Rainer and Geiger’s Simple Church has had a profound effect on my thinking about how to structure churches for community impact.
Last time, I introduced my first discovery: if, on a practical level, the church exists to go and to make disciples [Mt 28:19] how might we focus our time, energy, and money? I invited you to wonder with me how you’d lead your congregants to go into the vast mission field that is just across your property line. No airline tickets. No months-to-plan logistics. No fund-raising just to get people there.
Now, imagine that the other central organizing objective for all your church does is simply to make mature disciples. Your church provides an array of classes, groups, activities, and programs that you hope, in some imprecise and unspecified way, contribute to the maturing of the faith of your folks. The studies I’m aware of continue to show that this just isn’t the case. An active church member can participate for decades in many retreats, fellowships, studies, and activities in church yet scarcely demonstrate maturity beyond what they did, say, after completing the Alpha course as a new believer.
If you designed your programming to produce mature disciples, how might you go about it? First, decide what a mature disciple lives like.
What behaviors and attitudes characterize this person?
What convictions and values drive behavior?
What beliefs inform these convictions of the heart?
You’ll notice that there are a number of factors between belief and behavior. How could you cause people to take ownership of these?
Next, identify the experiences and exposures that will develop these postures, motivations, and behaviors in the lives of your people.
My guess is that you see that transformations like these transcend what’s possible from the pulpit and classroom alone. What experiences might provoke just-in-time learning? How can you experiment with in-the-job discipleship training?
You might consider how Jesus did it.
With the three.
The twelve.
The seventy-two.
What did the pioneers of the first churches do, in the Book of Acts? What makes sense in the culture in which you minister?
In what ways could you attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of your maturing process? What feedback-and-adjust mechanisms might be built into the process to keep you, it, and them flexible and growing in effectiveness?
Who will your new heroes be? How could you raise their visibility? How many ways could the story of both their struggles and accomplishments be told? What ways could these new role-models inspire others in your midst?
Here’s a challenge: consider the vast array of programs your church offers, each in competition with all the others for the time and attention of your people.
Are these good things?
I’m sure they are.
Are they best, though, to grow Christians to maturity?
I doubt it!
What if you engaged your key decision-makers in an honest analysis of every program your church offers, and to which, no doubt, many are devoted. Does it directly produce mature disciples? If not, what is it designed to produce? And, what, actually, does it accomplish? In light of the opportunity to become the kinds of maturing disciples who minister the love, hope, mercy, and forgiveness of Christ to those around you, what changes will you choose to make?
It’s been my privilege for the last few years to walk with a number of pastors and their leaders who’ve chosen to do just that. Inspiring and frightening, it’s been a steep-learning-curve experience leading change in real-time. These women and men are my heroes. I hope they’ll become your heroes, too!