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“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20). Disciple making is our one and only mission, as a church. This mission-based pursuit means that our measure of success is more and better disciples that are making more and better disciples. More and better disciples means have a growing pipeline, when it comes to disciples. A generic disciple-making pipeline consists of pre-disciples, new disciples, growing disciples, multiplying disciples, and catalyzing disciples. Therefore, a healthy pipeline means that we have a healthy number of disciples at every level, as described in the chart below.  The Disciple-Making Pipeline can be a good tool for assessing your overall effectiveness when in comes to making more and better disciples. A simple place to begin an assessment is by identifying the percentage of individuals that fall into each of these categories that attend your Sunday Morning Gathering. In a healthy disciple-making culture the results may look more like a normal bell curve.  The Disciple-Making Pipeline is one tool, among others, when it comes to assessing our overall health and effectiveness in the area of a disciple-making culture. Other areas that you will want to include in an assessment are culture, leadership, mindset, and strategy.
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Assess Your Disciple-Making Culture Today we are having more conversations and producing more and better resources when it comes to disciple-making, but we are mostly getting the same results. Why? Because we don’t have a disciple-making problem, we have a disciple-making culture problem. The current operating system we are running in our churches are designed to provide religious services for religious people, and until we install a new system, we are going to see minimal results, no matter what the programming or strategy. Zooming out and doing an assessment of our current culture around the five vital disciple-making questions is a significant first step. These questions include: • What is our disciple-making mission? • What are our disciple shaping values? • What is our disciple-making strategy? • What does a disciple look like in our context? • What is our disciple-making dream?  Discover Your Disciple Making DNA First, we must embrace the reality that we have one and only one mission, and that is to make disciples that make disciples. To replicate a culture of disciple-making, you have to drill down to the cellular level or what I’m referring to as disciple-making DNA. The Venn diagram below illustrates three core elements that make up the disciple-making DNA of a church. It includes spiritual truth, life-on-life relationships, and missional engagement. Where you find a disciple-making operational system, you will always find these three elements in some form replicated throughout the entire church organization.  Establish Your Disciple Making Foundation Here I am referring to our core belief rooted in a healthy Christology, missiology, and ecclesiology. I reframe these three core beliefs into three practical questions: What is the gospel? What is a disciple? And, What is a church? In doing so, I answer these question in the order I’ve listed them understanding that each one builds on the other. The Gospel Lens below illustrates their relationship with one another and how together they form a worldview lens. This is key because at a very core level disciple-making is about worldview conversion. It’s about taking a mind that is rooted in some other core ideology such as humanism or some different western or eastern worldview and through a process of sanctification seeing it transformed into the “mind of Christ” or a gospel-centered worldview.  Develop Your Disciple Making Strategy Creating a disciple-making culture involves knowing your disciple-making culture at the system level. If you zoom out, there are five systems you need to consider. While each of our terminologies might be more reflective of our unique process, the five areas will be reasonably consistent. I use the following phrases to describe each of these five systems and to conduct training at the field area they include: Entering, Planting, Making, Forming, and Reproducing.  Build Your Disciple-Making Pathway or Pipeline Disciples are at different points along the pathway of maturity that requires a very intentional and specific response for each one. This pathway at its most general state might include pre-disciples, new disciples, growing disciples, multiplying disciples, and catalytic disciples.  At each of these milestones along the journey, it requires unique character, competencies, relationships, and levels of missional engagement to advance to the next. Determine Your Disciple Making Dream Ultimately, we must ask “Where is God taking us?’ Someone suggested that everything is created twice, first in the heart and then in reality. For developing this disciple-making dream, we use a tool developed by Will Mancini called the Horizon Storyline. It’s not enough to have a culture of disciple-making, but if we want to turbocharge our efforts, we need a strategic and tactical plan. The Horizon Storyline consists of four-time horizons we refer to as the “1414”. The drawing below illustrates it. These visionary tools assist us in answering four-time sensitive question: 1) What is a 5 to 10-year disciple-making dream? 2) What are the four big rocks we must address over the next three years? 3) What is the one thing we must focus on over the next year? And 4) What are the four 90-Day Initiatives we must accomplish to achieve our one-year milestone?  Conclusion
Installing a disciple-making operational system is a marathon, not a sprint. Perhaps this is why many choose to implement change at the service or programming level with no real lasting change. You can start a journey today by scheduling a free 30 minutes phone call! Disciple making at its core is about worldview transformation. A person's worldview is the way they see and understand the world. Our worldview is based on our core beliefs. These non-negotiable beliefs determine our behavior. In other words, what we believe determines our behavior. As a disciple of Christ we might frame it this way, “What we believe about the gospel determines how we follow Jesus”. I use a simple tool I created called the “Gospel Lens” to illustrate this. This tool is based on three questions that I believe have a very unique and specific relationship to one another. These questions are:
It is essential that we begin with the gospel, move to disciple, and finally to the church in the order we ask and answer these questions. In other words, the gospel informs our understanding of disciples, and our understanding of disciples informs our understanding of the church.  Most often when it comes to worldview formation we begin with the church. When we do this it always distorts the image. The gospel informs the church, not the other way around. This is why Mike Breen says, “If you make disciples you will always get the church, but if you try to build the church you rarely get disciples”.
Our tendency to typically begin with our understanding of church is exactly why I’ve written a new eBook that we are making available, One-Hour Theology. This eBook gives a brief answer to all three of these questions beginning with the gospel. Visit our resources page and grab a copy of One-Hour Theology today! Peter Drucker is credited with the statement, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This statement is especially true when it relates to the church and how we approach disciple-making. Many churches have what I call a weekend only culture. This weekend only culture is when most of our energy and resources go into creating and sustaining a weekend service that attracts a large number of worshipers who mostly come merely to consume. I know this approach well. I spent most of my early church planting efforts planting this kind of church. As one of my buddies put it, “I think we planted a lot of weekend services, but I’m not sure we planted many churches”. Mike Bream sums it up well when it says, “If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples”. This may explain why no matter what program or strategy we import into your church we fail to get the disciple-making results we desire. Is there any hope? Absolutely! One of our challenges is we often start with the wrong question, “How do we make more and better disciples?” The better question is, “How do we transition a weekend only culture to a discipleship culture?” The reality is we need to install a new disciple-making operational system. This new operational system begins with an intentional process of reshaping our culture. The process below represents a set of master tools developed by Will Mancini of Auxano. These tools are the best in class for shaping your culture. As a Lead Navigator with Auxano, I have spent the last five years mastering these tools and seeing some amazing discipleship results. Let’s take a few moments to look at them through our disciple- making lens.  Rethink
We must begin by confronting the brutal facts. Do we have a disciple-making culture? Chances are you don’t, or you would know it. Matter-of-fact welcome to the club. Very few churches actually have a disciple-making culture. You may have some disciples, but are you really making more and better disciples? Why not take our simple Disciple-Making Culture Assessment. This tool will help you identify whether or not you have a disciple-making culture and where to begin your disciple-making journey. Uncover One of the keys to a disciple-making culture is to discover your unique disciple-making DNA as a church. This disciple-making DNA is informed by your unique passion, place, and people. Once you discover your DNA, it is time to replicate it in every living cell of your church by reshaping a culture that replicates your DNA. Talk Up To have a disciple-making culture, you must do a deep dive into your identity as a church and develop your disciple-making identity. Here are some key questions you need to ask:
If you, your leadership, and the entire church can’t answer these questions, you probably have an identity issue. Go Ahead Once you have developed your identity it time to discover your disciple-making dream. Ultimately, where is God taking you collectively on this disciple-making journey? What is our disciple-making dream? Once you understand God’s dream for you as a church, you can then and only then begin developing a tactical plan to accomplish that dream. Live Out Culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an organization. Key to developing a disciple-making culture is the intentional integration of disciple-making from the top-down and the inside-out. For a disciple-making culture to replicate throughout an organization, there must be deep ownership and buy-in at the senior staff level, leader level, and ultimately member and attender level. This kind of integration must be intentional and takes time. Here are my observations...many leaders default to what we call generic vision. Generic vision is akin to having no vision at all. There are several different types of generic vision. They all take a kind of general tone like love God and love people, reach more people, or go make disciples.
I’m glad you love God and people. I’m glad that you want to reach more people and make more disciples. We already know that, but what if God wants to do something cosmically significant and locally specific through you and your church? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a church when they actually “name” the vision and then for whatever the reason they blink. They default back to generic vision. I mean they pull back and retreat to the safe and secure lands of Generica. What we need and what it takes to lead with specific and clear vision is courage. Everyone loves you as long as you don’t have vision or have some common form of a lesser vision. Get specific and guess what? There are going to be people who are going to disagree with you. Be bold and courageous! Name your vision! Get specific! Let’s face it, we all lack courage at times. You are not alone, but what if you could gain courage and by doing so discover that God is able to do abundantly above all you ask or imagine! Here are three things that will give the confidence and courage when it comes to vision. Collaboration with a Team Don’t take the vision journey alone. Build a team of both strategic and tactical people who are willing to own the journey with you. A common mistake when it comes to vision is the idea that if we get it down on paper, we have a vision. We may have a vision statement or a visionary plan, but what we want and need to build courage is so much more. We need a sense of shared vision. This visionary plan isn’t a document that a leader wrote and is now sharing with us, but it is a shared vision that we discovered together. Each person on the team is now a stakeholder and has a deep level of ownership. Together we are more courageous than when we are separated. We draw strength from the collective genius of all. Confidence in a Process As an organization (Auxano.com), we consider ourselves a team of Navigators. You the client are the content experts. You and your organization are unique. You consist of a unique people, in a unique place, and with a unique passion. There is no one or any given place quite like you. At the same time, our navigators are process experts. We believe God is at work in you and a great navigator with the best process tools should serve you well in helping you discover God’s unique vision for your church. We have seen it work hundreds of times and we believe it can work for you. Go ahead and check it out for yourself. We included our entire process and many of our tools in a book by our founder Will Mancini titled God Dreams. Clarity of Vision The final component of courage when it comes to vision is clarity. The way we say it is, “Clarity isn’t everything, but it changes everything.” That’s right clarity changes everything. When you have it, you experience the confidence and even the courage needed to lead with it. However, getting to the point of clarity isn’t easy, if it were everyone would have it. Clarity requires hard work. Clarity requires time and testing. There is rarely a day that I don’t encourage one or more of my clients to slow down in order to speed up. That’s right, slow down and do the hard work of vision. Work the process with your team until you experience breakthrough. My consistent prayer for the teams I work with is for God to give us breakthrough. Prior to clarity, it is my observation that we often have to go through the tunnel of chaos to get there. This alone takes a level of courage. You can be courageous even when you feel fear. Courage is not the absent of fear, but the willingness to continue in spite of fear. A great team, proven process, and clarity goes a long way when it comes to leading with confidence and courage. |
AuthorDavid Putman is the founder of Planting the Gospel and a Senior Lead Navigator with Auxano the category leader in vision clarity. When David isn't writing or consulting he enjoys staying fit and competing at Crossfit. Archives
August 2020
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