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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.   ​

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?is link. ​

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. ​

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. ​

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.  For a free copy of One-Hour Theology attend our next webinar.

This webinar, Developing A Disciple-Making Worldview is schedule for November 27 at 2:00 PM EST.  In this 20 minute webinar I am going to lay out what I believe is the DNA of disciple making and how to integrate it into every aspect of your church.  This webinar builds off last months webinar, Transitioning from a Weekend-Only Culture to a Disciple-Making Culture.  If you missed it you may want to download and watch it before our next webinar. Download the webinar here! You don’t want to miss either one of these as we lay a foundation that will transform your disciple making efforts.

​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:

1. What’s your unique disciple-making mission?
2. What are the principles and values that drive your disciple-making mission?
3. What’s your way of making disciples that make disciples?
4. What does a disciple look like in our context?

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.

Start you disciple-making journey by completing Disciple-Making Assessment and join me for our upcoming Webinar on October 23 at 2 PM EDT on Transitioning a Weekend Only Culture to a Disciple-Making Culture.

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.
 
Join Bryan Rose and David Putman on May 10 at 2 PM EDT for our upcoming webinar on How 2 Days Can Impact the Next 10 Years!  Click here to register for this free webinar.

Glad to have the opportunity to partner with Bryan Rose, Lead Navigator with Auxano in an upcoming webinar.  Read his blog here and sign up now for our May 10th webinar.  

Imagine a day when every staff member and key lay leader wakes up with a clear and shared understanding of God’s better future for your church. A day when the question “What’s your vision, Pastor?” brings you energy and excitement and not dread or suspicion. Imagine a day when every ministry understands their role in fulfilling the entire church’s disciple-making call, not just their role in filling a ministry program.
How does this become a reality? Is it possible that a time away together as a staff and leadership team could lead to these God-sized dreams? It will never happen if you keep putting off scheduling a meaningful leadership retreat.

This type of pastoral procrastination often happens because:

1. There has never been any measurable return on the investment of the time it will take.
2. Leadership is living from Sunday to Sunday putting out fires and cannot focus together for long.
3. Everyone typically makes great relational strides on retreats but achieves very little tactical progress.
4. There have never been any resources budgeted for getting the team away to pray and plan.
5. The team’s credibility is at stake if yet another plan gets created but not executed.
6. It is easier to install yet another “silver bullet” program than it is to invest in a lasting process.
7. Anyone on the team could lead a good enough retreat, but nobody has the time to facilitate an excellent one.
8. It has always been easier to just rely on the Senior Pastor for all the answers.
9. There is so much that needs to be done, it is hard to know where to even start.

If you've been putting off pulling away for a staff retreat one or more of the above reasons likely resonate with you. Waiting until you have enough time or money to get the team away just masks the reality that you won’t ever get around to it…
Until a significant enough crisis arrives and forces your hand.  There is good news!

​You don’t have to solve every staff retreat problem all at once. You only need to take the first step. Join David Putman and me in our upcoming webinar on May 10 at 2 pm EDT - Gain (and Don't Lose) Ground this Summer: How 2 Days Can Produce 10 Years of Actionable Results - Together we will walk through a dynamic and reproducible plan for two days of catalytic process with your team that will impact the next decade. We will introduce you to the only church-leadership planning tool that fulfills your team’s need for visionary direction as well as strategic execution. During the webinar, you will gain the information you need to take the next critical step toward even more effective disciple-making growth.
​
Register for the Gain (and Don’t Lose) Ground this Summer webinar here.

Register for the Gain (and Don’t Lose) Ground this Summer webinar here.

Ran across this old post on an old blog and didn't want to loose it.  I'm so grateful that tomorrow I will have New Years Day dinner with my son and one of his army friends eleven years later....

Last night we received a phone call from the front lines of the War on Terror.  Not one you necessary want to get.  With our Son serving in the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan we consider "no news, good news".   Thank God it was our son.  He was on a Satellite phone in one of the most remote and dangerous places in Afghanistan.  He had just survived an IED (Improvised Explosive Device).  He began the conversation with his mom saying something like, "Mom I'm okay, but we just got hit by an IED and I wanted to call you before you got a call from the Army and the story got all messed up."  As they were leaving a village they were hit.  The IED blow up the Humvee.  Two of the brave soldier  in the Humvee was blown from the vehicle.  Another one was blown into the bulletproof windshield.  Somehow they all walked away.  
While the others were taken in...my son loaded up his radio, weapons,  and other gear and headed to the top of a mountain where he spent the night.  As a Forward Observer he is trained to call in the heavy artillery.  He spend the night running recon, ready to rain fire down on the enemy at any moment.  The next morning he made it back to the camp where he called me.  We were able to talk for about 30 minutes.  He was banged up pretty good. He had intense pain in his back and legs from the blast, but he was alive.  He was hungry and thought he might get a hot meal.  All of the soldiers hit by the IED are being flown to a larger Forward Operational Base where they have the medical equipment for CT Scans and observation.  In approximately a week my son along with the other three will be refitted and sent back out to continue the War on Terror.  
I was on the runway at the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta when I got the news.  I immediately thanked God and gave Him all the credit for saving my son and the other troops lives.  I thought of Psalm 91.  I read it often as I pray for my son and others.  
1 Those who live in the shelter of the Most High
      will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
2 This I declare about the Lord:
   He alone is my refuge, my place of safety;
      he is my God, and I trust him.
3 For he will rescue you from every trap
      and protect you from deadly disease.
4 He will cover you with his feathers.
      He will shelter you with his wings.
      His faithful promises are your armor and protection.
5 Do not be afraid of the terrors of the night,
      nor the arrow that flies in the day.
6 Do not dread the disease that stalks in darkness,
      nor the disaster that strikes at midday.
7 Though a thousand fall at your side,
      though ten thousand are dying around you,
      these evils will not touch you.
8 Just open your eyes,
      and see how the wicked are punished.
I tell you this story to say thanks for praying...prayer does make a difference.  I also tell you story to encourage you to continue to pray for my son and our troops...david