calls people to follow Him, He says, “Come, follow me, and I will teach you how to fish for people” (Matt. 4:19). So, the call to follow Him, the call to come into a disciple-making relationship, is a call to come and be trained for mission.
That’s right at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel. In Matt. 4:19, you’ve got the calling, then in Matt. 28:18-20, you’ve got the commissioning of the disciples. Everything in the middle is kind of a disciple making workbook or document. That’s one way of looking at the Gospel of Matthew.
So, disciple making for me is the most important thing. Everyone is called to be a disciple maker. I believe, in the Bible, a disciple is the same thing as a disciple maker. Disciple making isn’t an elite sport, where only certain or special people do that. Every disciple is called to be a disciple maker.
A disciple, then, is someone who follows Jesus, and a disciple maker is someone who follows Jesus and helps other people follow Jesus. So, what is an image bearer?
We bear fruit in two ways. We’re bearing fruit in terms of being like Jesus—our characters becoming Christlike—and the fruit of multiplying people into His kingdom who reflect that character. Particularly when we look at our prophetic calling in Revelation 13 and 14, the heart of the three angels’ messages and what’s at stake, it’s fundamentally about, Who do we look like? Disciple making is therefore core to our prophetic calling as Seventh-day Adventists: walking alongside people and showing people how to be like Jesus.
An image bearer is just looking at that from a different point of view. In Genesis, you’ve got creation, and the pinnacle of creation is the creation of human beings, and they are made in the image of God. That’s how they were designed. That’s at the core of what we are and what we’re called to be. We’re called to be like God and reflect that.
What happens in Genesis 3 undermines that whole thing, and that image is distorted or corrupted. Then the whole redemption plan—what we talk about as salvation—is not simply about escaping this bad place. It’s about being saved back into the purpose that God had for us, which is to be in His image.
When we walk on the earth looking like Jesus, it refutes everything that Satan is claiming about God. That’s what we’re trying to help people understand and implement where they are—how to be image bearers. Someone—I don’t know who it was—summarized Jesus’ disciple-making method as, “Think big, start small, go deep,” which I love. His mission was to reach the whole world. That’s think big. Start small: He started with these 12. And then He went deep with them. It was life on life. After a couple of years or so, He was able to send them out, and they knew what to do because He’d lived that life with them.
Cosmically, it feels very large and a little overwhelming for a normal person. Sometimes I might feel like, “I’m an ordinary person. I don’t know how to be a disciple maker. I’m still learning what it means to be in relationship with Jesus. I haven’t arrived yet.”
All fruitfulness is the overflow of intimacy with God at its most basic level. So, my task is to spend time with Jesus, listen to what He says, and then do that. And that’s really it. One of the important parts of that is doing it in community. Not doing it by ourselves. We should have other people there to encourage us when it gets difficult. People who can pray for us and support us.
Savannah: So what is actually in the 10-week boot camp course?
Gavin: We are looking at four very simple stages that Jesus modeled in his life as a disciple maker. The first is preparation: How did God prepare Jesus? How does God prepare us? How does God use the circumstances in our lives to shape us into people He can use?
Then, when Jesus begins ministry, He calls people. The bulk of Jesus’s time is spent coaching and mentoring these young guys. And finally, Jesus sends the disciples out. Where are they going? Why are they going? How are they going? We spend two weeks looking at each of those stages—preparing, calling, mentoring and sending—with an introduction and conclusion.
Savannah: And once the boot camp is complete, the next step is coaching and relationship with a mentor. What is the purpose of that and how is that structured?
Gavin: We are in the process of writing that course currently, but it’s divided into two parts: Grow and Go! We are using the idea of GPS – goal, practice, and stories that measure. How do I want to deepen my intimacy with God? How is God leading my life at the moment? The practices are how we are going to get there and the stories that measure tell us how far we’ve come.
We will coach people through helping them to set up their own goals for disciple making, whether that’s one of their children at home or someone next door. One of the most important things in this disciple-making relationship is that we can be with people once a week, where we can listen to how things are going, give some advice, and most importantly to pray for each other.
Savannah: So how can someone get started?
Gavin: Well, the first step is to go to our website at www.reflectingjesus.org. Currently, the only course available is the 10-week boot camp, which anyone can do either on their own or with some friends. We are also advertising some online cohorts where people can go through the boot camp via video conference. Once these cohorts conclude, then we’ll transition people into the grow and go coaching forum.
