Organic Discipleship

In the Missional Leadership Initiative in the CGGC, we are finishing out the first year of a two year process.

We are currently being challenged very heavily to "change the scorecard."

This has proven to be a more challenging task than I expected. It is a fact that at our church, The Crossover, we count two things --
1. Do you attend the Sunday morning service?
2. Do you attend a home group?

My desire is that The Crossover be about two very focused things --
1. Find ways to introduce people to Jesus Christ.
2. Create regular discipleship opportunities for people who know Jesus (and maybe even for those who don't)

So we are finding that what we are counting isn't creating our desired intentions for people. We have a lot of questions we need to be asking ourselves. Again I will give two.
1. In what context would it be our best opportunity to introduce people to Jesus? And then how can we count the people who take this opportunity to share and the number of people who respond positively?
2. How do we define a disciple? What should be the expectations of a disciple? And then how can we count people who meet these expectations?

As Bill looks for a model to implement, I think these are the two key questions that must be answered before we create a model.

An Example of APEST in Action

As someone who is interested in how good ideas might work out in practice, I found an interesting article by Alan Hirsch from Leadership Journal.

Hirsch tells us that his church movement in Australia made sure that they included a person from each gifting on their leadership team.

It is worth reading in it's entirety, but here is a 'practical' application:

"When facing any ministry issue, we begin by committing ourselves to the common mission of the group. We covenant to do whatever it takes to see our mission fulfilled. But this kind of interpersonal commitment requires a bond that goes beyond the professional relationships that exist on many church staffs.

We lived out our unity in Christ by living together, struggling together, worshiping together, praying together, and facing our problems together. It was the healthy trust developed on the team (fit) that allowed divergent opinions (split) to be expressed without fear of offending one another. It was the strong sense of commitment to one another that gave each member permission to operate out of his or her own ministry biases, and then unapologetically represent their perspectives on the issue at hand.

The apostle would press the need to galvanize the community around mission and extension. The prophet would challenge just about everything and ask probing questions about how God fit into our grand schemes. The evangelist would always emphasize the need to bring people to faith and expand the reach of the gospel. The shepherd inevitably expressed concerns about how the community could remain healthy amid change. And the teacher tried to discern the validity of any new idea from Scripture and history.

The presence of these divergent interests inevitably caused debates and arguments (contend). But we did not try to resolve disagreement too quickly—much to the discomfort of the shepherd on the team. In my experience, the greatest tension usually arose between the apostle (with the missional drive) and the shepherd (with the community health impulse), but we almost always managed to overcome conflict through dialogue and prayer (transcend).

Remember, we were committed to stay with the problem until we had assessed all options and had, through dialogue and debate, arrived at the best solution. As a result, the outcomes we reached were more full-orbed, faithful to God, sensitive to the needs of not-yet-believers, sustainable, mature, and theologically well grounded."