Journey Toward Disipleship.

I pastor a church in a small town in south Georgia.  In my five years as pastor I have taken all the “church growth” wisdom I had acquired from seminary, reading, conferences and podcasts and seen it amount to total frustration in my current setting. I began to think that the setting was the issue. I thought culture was the reason I was not seeing my plans result in a “changed” church.  I figured I just hadn’t hit on what will work in this setting or it was just a hopeless dying church and I would just be one of the pastors that would hold it’s hand while it died.  About a year ago God began something in my life that would fundamentally change the way I view the church and my ministry.

Up to this point I had understood and taught that it was the church’s mission to make disciples.  After all the church growth books had taken me through strategic planning which pointed me to form a mission/vision/core values statement.  That statement always boils down to glorifying God by making disciples.  No doubt that is a good and right mission statement for a church.  My problem, and I think the problem of many others, is that I saw the process of making disciples as something that the church as a whole would do and not something that I and the other members of the church had the responsibility to initiate and follow through to completion with actual individuals.

In my view the church was a disciple making machine.  You pour a person in at the top and they come out the bottom as a disciple.  If you are Rick Warren, you take them around the bases of your baseball diamond. If you are Andy Stanley you take them through rooms in your house.  Both of these models are essentially the same idea.  If I can get the person to participate in the ministries of the church that are collectively designed to turn them into a disciple and they touch every base or sit in every room then they are considered discipled.

We have the same thing in the Baptist Church.  We hope to move the person from not attending church, to attending worship service, to attending Sunday school, to participating in some sort of ministry (give them a job).  This machine needs a lot of people to keep it running and I have taught my people that if they will just participate as one of the pieces of the machine then they are making disciples. If you sing in the choir, teach Sunday school, pass out bulletins, rock babies in the nursery, then you are making disciples – nonsense.  You may be doing a good thing serving the church but you are not personally engaged in leading someone to be a follower of Jesus and teaching them to obey all He commanded.  You are not calling others to follow you as you follow Christ. And neither was I as the pastor of the church.

What changed?  Someone asked me what I was doing personally to make disciples.  Apart from a few intentional relationships that were not centered around Christ or the word, I had to answer that I was not doing anything at all to personally lead others to follow Christ.  The guy that asked me this was youth minister from another denomination and the reason he asked me is because some copier salesman had asked  him the same thing.

These men led me to a simple method of initiating and following through a process of making a disciple.  All I have to do is ask some guy to read the Bible with me.  What I mean is that we would share the experience of a bible reading plan that we read on our own throughout the week and then we would meet once a week to talk about what God had taught us through his word. We confess our struggles with each other and we pray for each other.

My limited experience with this has proved it to be the most beneficial and powerful thing I have been a part of in 15 years of ministry.  God’s word is powerful and when men seriously engage it they are changed.  I am currently reading with eight men in groups of two or three.  I have just started three groups of middle schoolers.  In all of these individuals I am seeing serious interaction with God’s word. They are seeing God in His word and they are seeing their own lives in there as well. The changes in thinking, attitude and action are so much fun to watch.

I don’t know ultimately where this is going and what it means for me as a pastor but I do know that I am more content in ministry than I have ever been.  I have always been frustrated because my church was not “succeeding.”. I thought that meant God was not working in our church. Now that I am looking for God at work in the life of individuals I am never disappointed and I am much more content.