Today, I’m beginning a new series of posts in which I break down what went into our discipleship process at Pioneer Memorial Church. I’ll share the ideas, books, and process that helped make it come to fruition.
There are four steps involved in our discipleship process: Connect, Grow, Serve, Go.
Allow me to show you a video that gives an overview:
Here are four books that were influential in helping us to process some of these ideas:
1. Simple Church by Thom Rainer
2. Fusion, by Nelson Searcy
3. Activate, by Nelson Searcy
What’s unique about our discipleship process is that it’s also the mission statement of our church. Our complete mission statement is “Transforming this generation to connect, grow, serve, and go.” This concept, that your purpose/mission statement should describe the process, was an invaluable contribution by Thom Rainer in Simple Church. We feel that it’s helped us to become quite focused on what is actually important: helping people to grow closer to Jesus in an intentional way.
By the way, part of the reason why having clarity in your mission is so important is so that you can know what to say no to. As a leader, you are constantly bombarded by good, and even great ideas, but are they ideas that will help to focus your people on what is most important?
In the next post, I’ll dig deeper into what we do for “Connect” and I’ll share some resources that we use.
By the way, the two people on our team that were responsible for making this video were Jonathan Lapointe and Rachelle Offenback.
Here’s the rest of the series:
Connect: Part One of Our Discipleship Process
Grow: Part Two of Our Discipleship Process
Serve: Part Three of Our Discipleship Process
Go: Part Four of Our Discipleship Process
So what about you? What does your discipleship process look like? What do you think is the best way to help people grow closer to God? (To leave a comment click here)
We are in the process of developing a process right now. I am taking my discipleship leader through Transformational Discipleship, the follow up to Transformational church. I have read simply church and it has def impacted my ministry and I am doing a Big day event next week and starting semester based small groups based on fusion next week!
Very cool! Glad to hear that, Chris. Let me know how it goes.