Discipleship Training
Notes
Transcript
Handout
What’s up guys. My name is Heath Haney. I serve as the lead pastor of Lindsay Lane East. We are one of three campuses of Lindsay Lane Baptist Church in Limestone County. Been there 19 months so far. Loving it.
I was a youth pastor for 8.5 years at a church 25 miles west of where I am now. Then I served as an associate pastor in the town I grew up in for around 3.5. There I mainly oversaw the discipleship process at our church: moving first time guests all the way through to leadership development in roles at our church, and every stop in between. Then I got the chance of a lifetime to pastor a young, thriving 6 year old church. Covid has definitely complicated the transition from the founding pastor to me, but we are continuing to see more and more people come our way and stick around!
We are going to talk about discipleship today. I want to share with you the things I have learned about it through my 13 years in ministry. Alright?
What verse do you think about when you think of DISCIPLESHIP?
Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
You may already know this, but there is only one command in this verse! Jesus says, Make Disciples. That’s the verb form in the Greek. The going, the baptizing and the teaching are the ways in which we accomplish that, but there is only one command: Make Disciples.
The command is not just for pastors, or church leaders to make disciples. It seems throughout the rest of the New Testament that God desires all believers to MAKE DISCIPLES. Paul will flesh out much more about how this looks on a local church level. It is everything to us!
But the term “discipleship” doesn’t mean the same things to everyone. I can remember being a kid and thinking that being a “disciple” was like being a second level Christian. You had to grow into that role. Christians were those who had been saved, but DISCIPLES were legit! They were Super Christians.
As I got older and read the Bible, I discovered that “disciple” is actually one of the most common terms in the Bible to refer to Jesus followers and there is no distinct level up mentality. To be a Christian is to be a disciple.
The first thing I learned
The first
If you are taking notes…
1. Definition of discipleship
1. Definition of discipleship
It can’t be a particular thing. Discipleship is going to happen a lot of different ways. To say that “real discipleship” is a one on one accountability relationship or a one on three-five group that meets weekly for Bible study is to neglect the most common ways discipleship occurs. Will most of your church get in those groups? Probably not, right? So, everyone not in those groups are not being discipled?
There may be leaders here who would disagree with me on this part. But why not start off a little controversial!
If we are going to define what discipleship means, we have to define disciple right?
It simply means “learner” or “student.” That’s the broad dictionary definition.
We should also consider what Jesus said, right?
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you continue in my word, you really are my disciples.
Jesus says a disciple is one who personally obeys his word and commands.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
Jesus says a disciple is one who is engaging in loving ways with other believers (in the church).
My Father is glorified by this: that you produce much fruit and prove to be my disciples.
Jesus says a disciple is one that is actively engaging the lost and doing things for the glory of God in the world.
So, which is it? Did Jesus forget what he had already said?
Being a disciple is more than just a checklist with a few actions to mark off. I believe we get the image from...
A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.
Do you see that? What is Jesus saying? A disciple’s goal is to become just like his teacher, which for us is Jesus.
We will come back to some of these verses later, but for now, it seems like a disciple is someone who is working towards looking like Jesus in everything.
So DISCIPLESHIP then, is helping someone work towards looking like jesus in everything. I like the term Next Steps at East. So for me...
Discipleship is helping someone else take a next step towards Jesus.
It really is that simple!
So, is a Sunday School teacher discipling someone by simply teaching a lesson to their class? If they are intentionally helping the people in there take a next step towards Jesus, they are! We’ve all been in the Sunday School class were the teacher was just getting through the lesson. They are not!
Is a pastor discipling by preaching to his congregation? If he is intentionally helping the congregation take next steps he is! Sometimes pastors have wrong motives for preaching sermons. If it’s for any other reason, it’s not discipleship.
What about a lunch meeting with a fellow Christian? or Answering questions your neighbor has about the Bible? Or even sending a text message to check in on someone at church?
All of these things can be discipleship if they are done with the intentionality of helping someone take a next step towards Jesus!
I began to see this pretty early in ministry as a youth pastor. When I begin to view every road trip, every Wednesday night message, every errand that a student tags along with as discipleship, we began to see some growth in our students.
Think about the path you are considering in ministry and begin to recognize that everything you will do in that role needs to be towards discipleship!
The next misconception I had about ministry was viewing all my students on the same level. I only had two descriptors for them: lost or saved. That was it! If they were lost, they needed to hear the Gospel. If they were already saved, they needed to hear any number of messages about how to live and obey God.
That was my first few years in ministry, sadly. However, God finally helped me see that it would be helpful for me as a pastor if I could classify our students into different categories. Again, these are not real spiritual levels that determine eternity (besides lost…)
All I was trying to do was turn lost kids into leaders. And that’s awesome, but it was helpful for me to break it down a littler further. The same is true for you. You need to think about a...
2. Pathway of discipleship
2. Pathway of discipleship
I asked the question, “What do I start with?” The lost, right? Hopefully lost kids are coming into our student ministry. What does discipleship look like for a lost kid? What are they learning?
What is the desired outcome for a lost student in your ministry?
My desire was that they would become saved.
Well, what if they did? Many did. We had the privilege to baptize a lot of kids and students in my 8.5 years there. But what was the next desired outcome? What did we want the saved to become?
I defined that outcome as “faithful.” I wanted to see these kids begin to follow God closely. I wanted them to engage in the local church and in their personal walk with Jesus.
But was that it? Was creating good rule-following believers really the end?
My desire for them was defined as “leaders.” I wanted to see these students who were learning and taking next steps begin to help other do the same!
Lost->Saved->Faithful->Leaders
Think for yourself where you are in this pathway. It’s helpful for self-awareness, but it’s also helpful for thinking about those you have a chance to lead. If you are a Sunday School or small group leader, think about your group in light of these categories.
But the next thing I wrestled with was, “How do people grow as a disciple?”
I was wrestling with this by the time I left my first church to become associate pastor of a really fun church in Ardmore.
My first task there was to develop the systems needed to get people to grow in their walk with Christ.
3. Growth Factors of discipleship
3. Growth Factors of discipleship
Let’s be honest, when you think about verses like...
A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.
That can be overwhelming! I’m supposed to look like Jesus? Yes, I know that it is God’s will that I look like Jesus, but in the daily grind of it all, I see all the ways in which I am lacking and it is overwhelming!
So let me ask you...
If someone came to you and said, How can I grow in my faith? What would you tell them?
There are nearly an endless list of answers here, right?
And what do people do when they feel overwhelmed and their seem to be too many answers to process through?
Many will shut it down. They will just say, “I can never be like Jesus.” and quit.
What we started saying was a quote from Daniel Im in his book No Sliver Bullets: “Living as a Christian is less about a destination and more about a direction.” We wanted people to not get overwhelmed with all that was wrong with them and all the ways they needed to grow, but instead acknowledge the direction they want to head and then start taking Next Steps.
I am convinced that the Christian walk is really tens of thousands of tiny steps that way take in a common direction. Most of them are not sexy. They aren’t HUGE steps. They are setting an alarm to wake up early to study your Bible.... Then doing it! Or speaking to your neighbors who don’t go to church even though you are a true introvert. Tiny steps in a common direction.
But it’s not enough to simply say, “Take next steps.” We need to help them see what they are! What if we could provide very specific ways or growth factors that could help people assess areas they are weak in and then provide them with Next Steps they could take? That would be good right?
But how can we do that?
I developed an analogy that was super helpful using working out. If you take three major muscle groups: arms, abs, and legs. Tell me which of these guys is the strongest:
a. Guy with massive arms and neck, but skinny chicken legs,
b. Guy with a ripped six pack but can’t lift a gallon of milk
c. Guy who can squat a Volkswagen but has a beer belly?
The truth is, each one has its strength. And each one has its weakness. If your legs are weak, you need to make a list of some leg exercises, pick a few, and do them with regularity. If you arms, the same way, and your abs.
God helped me see through this goofy analogy that our discipleship is the same way. We need some way to be able assess where we are weak and where we are strong, and then address the weak.
So, we began to pray, What are the three muscle groups of the Christian life? God kept bringing up the word “CONNECT” in our staff discussions. So we just needed to know what we were supposed to CONNECT with!
Let’s go back to our verses from earlier...
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you continue in my word, you really are my disciples.
Over and over again in the Bible, we see a call to Connect with God as a believer. A disciple should be connecting with God, right?
What would that look like to CONNECT WITH GOD? What are some ways we can do that?
For us, we wanted to give our people only three exercises to grow in each area. For Connect with God it was Prayer, Singing, and Bible engagement. If someone recognized their personal walk with Christ was the weakest muscle group, we had three exercises to pass along!
The second muscle group was CONNECT with Others.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
This is the one about fellowship and small groups. As disciples we have got to grow in our walk with Jesus by loving other people!
Here we had exercises like Fellowship with others, Study the bible together, and pray with and for one another.
Then we had Connect with the Mission. We originally described that as Pray. Give. Engage. It later became, Use Your Gifts, Share Your Story. Make Disciples
You don’t have
4. Schedule of discipleship
4. Schedule of discipleship
We then have to ask, how can we as a church or ministry come alongside to help with these things?
In 2006, Eric Geiger and Thom Rainer wrote a book called Simple Church. The goal of the book was to say, scratch the whole playbook and start from scratch. Lay out what you are trying to accomplish as a church, your mission, and then have one scheduled thing that helps accomplish that. If your mission was “creating disciples who WORSHIP GROW and SERVE, you would have a worship service each week to accomplish that. You would offer groups that were content heavy so that people could grow, and then you would have missional groups meet once per month to do things in their communities as outreach.
The problem with the book is that, if you are not in a church open to change or planting a church, you can’t really do that! For those churches like I served as youth pastor, we had Sunday School, Worship, Discipleship Training, another worship, and Wednesday night prayer meeting. According to the book, two of those things need to go! Good luck with canceling those things! There were other things that probably weren’t as helpful as the authors had thought. However...
The book was super helpful to so many of us beginning in ministry around that time and helped get us thinking about why we do what we do!
Many of you will be serving in established churches and will probably not be in the lead chair where you can change things like meeting times. But you can make good use of the times that you do have to meet!
The first step is to look at when you meet and ask how those things work towards your desired discipleship outcomes.
What do we need to offer to help our people take these steps?
And how can we help more with the things we already have?
At East, we have what we call, Foundation. Life. Leadership. as our process of discipleship. We believe that for all new Christians to grow well, they need a strong foundation. We have currently a 30ish week curriculum that we ask people to walk through in small groups. It is made up of three courses...
a. Old Testament Overview (12 week)
b. New Testament Overview (6-8 week)
c. Discipleship 101 (12 week) (where we walk through basic practices and disciplines of the faith)
We believe these things will help get new believers on the right foot and will serve as a good restart for stale Christians coming out of seasons of inactivity.
Once people have a strong foundation, we believe the next big thing they need is to learn to read the Bible for themselves and begin to learn how the Bible applies to their life. This happens best in a small group setting that is focused just as much on community as it is on content. We want to foster deep relationships here.
Once believers have formed relationships and are applying the Bible to their lives, the opportunity opens for them to apply for our leadership track. This is still a work in progress and has lots of loose ends, but the gameplan is to create an institute of sorts that will be a low level seminary education within our local church. We hope to launch this in January. The curriculum will be similar to that one might take in seminary and it will be probably a 52 week curriculum spread out over 18 months. (patent pending)
All of this is for the effort of making disciples who make disciples.
My last piece of advice for you is...
5. Personal Growth of Discipleship
5. Personal Growth of Discipleship
If you are going to be the champion for discipleship in your church and in your ministry, you’ve got to practice the same stuff you are asking them to do! The danger of hypocrisy is ever before the pastor. Fight against that! Fight for your people and your own discipleship.
Find someone who can invest in you.
Find people like you that you can do life with.
Find people you can invest in personally.
I want to be praying for you guys. Please let me know how God begins to answer the call in your life!