Glad to hear you’re taking some steps to bring disciple-making (after too many years of indoctrination as a Southern Baptist, I can no longer use the other “d” word that ends in “ship”) back onto the radar screen of your local body of believers. How about a couple of suggestions from an older brother in the faith?

Just keep it simple and remember that it’s not a church program! And it’s not something that belongs exclusively in the pastor’s toolkit or job description. Every believer is called to make disciples and should be encouraged to do so. When that starts happening, you’ll be running to catch up with a church planting movement.

We’re a PDC, so we use Warren’s 101,201,301,401 classes, but we use them only as a starting point. We also offer other classes, and some one-on-one mentoring, but our big push lately has been getting people involved in each others lives through the use of 3 person cell groups.

My IMB brother-in-law had been pestering me for a year about looking into this thing called Life Transformation Groups, put forward by Neil Cole. My wife and I finally read his book Cultivating a Life for God and loved the focus on making scripture the central part of an accountability cell group. We also liked that other than creating some structure to create and enable the groups, they take on the personality of the groups members, and not some program structure.

We kicked this off 3 weeks ago, along with the other discipleship classes. Our worship service has an attendance of roughly 130, and so far we have 5 women’s cell groups, and 2 mens groups.

I’ve been encouraged by the response by the women, and a bit discouraged by the men. I’m the discipleship director and I’m in one group, and the senior pastor is in the other.

We’re still gonna plug away at it. We have some big classroom based teaching coming up, so we’ll also use that time to encourage the attenders to join or create a group.

Personally, I hope to see some responses in this thread about how other churches are intentionally developing leaders, and how churches can foster an environment where theology is not the proprietary domain of professionals.

Often times in the church we miss the ideas of observation and practice like you mentioned. I believe this is because we are working of the presupposition that right thinking will lead to right practice. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but many of us know way more about christ and theology than we are obedient to. At the same time I don’t want to swing to the other side of the pendulum and say right practice will lead to right belief, because I don’t think that works either. I think it is somewhere in between and that is why you must have theological training as well as practical training in discipleship.

The analogy I use with people is that if you have only theological training you would be a like a child with a huge brain but no muscle mass and completely useless. If you have only practical training and no theological you would be like a huge brute with no brains which at best is dangerous.