Effective discipleship Strategy!

 

If you are assuming that the purpose of the Church, is branding the Church building with your registered denominational tag and making the Church building visible for the world, and keeping the people busy with programs, then probably you have got it all wrong. The goal of ministry isn’t to keep people busy in church activities—the goal is to equip people to become more like Christ and live out their purpose as part of the body of Christ.

Our natural tendency is to think we need to offer more ministries and more programs to encourage more steps of spiritual formation, but that is faulty thinking: Over 500,000 church attenders from more than 2,000 churches participated in the Reveal survey, which gives us a clearer picture of how people take steps toward Christ. The data specifically found: “Increased church activity does not lead to spiritual growth.”

Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson wrote about the learnings from this research in the book, Move: What 1,000 Churches Reveal About Spiritual Growth, “Unfortunately, churches often make things harder by obscuring the goal—to become more like Christ—with a complicated assortment of activities… When the church incessantly promotes all the things people should do, it’s very easy for them to lose sight of the real goal—which is who they should become.”

Tony Morgan in helping the Churches to move from Program to real impact, states this, “The Key to Ineffective Discipleship: Programs”. And he says this, while churches should be in the disciple-making business, they often have no intentional discipleship strategy. Instead, churches tend to opt for a program-driven model that simply ends up keeping their people busy in church activities.

When churches take this program-driven approach, it creates several challenges:

·        Ministries within a church start competing with each other for people’s time and attention.

• It feeds a consumer-mindset where the church promotes programs and events for people to attend rather than equipping people to do God’s work.
• Churches continue to add programs as the church grows, creating additional complexity.
• People are made to just pay to the Church with a sense of obligation without a conviction to participate in the actual mission. i.e., share the gospel in the sphere of their influence.

The solution to this challenge is to move from programs to a path. And the path or the journey is to equip the people to be a disciple-maker, not a Sunday crowd where the Church is benefited with all types of offering and all leave satisfied. Establishing a clear Discipleship Path is all about helping people move from where they are now to where God wants them to be. Everyone has a next step they can take:

A person new to faith may need to concentrate on biblical teaching and spiritual disciplines.

A more mature Christian may need to take steps toward reaching those outsides of the faith.

Each step on the Discipleship Path must have an easy to access on-ramp. I want to refer to Tony Morgan’s 5 stages of people’s journey.

Stage 1- Not interested.

Stage 2- Spiritually Curious

Stage 3- Believer

Stage 4- Being discipled.

Stage 5- Disciple Maker

When the Church finds where their members are and slowly move towards the final stage which is to equip them as a disciple maker you then actually fulfil the purpose of the Church.

In most of the churches today, we have a measurement problem. It’s not necessarily with finances or attendance, but with the one thing we’re tasked with doing: making disciples.

 

This raises two fairly important questions:

What does spiritual progress look like?

And how can we help people recognize movement in their own journey?

When our initiatives revolve around the 5 stages and move people from stage 1 to stage 5 the true purpose of the body of Christ is made complete. The Church is the only hope for the dying world and that means every believer is equipped to be a disciple maker and a missionary for Christ.

  

You may read the last blog HERE

 

Click here You can follow on Twitter