Exponential 2013 - 2 - Shift from Reaching to Making

Discipleship Shift #1 - From Reaching to Making

There has been a tent revival going on in Thomasville for a week. So many people are "getting saved" that the folks leading the meetings have decided to stay for several more days. Every day teams of people take to the streets of Thomasville with the salvation message. At last count there have been over 4,000 "salvations." While I applaud the zeal behind the meetings, have supported the effort and am praying that God will indeed be bringing people to Himself, I wonder if the focus on conversion will transform my city. Perhaps we need to shift our focus from reaching people to making disciples.

At the heart of discipleship is a journey into maturity. Making disciples is making learners and followers. Paul puts it this way, "Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ" (Col. 1:28). Proclamation for Paul included warning and teaching; its goal being maturity, not just praying a prayer. But here is a big question for most of our churches: what does a mature disciple look like?

Lifeway has developed a tool for measuring transformational discipleship. It looks at 9 areas: Bible engagement, obeying God and denying self; serving God and others, sharing Christ, exercising faith, seeking God, building relationships, being unashamed, and doctrinal positions. You can take an assessment for $9.95 that gives you some feedback about how you are doing. My lowest score had to do with sharing Christ with unbelievers - not exactly shocking news. But the question for me is, What are your going to do about it? I need to address this place of deficiency in my personal discipleship.

How does your congregation define maturity in a disciple of Jesus? What is in place to help people move towards that vision?

Exponential Conference 2013 - 1

It has been three weeks since Shari and I were heading to this year's iteration of the Exponential Conference entitled "Discipleshift"; likely the largest gathering of church planters in one place in the world. I came back with a to do list of 31 items based on what I was learning. If you can swing $69, you can have access to the main sessions. Go to www.exponential.org/extend and check it out. On their website you can also find a bunch of free ebooks!

The focus of the conference was discipleship and the ways that the Church needs to shift it focus. In the next posts I'll spend some time with each of the shifts that Exponential talked about. But a huge question the conference raised for those of us interested in church planting is this: Is church planting a goal or the by-product of something else, namely making disciples?

As part of my Bible reading, I read Acts 14 and 15 this morning. I was struck by Paul's discipleship method. He told anybody who would listen about Jesus. Then he got together with them wherever he could. And he spent as much time with them as he could until he was thrown out of town. On his way back through town he appointed elders for their community. He made disciples and got a church.

Obviously, the two things are inextricably connected. But which one is the focus? Is it possible to gather a congregation without actually making disciples? Is it possible to make disciples without having them eventually coalesce into a congregation? And what exactly do we mean by "disciple" and "church?" After all the diversity of expressions of the Church is dizzying. What does a house church have in common with a multi-site mega-church? It's like asking what does a hamster have in common with an elephant? But, as in the church question, though the hamster and the elephant are not the same species, they are both mammals. They, in fact, have a lot in common. Likewise the divergent congregations. Both have expressions of worship and prayer. Both have ways of devoting themselves to the fellowship. Both are on mission in the world. And both are making disciples. Just in very different ways. Which brings us to the shifts that we need to make and the next post.