Baby Christians are vulnerable to false teaching…It is critical to help them as best we can in this critical time in their lives. There is no substitute for a church with good preaching and teaching. Smaller groups with Christians of all maturity levels will definitely help as well. But let me put forward another possibility: an intentional discipleship ministry run either one to one or in small groups. 

All Christians and churches are keen to see people become Christians. We plan and pray for evangelism. We get trained in basic gospel outlines to help people understand who Jesus is and why they should care. And we celebrate when someone professes faith or is baptised.

That’s all great! Yet let’s think about the next step. Imagine that you now have a new baby Christian in your church. They are glad to be in church, they are excited about Jesus, and they cannot get enough of the Bible. With many churches, once someone is ‘over the line’, they are just in the general church population. That person is saved, great, now let’s look for someone else.

Baby Christians, like baby people, have a lot they need to learn. We intentionally teach babies the important things they need to know, while they naturally pick up lots of other things as they grow. I am convinced that we can do a lot more to help new believers to understand God and the Bible well to set them up with a good foundation for growth.

There is good Biblical precedent for this. In Acts 2, three thousand people became Christians in one day. This was in response to hearing one sermon which explained from the Old Testament that Jesus was the Christ. They were all Jewish believers, so they knew a lot from what we would call the Old Testament. Yet if you were to interview them about what their new faith means for their work, their attitude to non-Jewish Christians, or to church, they would struggle to answer those questions. They simply don’t know yet. There would have been a lot that they did not know. But they immediately started meeting daily in smaller groups in houses, being devoted to learning more and living in community. In that context, they would have learnt a lot of what it practically meant to be a Christian while also deepening in their understanding of God and His character and work.

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