The Five Marks of Mission outline the importance of proclaiming Good News and nurturing new believers. The Anglican Communion Office spoke with The Rt Revd Moon Hing, the former Archbishop of South-East Asia about his ministry in church planting and how he learned about being a disciple-maker from fixing bicycles with his father.

Discipleship and fixing bicycles
“Making disciples should be the main focus for all Christians”, according to the Bishop of West Malaysia, the Rt Revd Moon Hing. He says he learned about being a disciple-maker from fixing bicycles with his father. “The word disciples means ‘a learner’,” said Bishop Moon Hing. “My dad had a little bicycle repair shop and I remember when I was about nine or ten years old, my dad would call my brothers and I out, and say, ‘Squat down beside me and watch how I do the assembling or repairing’. I remember very clearly how he showed us how to fix the spokes and then rotate it in a balancer. He would say, ‘Do this and do that, then you will balance the wheel’. Then he would stand up and say, ‘Your turn’. So, each of us would go in and squat down and try… That’s how we learn and grow. So finally, we grew up learning how to repair bicycles. This is part and parcel of the discipleship programme my father did with us, and I can still go ahead and repair bicycles!”

Training theological students to be disciple-makers
“That’s how we pass the message down. So, I took this into the church. When I was a priest, every year I had theological students for two months of practical learning under me. I always told them, ‘You do not need to learn anything about the church. If you learn anything about the church, that is a bonus, but you learn by observing how I do my ministry, how I deal with my family, how I deal with my free time, how I deal with my devotion time, how I deal with my sermon preparation, and how I deal with an emergency’. So, they observed my life for two months, staying in our house. And that is a discipleship style that I adopted over 30 years ago… I wanted them to see how I operate my life. And they could see the weaknesses. Of course, it’s a very vulnerable position, very vulnerable, we open ourselves up for them, they could easily criticise. I thought by doing so, very few people will want to go into the ministry because of the tough, difficult challenges. But surprisingly, over my twenty years in a parish ministry, I planted fifty churches, and I trained these forty-six workers to run the ministry. So, when I became a bishop, they took over and now run the different parishes themselves.”

Pastoring and teaching others to fish
“Discipleship is not only believing in the Great Commission, that Jesus says, ‘Go, and make disciples’, but it has to be translated downward into the heart and the arms and limbs so that we work on it.” Bishop Moon Hing believes pastoring should be more than caring for the ‘sheep’ and making disciples. “We should be saying that pastoring involves disciple-making and making disciples; the person who knows not only how to make them disciples, but will make them a disciple-maker also. I think disciple-making is not just that we are feeding the sheep. My idea of disciple making is that they should be able to fish by themselves and teach others to fish.”

Growing disciples is like growing mangoes
For Bishop Moon Hing, growing mangoes can be a picture of how we grow disciples. He said, “In this country, in Malaysia, we have a lot of mangoes and we grow a lot of mangoes. I often ask the question, what is the fruit of a mango tree? And everybody says, ‘mangoes’, but that’s not the complete answer. Everyone of them is a consumer of mangoes and nobody plants mangoes trees. So, the answer should be the fruit of a mango tree is another mango tree, not just a fruit to be consumed. If you have vision, you go further, and ask what is the fruit of a mango tree? It’s a plantation of mango trees. Because every tree will produce hundreds and thousands of mangoes, if we plant them. That is the same thing in our Christian life, if you make one disciple and train the disciple, you know you will have a total of two you. But if you go further deeper into it, it’s not just two, it will be millions and billions and trillions of people, because each one is like the seed of the mango. And if one tree can produce a plantation, it’s the same as discipleship. That person will actually multiply into two or four, or six or eight and go on, before you realise you will have a whole army rising up to become disciples and to be strong disciples of Christ.”