Scaling vs. Growth in Disciple Making: Why Multiplication Requires a Different Mindset
- Dave Miller
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
by Dave Miller
🎧H3X Podcast🎧
Understanding the Real Difference
In business, growth and scale are not the same thing—and that difference matters when we talk about disciple making.
Growth increases revenue by adding more resources—more employees, equipment, or capital—so costs rise proportionally with revenue.
Scale increases revenue without a proportional rise in costs. It focuses on efficiency—leveraging technology, processes, or existing resources so you can serve more customers or produce more output with minimal additional expense.
A scalable business can handle more demand without breaking its structure or adding massive overhead. Scaling is key in business because it improves profit margins while expanding output.
In recent years, we’ve borrowed the language of scale from the business world and applied it to disciple making. On the surface, this seems attractive: if we can disciple more people with the same time and resources, the Kingdom advances faster. But disciple making doesn’t behave like a business metric. Its very nature—life-on-life, relational, and deeply personal—means that scaling it like a business will eventually undermine the thing we most want to see: disciples who reproduce.
This article explores why growth—not scale—is the better aim for disciple making, how growth can still create movement-level multiplication, and why a sustainable, CoVocational lifestyle is essential for long-term, compounding impact.
Why “Scaling” Breaks Down in Disciple Making
The heart of disciple making is presence, proximity, and time—three elements that refuse to be mass-produced. When we try to apply a business scaling model to disciple making, we inevitably hit a breakdown point.
At some number—three, five, ten—the limits of relational bandwidth kick in. You might “reach” more people, but the depth of relationship and personal investment drops. Over time, this erodes reproduction. You end up with more participants but fewer disciple makers.
And this is the critical point—if the aim is true multiplication, we have to work with the grain of disciple making, not against it. That means shifting our sights from scale to something that actually produces long-term fruit.
Why Growth Fits Disciple Making Better Than Scale
If scaling disciple making is problematic, what should we aim for instead? The answer is growth—but growth defined in disciple-making terms.
Growth means walking with people long enough, deep enough, and consistently enough for them to mature into responsible, sustaining, resilient disciple makers themselves. It’s less about raw numbers and more about depth and durability.
This is where my earlier writing on fatherhood connects. A father doesn’t measure success by how many kids he can feed in a meal but by whether he raises sons and daughters who can one day feed others. You can “scale” a feeding program, but you can’t scale fatherhood. Raising sons in the faith requires time, relationship, and example.
So while we reject the idea of scaling relationships, we can still ask—are there aspects of disciple making that can benefit from the efficiencies of scale without losing its essence? That leads us to resources.
Scaling Resources—With the Right Recipients
Scaling does have a place in disciple making—in resources. Tools, tips, training, and communities of practice can speed the process, but only when they’re placed in the hands of the right people.
Resources must be channels for shared learnings, contextual breakthroughs, and proven wisdom—and they must be used by disciples who are already discipling. Throwing resources at boys won’t make them men. But putting resources in the hands of men who are raising boys can help them raise those boys better.
Spiritually, scaling resources works only when they equip active disciple makers, not when they try to shortcut the process of becoming one.
And when those right people put resources to work in relational disciple making, something remarkable happens—the effects compound over time.
The Mathematics of Compounding Growth
Growth in disciple making becomes powerful when it compounds. Imagine two disciples making two more disciples each year. If every disciple they make also makes two disciples annually, the numbers grow exponentially:
Year Total Disciple Makers
1 2
2 4
3 8
4 16
5 32
6 64
7 128
8 256
9 512
10 1,024
11 2,048
12 4,096
13 8,192
14 16,384
15 32,768
16 65,536
17 131,072
18 262,144
19 524,288
20 1,048,576
This works only if every disciple maker remains committed, focused, and consistent (CFC) in making disciples over the long haul. In this scenario, the original two would have personally raised forty responsible disciple makers over twenty years—people who can stand on their own, weather storms, and keep multiplying.
This is where proximity and relationship are essential. Multiplication happens when growth is rooted in relational investment—and when that growth is multiplied across collaboration, teams, hubs, and communities of practice. Scale in disciple making doesn’t come from an individual reducing time spent with each disciple—it comes from the compounding effect of many growing disciple makers reproducing over time.
Normalizing the CoVocational Way of Life
Compounding growth requires decades of sustained investment. That means disciple makers must build a practical, sustainable lifestyle—one that blends mission and provision without burning out.
The CoVocational lifestyle is about finding joy, contentment, and purpose in everyday work—not as a distraction from ministry but as a platform for it. Compounding growth isn’t fueled by short bursts of intense effort; it’s built on the steady foundation of long-term resilience. And resilience is only possible when your way of life is stable, sustainable, and deeply integrated with your mission.
Provision Without Anxiety: The Money Question in Multiplication
For long-term compounding growth to be sustainable, we can’t ignore the practical realities of life. People need a place to live, food to eat, and clothes to wear.
Jesus told us not to worry about these things but to “seek first the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 6:33)—yet this wasn’t an invitation to neglect our needs. It was a call to trust God’s provision as we work with faithful hands.
Like the people in Haggai’s day, we are not called to abandon our livelihoods—we are called to realign them. We still tend the field, swing the hammer, and run the business, but we do so while building the “house of the Lord” in the lives of people.
We see this in the ministry of Priscilla, Aquila, and Paul (Acts 18:1–3). They shared a trade as tentmakers, working side-by-side to meet their needs while using their trade as a platform for gospel influence. Their home became a base for the church (Romans 16:3–5; 1 Corinthians 16:19), and their life together created a natural context for developing leaders like Apollos (Acts 18:26).
Paul reinforced this approach: “Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Corinthians 7:20). He warned, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10), and modeled it himself—working with his own hands to provide for himself and his team (Acts 20:33–35).
For the CoVocational disciple maker, money is not the mission—it’s a tool. It sustains your household so you can sustain your ministry. When your work and ministry are aligned under God’s priorities, He fills both your home and His house with His glory.
CoVocational Models and Disciple Making Goals
Your approach to covocational models directly shapes your approach to disciple making.
Tentmakers aim to scale their covocational model so they can grow disciple making—freeing time, finances, and flexibility for deep relational investment.
Sentrepreneurs may intentionally sacrifice business scale to create growth opportunities for people, even at the expense of profit—seeing the business itself as a discipling environment.
Marketplace missionaries operate anywhere along this spectrum, but the key is alignment—ensuring your covocational model serves your disciple-making mission rather than competes with it.
The model must serve the mission, not the other way around.
Conclusion: Multiplication Over Scale
Scaling may be a brilliant strategy for profit, but in disciple making, it eventually reaches a breaking point. True Kingdom multiplication comes not from stretching one person thinner but from investing deeply in a few who can invest deeply in others.
Growth—rooted in relationship, proximity, and resilience—compounds into movements when it’s sustained over decades, supported by a CoVocational way of life, aligned with both provision and mission, and fueled by leaders who are committed, focused, and consistent.
The goal is not to scale disciple making but to multiply disciples by growing them—because in God’s economy, the input and the output are always about people, not just numbers.