By Pastor Larry Beauregard

Some years ago, Pastor Mitchell told me a bit about Harold Warner. He said he was always very curious; always asking questions; always wanting answers for the things stirring inside him. Harold was a few years older than the other young men who got saved at The Potter’s House in Prescott, Arizona in the early ’70s and – unbeknownst to both him and his pastor – the Holy Spirit was behind all that curiosity.

You could say Pastor Mitchell and Pastor Warner kind of stumbled upon the concept of discipleship. It grew naturally out of their relationship with God and each other; from the natural flow of friendship, trust, and respect between a pastor and a young man in his congregation.

Over a period spanning just a couple of years, Pastor Mitchell saw that Harold had developed into quite a preacher. This is what led him to send Pastor Warner to Kearny, Arizona, in response to a request by the leaders of that church for a pastor.

Before he even preached his first sermon there, however, the leaders decided he was not what they were looking for, and Pastor Mitchell counseled him to resign on that first Sunday.

As Pastor Warner was driving back to Prescott, he was involved in the auto accident that severed his spinal cord. During his recovery time in Phoenix, two other Arizona churches were planted in Flagstaff and Wickenburg.

When Pastor Warner and Mona arrived to pioneer the Door Church in Tucson, I came in two months later and was saved as the first convert. Within a month, I began attending prayer meetings at the church with Pastor Warner on the days when I didn’t work.

He was the only male Christian I knew, and I thought all Christians were like him. Immediately, I had respect and trust for him because he began spending time with me; he began building a relationship. I didn’t know it at the time, nor did he realize it either, but discipleship was taking place. It was at the very forefront of the church from its beginning.

Basically, I was to Pastor Warner what he had been to Pastor Mitchell. The same back-and-forth give-and-take naturally occurred between us. To me, he was always Harold. As the church grew, many of the young men coming in followed the same pattern of relationship.

I had been saved for six months when Pastor Warner began preaching actual sermons on discipleship. He preached what he was learning from Scripture and from his pastor and from those fellow disciples of Pastor Mitchell who were pastors now also.

Young men were coming into their churches, too. Almost daily, they were discussing things concerning discipleship, and Pastor Mitchell was learning all about it along with them. A culture of discipleship began to form in these churches as they preached on it, and this included the mother church in Prescott.

When it came to their understanding of discipleship, the Prescott church was not three years ahead of the other three churches; they were all learning about discipleship and preaching on it at the same time and, as a result, many young men were coming in. As I said, they kind of stumbled into the concept.

About eight months after I got saved, I went for two days with Pastor Warner to Ciudad Obregón in southern Sonora, Mexico to attend the first healing crusade that Jack Harris preached beyond the city of Nogales, where he had pioneered a church on both sides of the border. Five churches had now been launched from the Prescott church.

We were eating lunch in the hotel where we were staying when Pastor Mitchell arrived and checked in. As he walked past us with his bags, he said, “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” He returned with a small book in his hand and put it in front of Pastor Warner and said, “Here it is, Harold. All my years of studying as a pastor, and now that we’ve already been experiencing this and developing it in our churches, I find this. This man wrote about discipleship through his study of the Scriptures and has probably never actually seen it or experienced it himself. We’ve been experiencing discipleship without really knowing all the Scriptural teaching on it in the Bible.”

The book was Master Plan of Evangelism by Robert E. Coleman. It has been one of the standard reference books on discipleship in our fellowship ever since.

By the time I went out in 1977 to pioneer and pastor my first church in Douglas, Arizona, the culture of discipleship in our congregation had developed quite a bit – though we were all still learning. Three weeks before I left, Pastor Warner preached a message called “Delegation of Authority,” on his newest revelation regarding discipleship, and that was a game changer.

Before that, I was on staff for five months, and that meant literally doing every task in the church myself. To this day, it was the hardest job I’ve ever had. My day usually started at 4:30 in the morning and finished around 11:00 at night, seven days a week.

In the middle of it all, Susan and I had our first child. It took about two months out on our own pastoring before Susan and I could settle into a normal routine and be free from exhaustion.

All discipleship at that time happened through natural relationships between pastors and the young men in their churches. Exampleship was a repeating theme from the pulpit. The pastor lived out exampleship for his men; we lived out exampleship to one another. Relationships.

It had become a culture in the church and, because of this, God brought many men into our churches – and that is still the case, to this day.

Discipleship was now at the forefront of the church I was pioneering, and the culture of discipleship was being established there. For the first eleven years that I pastored, I hung on every word out of the mouth of Harold Warner and Pastor Mitchell. They did all they could to help me find and fulfill the will of God for my life.

To this day, I draw things from Pastor Warner and from other pastors – even from new converts – because I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. I am always learning and always ready to give out to others what God has deposited in me.

Since the beginning of the Tucson church, I was a faithful and loyal servant to Pastor Warner and to the congregation; I was a servant of God and I am still a servant, always learning.

From the beginning, the Tucson church has been a church full of servants.

Serving is part of the culture of discipleship. As disciples, we became good friends, serving God together to further the Kingdom of God in the earth by partnering together in discipleship, evangelism, and church planting.

This is what brings us to the turning point.

A pastor can only disciple a person to a certain point through relationship and through serving. Serving God in the local church is our service to God. We’re servants (slaves) of God through Christ Jesus our Lord. As we grow and mature in Christ, there comes a turning point in our lives that Jesus told His disciples about in John 15:14-16.

He put it this way: “You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you.”

When we reach the turning point, we’re no longer seen as servants of Jesus. We have now become His friends. Relationship. We’re no longer living by the commands of our Master; we’re His friends. We don’t serve because He tells us to; we serve out of understanding.

As our Friend, Jesus now tells us all things and we’re serving because we’re being led by the Spirit of God. He is always teaching us His ways and letting us know why we’re doing the things we do.

This is the place that God wants every one of us to get to. This is a place of fruitfulness and bearing fruit that will remain.

I was sharing these thoughts with a pastor friend of mine recently, and he asked me this simple question: “Is Harold Warner still discipling you?”

I had never thought about this, so I considered it for a moment before telling him, “No. He hasn’t discipled me for a long time.”

“Right answer,” he said. Why? Because years ago, I had reached that turning point with Christ. Is Pastor Warner still my pastor? Yes, he is. Can he, and does he, still speak into my life? Absolutely. But I have grown up in Christ.

My pastor has taken me about as far as he can in this physical world. Jesus is the only One who takes me spiritually beyond that point. And He has.

Am I still being discipled? Yes, I am. But it is Christ Jesus my Lord who is discipling me.

The discipling process we go through to reach that turning point can be rough at times. It is a process of dying to self; of picking up our cross daily, if you will.

But it is this process that makes us into a man or woman of God.

Reaching this turning point ought to be the goal of every believer as we press into Jesus through prayer, study, and experience. Serving.

My book, You Can Become a Walking Revival! gives further insight into how to reach your turning point. It can be found on Amazon, both in print form and as a Kindle book.