DiscipleShift

Jim Putman, Bobby Harrington, Robert Coleman

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780310492634
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ministro del culto cristiano

Question: What is the God-given purpose of the local church?

Answer: Relational discipleship.

DiscipleShift walks you through five key "shifts" that churches must make to refocus on the fundamental biblical mission of discipleship. These intentional changes will attract the world and empower your church members to be salt and light in their communities.

Over the last thirty years, many influential church leaders and church planters in America have adopted various models for reaching unchurched people. While many of these approaches have merit, something is still missing, something even more fundamental to the mission of the church: discipleship.

Making disciples—helping people to trust and follow Jesus—is the church's God-given mandate. Devoted disciples attract people outside the church because of the change others see in their Christ-like lives. And discipleship empowers Christians to be more like Christ as they intentionally develop relationships with non-believers.

Through biblical and professional insights, Jim Putman and Bobby Harrington discuss the transformational effectiveness of making disciples and just how to do so, in practical terms. You'll learn:

• The specific roles of a disciple-making pastor.
• The components of person-to-person discipleship.
• How each ministry in your church leads to discipleship.
• How to implement discipleship in your church.

Disciple-making leaders will not produce perfect churches, but they will create effective churches.

Chapter 1

THE ENGINE THAT DRIVES IT ALL

What is the God-given purpose of the local church?

Bobby Harrington gave a lot of his extra time for about a decade to train church planters and create church planting networks. He did it joyfully. But one day, flying out of Nashville for a network meeting in another city, a vague thought became a clear realization: he was uneasy with the churches being planted. Would the result of all these church planting efforts really last? Would the churches planted truly please God, long term?

The church planters were godly, wonderful people. The theology was good. Their level of commitment was inspiring. But he wondered if the approach to church planting that he and his peers (including various church planting organizations) were advocating was often leading to a shallow, cultural Christianity. Before giving himself to church planting, he had already concluded the same thing about many established churches. Too often they had problems with legalism or traditionalism or they lacked authenticity or something else that missed Jesus’ heart for a lost and hurting world. But that day, he finally admitted to himself that he was witnessing much of the same cultural Christianity in the church planting world. Something at a fundamental level needed reevaluation.

It was around this time that we (Jim and Bobby) became good friends. We had the same fundamental belief. Maybe you agree with us? When it comes to the local church in North America today, something is not working.

The big question driving this book is the question of effectiveness. For a moment, resist the urge to defend yourself or your church. Don’t defend your experience in ministry, your seminary degrees, or your genuine heart for seeing people come to know Christ. Don’t defend any of the activities taking place at your church. And don’t defend the size of your congregation, the amount of giving, your service to the poor, or the number of new converts. Simply ask yourself, Is the church producing results? Is it doing its job in the best way possible? And please resist the urge to quickly answer yes.¹

It’s true that throughout North America today, though numbers are declining, there are still many people coming to church, and some are busy with ministry-related activities. There are ministries to the poor. Buildings are being built. Programs are running at full tilt. Money is being given.

But attendance, busyness, construction, finances, and programs are not real indications of success. The core question of effectiveness — the question that ultimately matters — is whether the people who are getting saved are being conformed to the likeness of Christ. Are we making mature disciples of Jesus who are not only able to withstand the culture but are also making disciples of Jesus themselves?

Let’s look at some research.²

Consider how recent statistics show that when it comes to morality and lifestyle issues, there is little difference between the behavior (and one can assume condition of the heart) of Christians and non-Christians.

Divorce rates are about the same.

The percentages of men who regularly view pornography are roughly the same — and it’s a lot of men.

Christians are considered to be more than two times as likely to have racist attitudes as non-Christians.

Domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and most other problems are just as prevalent among Christians as among non-Christians.

Consider too statistics about evangelicals. About one in four people living together outside marriage call themselves evangelicals.

Only about 6 percent of evangelicals regularly tithe.

Only about half the people who say they regularly attend church actually do. And a significant number of younger adults (millennials) believe that evangelical churches are not even Christlike or Christian. Sixty to 80 percent of young people will leave the church in their twenties.³

Fewer than one out of five who claim to be born-again Christians have a worldview of even a few fundamental biblical beliefs. Plenty of people call themselves Christians, but very few people can actually tell you what it means — from the Bible’s perspective — to be a Christian. They might call themselves Christians, but they also believe that the Bible is full of errors or that God is not one God manifest in three persons or that Jesus Christ did not lead a sinless life (or that he isn’t God) or that simply being good will get you into heaven.

When you ask most evangelicals what their job as a believer is, they may tell you that they are to share Christ, but how many actually do? At worst, they follow the rule that you don’t talk about politics and religion, and they will die without ever seeing anyone come to faith. At best, they may invite people to church, but they think making disciples is not their job; it’s the pastor’s job.

We could go on and on. One can’t help but conclude that something is wrong. Where’s the lasting life change? Where are the transformed lives? Why are people in our churches just like the world? Why are we not developing people who are Christlike?

A few years back, Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Church, one of the most influential churches in America, revealed the results of a months-long study into the church’s effectiveness. The conclusion was that the church simply wasn’t producing the results they were hoping for. Willow Creek’s leaders did research into other churches across the country and came to the same conclusions.⁴ In the foreword to Reveal, a book outlining their discoveries, Bill Hybels wrote, “The local church is the hope of the world. For a number of years now, I have shared this message whenever I’ve had the opportunity to serve pastors of local churches across the nation and around the world. It’s a message I believe with all my heart. So you can imagine my reaction when three people whose counsel I value told me that the local church I’ve been the pastor of for more than three decades was not doing as well as we thought when it came to spiritual growth. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they said this wasn’t just their opinion. It was based on scientific research.”⁵

The results rocked Willow Creek’s world. Willow Creek’s leaders realized that they had to make significant changes. Hybels put it this way: “Our dream is that we fundamentally change the way we do church. That we take out a clean sheet of paper and we rethink all of our old assumptions. Replace it with new insights. Insights that are informed by research and rooted in Scripture. Our dream is really to discover what God is doing and how he’s asking us to transform this planet.”⁶

That’s what’s required of us as well. To be effective, we need to make a fundamental shift in the way we do church. What we’re doing now isn’t working, at least not like we’d hoped. We have defined ourselves by emphases and methodologies that don’t produce results.

Fortunately, there is hope ahead. Within the pages of God’s Word is a design that will lead to effectiveness. The solution to our ineffectiveness as churches involves following a clear and uncomplicated way to train people to be spiritually mature, fully devoted followers of Christ, and then in turn having those disciples make more disciples.

What we need in our churches today are fewer “Christians,” at least in today’s popular definition of the word. Now, I don’t want fewer saved people. Far from it. I want as many to be saved as possible. But the point is that fewer than we think are actually saved.

What I want are full-fledged followers of Jesus Christ, and to produce that in our churches today, we need a radical shift. We need more of the engine that Jesus used to change the world, the engine he instructs us to use. This engine will not create perfect churches, but it will create effective churches.

It’s relational discipleship.

Ask Dr. Coleman

Is the church today doing its job to the degree that it could?

As church leaders, we definitely need to ask ourselves whether our churches are as effective as they could be. I’m afraid, however, that the church is not living up to her potential.

The church is preserving itself well, content to maintain a rearguard action, content to protect the status quo. But that’s not what God has called the church to do. God wants the church to do more than merely hold its own. We’re in a battle against the powers and principalities of this world. Aggressive action is needed.

Regrettably, I’ve seen a lack of effectiveness all too often. It leaves you with a sinking feeling to see what great potential there is in a person or a church, yet to see them settling for second or third best. It leaves you with the feeling of sorrow. American poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier said, “For all sad words of tongue and pen, / The saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”

There are, however, many exciting places in the world today where the church is moving. I think of the Covenant Evangelical Free Church in Singapore. More than 4,500 people fill the five Sunday services on two campuses, and a third campus soon will be under construction. Twenty-five years ago when Edmund Chan, fresh out of college, became a pastor, his discouraged congregation had only seventeen members. But this gifted expositor of Scripture had a vision to make disciples who truly worship God in all arenas of life by the enabling of the Spirit. He began to train men who would take up their crosses and follow Christ, teaching them to train others to live the same lifestyle. It was radical discipleship. As the church multiplied, so did its outreach in missions and church planting around the world. When I visited the church in the spring of 2012, a spirit of revival pervaded the atmosphere. I call that a church alive, a church living in the fulfillment of the Great Commission.

A church like this gives me hope. Today’s churches need constantly to strive through the power of the Holy Spirit to be as effective as they can be.

The solution to our ineffectiveness as churches is to train people to be spiritually mature, fully devoted followers of Christ, and then in turn to have those disciples make more disciples.

FOUR MAIN CATEGORIES

How did the church get to the state it’s in today? Simply put, the problem stems from the way today’s churches are designed. Within North America, each local church is characterized by two important components.

The first is focus. Think of a church’s focus as the primary emphasis that it commits its time and resources to achieve. It’s the engine that drives everything else in that church. For instance, a church may desire to reach lost people, so it will expend its energy and resources on bridge events and worship services focused on giving reasons to believe and issuing invitations to accept and follow Christ.

The second component is methodology. This is the way a church sets itself up systematically to accomplish its purpose, or the manner in which it tries to achieve its focus. It could also be thought of as a structure or a system environment (as we call it in the sports world) that a church has created to accomplish what it values.

Every church has its focus and its methodology for achieving its focus whether it realizes it or not. When looking at the different kinds of churches, leaders disagree over how many categories of churches exist today. Some hold that there are only two main categories — attractional and missional. Others add a third — organic (sometimes called “house”). Others add a fourth — educational. The disagreement stems mainly from crossover and blending of focus and methodologies. Truly, most churches don’t fit any category exactly. Nevertheless, I find that most churches today will lean toward one of the following four categories, even if a category doesn’t fit precisely.

Category 1: Educational

A pastoral-educational focus with a classroom methodology.

In the educational category, a church uses the bulk of its energy on biblical education, and it’s understood that the pastor’s job (along with the pastoral staff) is to provide this education for the people. Leaders and members make well-intentioned statements such as, “We believe the Bible is God’s Word, and we want to get it into the heads of our people.” Churches with this emphasis focus on Bible study and doctrine.

The methodology in these churches is most often the classroom model. A strong emphasis is placed on Sunday morning teaching times, Sunday school attendance, perhaps a midweek educational forum, youth and children’s programs and Bible studies, and perhaps information-oriented teacher-led small groups.

Sometimes a strong emphasis is placed on pastoral care as well, though few churches, especially larger churches, are intentional about this aspect. The paid, formally trained, professional pastors are responsible for developing and implementing programs for teaching Bible knowledge. The pastors in churches where care is expected are also responsible for caring for the congregants, so heavy expectations are placed on the pastors’ time. Congregants want pastors to visit them in the hospital, counsel them, open meetings with prayer, attend myriad planning meetings, drop everything to come to their aid in family crises, and seldom take time off for vacation (otherwise, who will lead the church?).

The educational model typically doesn’t stress attracting new people to the church as much as it does educating and taking care of people who are already there. Those who come through the door expect to be biblically educated, and this is often (in their minds) the meaning of “becoming a mature disciple.” The hope is that the education will translate to Christian behavior outside the walls of the church.

Category 2: Attractional

An attractional focus with an entertainment methodology.

The well-meaning emphasis in the attractional category is placed on biblical evangelism through church services and large events that attract people. Helping people to “make decisions for Christ” is primary. It is assumed that discipleship will happen through church attendance. Some churches in this category seek to retain people who have attended church for years in more traditional settings, by updating the way songs are sung and lessons are taught. The modern way of doing things tends to keep people from being bored with church, at least for a while. The key is to design church services to win people.

In this category, people are attracted to the church because they have real questions and hurts that need answering and dealing with. The sermons are designed to answer those questions and address those hurts. The leaders in these churches are focused on taking ground outside the walls of the church by using the weekend service as a hook. They really seek to inspire Christians to invite their friends to the services where an invitation to accept Christ is given. Worship se...