What if the most sought-after letters after a leader's name weren't MBA or PhD, but DM? Doctor of Management. Doctor of Music. Doctor of Ministry. Take your pick — those initials are spoken for.
But the one that matters most? Disciple Maker.
Fresh on the heels of Father's Day this past Sunday, with memories of my own father especially front and center, that's the idea I can't stop turning over. It came from a recent conversation (in an upcoming episode) on my podcast, The Price of Leadership, with Dr. David Schroeder of Pillar College. Our families go back a long way — we grew up together attending the CMA church in Camp Hill. And somewhere in our conversation, he said something that reframed the whole thing for me: we are not called to be disciples. We are called to make them.
That's the Great Commission. Not just to follow, but to cultivate followership. And when you sit with it, you realize that's the credential that should hang over every other one. We chase the degrees that prove we know things. The harder, higher work is proving we can grow people.
We spend our days with the flock, not the shepherd
Here's why this lands so squarely in the work I do. So much leadership writing fixes its gaze upward — on the boss, the visionary, the person at the front of the room. But think about your actual week. You spend far more hours with your colleagues than with your boss. The culture you live inside isn't set by the org chart. It's set by the people beside you.
So the real assignment isn't only to raise up more leaders. It's to grow more functional, fellowshiping followers. Because let's face it: there is no culture, no cohesion, no camaraderie without die-hard discipleship. The followers are the body. Tend them, and you have something alive. Neglect them, and you have a flowchart.
Nobody was ever an interruption
Back to that podcast conversation with Dr. Schroeder. He made a comment I haven't been able to shake. We were talking about the greatest disciple maker of all time, God in the flesh, and he said: Nobody was ever an interruption to Jesus.
Think about who came to Him. The children. The sick. The woman who had bled for twelve years and reached out through a crowd just to touch the hem of His robe. The sinners. The whoever-they-were. Not one of them was treated as a distraction from the real work. They were the real work.
That is how you grow followers. Your flock can never be an interruption to you. The interruption is the ministry. The knock on the door, the unscheduled question, the person who needs five minutes you don't have — that's not the thing pulling you away from leadership. That's the thing leadership is made of.
My father, Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, lived this. People didn't interrupt Charlie; people were the point of Charlie. And on a later episode, another guest who knew my dad — Gary Hillerich — put a frame around exactly why that worked. If you want to increase retention, he said, you have to raise identification and get the barriers down. People stay where they're known.
Which is just a modern way of saying what my father said his whole life: There is no communication without identification. You cannot lead people you refuse to identify with. And you cannot identify with people you keep treating as interruptions.
The disease is division
Here is where I'll be honest about the moment we're in. The greatest illness in our country right now is division. We have lost the ability to love each other, because identity politics has trained us to shout one another out of existence. We've built whole identities out of who we're against. Barriers up, identification gone, retention impossible — not just in our companies, but in our communities.
The research and the culture both point at the same wound. We are starving for the very thing disciple-making produces: people who can stay in the room with one another.
Scripture maps the way back, and it maps it as a progression. I keep returning to 2 Peter 1:6–7. I have the Living Epistles translation, and it walks the steps plainly:
"Next, learn to put aside your own desires so that you will become patient and godly, gladly letting God have His way. This will make possible the next step, which is for you to enjoy other people and to like them, and finally you will grow to love them deeply."
Notice the order. It doesn't start with loving people. It starts with setting your own desires aside. From there you become patient. From patience comes the capacity to actually enjoy people, then to like them — and only at the end, after all of that, do you grow to love them deeply. Love isn't the entry fee. It's the harvest.
The work, and the way into it
So here's where it lands.
Leaders must love their followers. Disciple makers must love their disciples. And learning to love one another can only be done one way — by learning to know God better and better. He is the ultimate disciple maker. The whole craft is downstream of Him.
That, finally, is the truth about my father. It wasn't that Charlie was religious. It's that he knew Christ so well, so personally, that he simply walked in His disciple-making footsteps. The fruit looked like warmth and retention and a room full of people who felt known — but the root was a man following the greatest example there has ever been.
May we all follow in His path. And may we earn the only credential that outlasts us — not for what we knew, but for who we grew.
