How would you answer those questions? We pastors tend to love preparing sermons and spending time with our people, but thinking about how our church will actually help people to experience transformation is often something we feel ill-prepared for.
This may be something you’ve wanted to tackle, but haven’t felt you’ve had the time or the know-how, so here are some ideas to jumpstart your creativity.
Define the goal of your discipleship process
What does a disciple look like? Even when you are one, it’s sometimes hard to put it into words. Hillvue Heights Church, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, believes every disciple should experience conversion, healing and development. Willow Creek wants to help everyone become fully devoted followers of Christ.
So, what’s your end game? What kind of believers do you hope to produce? What knowledge, perspective and skills do you want them to have after being a part of your church family for a few years?
Clarify the next steps
Once you know what a mature disciple looks like, review your current ministry approach and list out the next steps you have made clearly available to people. The important thing is that people with no previous background in church can know which next step to take and how to take it. Remove as many barriers as possible, especially the barrier of poor communication.
Outline your current discipleship process
Sunday School isn’t a process, it’s a program. It might be a good program that fits into a process, but someone can attend Sunday School for decades and not actually be more spiritually mature. The same can be said of small groups and any number of other ministries. These are great for long-term growth, but how do you know long term growth is actually happening? You need a process for measuring it.
Saddleback Church has done a great job of creating, implementing and offering to the world their CLASS process, which offers a one-time class for each of the major movements. You can discover church membership, spiritual maturity, your shape for ministry, your mission in the world and how to live a life fully devoted to worship. At the end of each class is a covenant and a certificate. This helps Saddleback be able to quantify and measure growth and maturity long term.
Eliminate clutter
I’ve written previously about my philosophy concerning simplicity in our church structures. Just as a pathway through the woods grows over quickly with weeds and becomes obscured, our process for spiritual growth can easily get crowded out in the busyness of trying to do all things “church.”
Staying simple and lean will require you to fight against the natural tendency to do more. But more isn’t necessarily better. Starting more programs rarely produces more disciples. You may be thinking right now of something that needs to be eliminated from consuming energy in your church that would be better devoted to disciple-making.
