Consistency: The Unseen Strength of Discipleship
The past couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of sitting with various ACO staff as they’ve stopped by our new HQ here in Kenya. Between assembling beds, maneuvering a massive boulder into place to mark the entrance off the main highway, and trying to get electricity and internet working (not necessarily in that order), we’ve kept circling back to one subject:
Discipleship.
And almost every one of them has said the same thing, “It’s happening right now. What we’re doing right now, this is it.”
Somewhere along the way in contemporary Christian culture, we crossed our wires. We attached programs to spiritual growth. We packaged maturity into curriculum. We turned following Jesus into a checklist, a badge system, something measurable and tidy.
Don’t misread me.
I love the Church. I’m not pointing fingers. Running a church is an entirely different responsibility than discipling someone. For the sake of this conversation, let’s simply set the institutional side down for a moment.
The Church gathers. Discipleship walks.
And it was never the Church’s sole responsibility to disciple you. It’s definitely not the Church’s responsibility to turn you into a disciple-maker. That calling belongs to everyday believers who choose to accept the call, to be Christ’s ambassador (2 Corinthians 5:20), and to live closely enough to someone else that life begins to overlap.
John Maxwell says it well: “More is caught than taught.”
That’s discipleship.
Dripping
If you read our latest newsletter (not on our email list? You can sign up below), you saw me describe it this way:
Dripping. Consistent, intentional dripping into someone’s life.
There’s no grand program attached to it. No certificate at the end. No “Level 4 Disciple” badge. Just presence.
As I prepare to pour into a young man close to me over the next several months, there isn’t a curriculum packet. There isn’t a performance metric. There’s life. There’s proximity. There’s the Word of God opened together, not to transpose the next chapter and verse, but to wrestle with what it means in the rawness of today.
Discipleship isn’t downloading information. It’s sharing oxygen.
Not Clones
And let me say this clearly:
The last thing I want to do is create a bunch of “little Toms.” If your discipleship produces carbon copies, you’ve missed it.
Consistent discipleship helps someone become more fully who “God” designed them to be, not who you are.
What Consistency Actually Looks Like
How do you be consistent in discipleship? Well, it looks like:
- Opening Scripture together regularly.
- Applying scripture to what’s actually happening in your week.
- Letting someone see how you carve out time with the Lord.
- Memorizing Scripture together.
- Praying honestly.
- Rubbing shoulders with fellow followers of Christ.
- And also with people who have no clue what any of this means.
It’s intentional.
It’s inconvenient.
It disrupts your calendar when done correctly.
It is rarely efficient.
And it cannot be microwaved.
The Cost
My father used to say, “It will cost you your life.”
At the time, that sounded dramatic. Now I understand what he meant. Consistent discipleship costs time.
It costs emotional energy.
It costs privacy.
It costs comfort.
It costs control.
But what it produces is depth.
We don’t need more programs. We need more people willing to drip.
To walk.
To stay.
To be consistent.
Because transformation doesn’t usually happen in a weekend event.
It happens in the quiet, faithful, ordinary consistency of walking alongside someone: while you’re putting beds together, rolling boulders into place, and trying to get the Wi-Fi to cooperate.
And sometimes…those random, ordinary moments are the exact environment where discipleship flourishes the most.
And in many ways, this is the same principle that sustains the work happening through ACO.
The kind of discipleship we described above isn’t built on big moments. It grows through consistent presence over time — people choosing to stay, to walk alongside others, and to keep showing up.
Consist Presence Over Time
In this season, we’re praying for that same kind of steady foundation for the ministry itself.
Our 100 × 100 campaign is a simple invitation: asking God to raise up 100 partners who will give $100 each month, creating the consistency needed to keep walking with students, leaders, and communities across Kenya.
Because just like discipleship, the most meaningful transformation is rarely instant.
It grows through faithful consistency.
Blessings,
Tom Stickney
Executive Director of ACO