What’s Your Discipleship Path?

The other day someone on staff asked, “What our discipleship path?” In other words, “How are we growing disciples at our church?” It’s a challenging question and an important one too.  It’s a question every church needs to answer.

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As a church we know we want growing disciples who are growing other disciples.  We’ve agreed that we want to do that by growing disciples who love God, love others and make disciples.  How that looks depends on the discipleship path we’ve put together for each area of our church. For our children’s ministry it means teaching kids how to: 

• Live like Christ, Pray and Grow in a personal relationship with God.  

For our student ministry we want them to embrace spiritual habits like:

• Prayer, Serving, Tithing, Sacramental Life, Bible Study, and Christian Fellowship.

And then when it comes to our adults we are encouraging people to embrace:

• Prayer, Tithing, Serving, Evangelization and Small Groups.

To bring each of these paths together to form one big discipleship path means:

• Each Department Consistently Communicates: You need to make sure everyone who is involved with discipleship (i.e. youth minister, adult discipleship coordinator) is discussing this matter.  You might work in the same church and have the same vision, but you could have different opinions on how to grow disciples.  Meet regularly to discuss the discipleship path so you can be on the same page.

• We Are Focused On The Mission And Vision: The habits that you want for your disciples might not be the best ones for your church.  God has given your church an identity through it’s vision.  For us we want growing disciples who are growing other disciples.  That means raising up disciples confident in their faith and willing to invest in others.

• There Is Constant Evaluation: Systems like anything will eventually breakdown.  Your discipleship path will be changed depending on the growth and changes of your church and surrounding community. Look to improve the quality of how you grow disciples even if it means having difficult conversations.

If you want your individual ministry to succeed it needs to be working with the other ministries in your church.  A discipleship path is fleshing out the mission of your church in order to reach the vision.  Bring the conversation to your coworkers and ask, “What’s our discipleship path?”  See what they say.

What components are necessary for creating a discipleship path?