Do you need to shorten the road to building a discipleship experience in your church?

The simplest way to build a discipleship experience in your church is to

1. Define the vision and objectives
2. Develop a comprehensive curriculum
3. Create a user-friendly delivery system
4. Implement effective training and mentoring
5. Regularly Evaluate and Iterate

Introduction

When I was a sophomore in high school I accepted Jesus into my heart and made the choice to dedicate my life to following him. But, what did that mean?

As a 15-year-old boy, though, I had no idea what that really meant. At the time I was a pretty good kid in comparison with all my friends. I didn’t drink, do drugs, fool around with girls, or really get in any trouble. I was a bit of a punk, had a sharp tongue at times, and picked on a few kids here and there.

So, I wasn’t a saint for sure, but besides cleaning up a few nagging trouble areas in my behavior, I didn’t really have a good handle on what it meant to live for Jesus.

That’s when the youth pastor at my church stepped in. Pastor Carey Huffman was an incredibly gifted youth pastor. One thing I still appreciate about him to this day is his passion for learning the scriptures and engaging in a discipleship experience.

The following three years of high school, I went through a very methodical discipleship experience that radically changed my life’s trajectory. In the end, it wasn’t necessarily the discipleship experience itself, but how it brought me closer to Jesus and allowed him to reveal himself and his plan for my life.

Returning to Discipleship Experiences

Ever since the sun set on Sunday School as a primary experience in churches, we have struggled with true, quality discipleship. For the most part, ministry models have shifted to using small groups as their discipleship model, but, there is an inherent flaw in small groups when we use them for discipleship…they are primarily a relational ministry tool, not a teaching one.

Though the value of small groups as a discipleship model can be debated, there isn’t much room for debate when we are faced with the lack of spiritual depth and knowledge among regular attending Christians today.

According to a 2022 Barna study, 39% of Christians are not engaged in discipleship of any kind. That means they are not being discipled, nor are they discipling others.

This creates a great shift in the health of individual spiritual relationships with Jesus. Of those who indicated they were not involved in discipleship, only 30% said their relationship with Jesus brings them deep joy and satisfaction while 65% of those engaged in a discipleship community indicated their relationship with Jesus brought them deep joy and satisfaction.

It is time for us, as pastors and ministry leaders, to return our focus on discipling those who attend our churches. We need to take them through an intentional, methodical, and engaging experience that deepens their relationship with Jesus and teaches them the depths of the scriptures.

The 5 Steps to Creating an Engaging Discipleship Experience

As a pastor you are busy, you have a lot of things going on, and it is hard to find time to build anything new. As a pastor for almost 25 years, I completely understand the overwhelm and time demands of creating a discipleship experience.

I am committing to give you a simple 5 step approach to creating an engaging discipleship system and all I am asking is for you to commit to giving 1-2 hours a week to make it a reality. There is very little on your schedule and your church’s calendar as important as creating this discipleship experience. Because through it you will deepen people’s walk with Jesus, you will increase the number of volunteers in your church, and you will increase your overall giving.

Your discipleship experience may be the most important thing you invest your time in outside of your Sunday morning experience.

Step 1: Define the Vision and Objectives

As with anything in ministry, begin with clarity on why you are creating a discipleship experience and what the objectives are.

What is the ultimate goal you want to achieve? You may want to increase the number of people who are involved in ministry at the church.

You may want to get more people involved in serving the community through an outreach program you have.

Maybe you have grown to the point where you are in serious need of more leaders to build and manage ministry teams.

Whatever your primary goal is, this will inform your vision and your objectives. The last discipleship experience I created was to address the lack of spiritual maturity within the congregation. Many people were volunteering and had been a part of the church for 2-7 years, but the overall spiritual maturity was still very young. So, the ultimate goal was to teach more of the Bible and develop spiritual disciplines like devotions and prayer.

What is your vision for your engaging discipleship experience? This should take no more than 30 minutes to determine the vision and 3-5 objectives.

Step 2: Develop Engaging Curriculum

The curriculum you develop and use is the meat and potatoes of your experience. Too often in ministry, we focus on the frills and the fluff. We focus too much on the lights and music, or the graphics and font, or the registration and people flow. All of these things are important, but the content is what people are really after and that is truly what we want to give them.

First, are you developing your own curriculum or using someone else’s?

If you are using someone else’s, you will need to determine if it is books, videos, workbooks, or a combination of all three. There are a lot of curriculums out there to choose from. Here are a couple of options you can find on Amazon.

Some options to consider:

Disciples Path by David Platt

Strategic Discipleship by Robert Laidlaw

If you are creating your own curriculum, will you be doing video, print, or classroom lecture style?

Second, what is the progressional pathway people will follow?

Most of us learn in a progressive style. We learn in steps so that what we are learning can build off of what we have already learned.

It is important to keep this in mind when building a discipleship experience. How will one lesson build off of the previous lesson in an ever-expanding understanding of the scriptures and a life following Jesus?

Answering these questions and mapping out your discipleship experience will take 2-4 hours if you do some research and think through the progression.

Step 3: Create a User-Friendly Delivery System

This may be the one that will stretch you as the pastor the most. Our default for most discipleship experiences is to gather people together for a learning experience. It may be a weekly classroom setting or a one day event, but we love getting everyone in the room to listen to a lecture, have a discussion, and watch videos together.

The problem with this is that people are busy and are increasingly valuing their time far more than even their money. Fitting another event into their schedule is challenging and will likely take more effort than most people are willing to give. You will have better luck with a one-day event, but a recurring event each week for 6-12 weeks is going to be difficult to accomplish.

Other options are videos available whenever your people are ready for them. You could offer PDF documents for people to access on their own schedules or even audio recordings that can be listened to when people have the space in their days.

The goal here is to make it as available to people as possible while still providing high levels of accountability. You can use a learning management system like Onark to deliver your content and track progress.

Mapping out he delivery system should take an hour or two if you are researching programs or working through the necessary volunteers to make it work.

Step 4: Implement Training

Depending on the experience you decide to create, you may have a minimal number of volunteers and staff needed to manage things. For whatever experience you create, you will need to do some training and development of your staff and volunteers. What will they need to know to run the experience well?

A few suggestions:

Administrator: whether this is a volunteer or a staff member, someone will need to track the progress of those going through the experience. This will require knowledge of your database system (for instance, Planning Center), the pathway people are going through, and the requirements of completion at each step.

Tech Guru: If you choose to do an online video delivery system, a learning management system, or even posting content to your website, you will need someone to manage the content in the digital spaces they live in.

Teachers: If you will have someone other than yourself teaching the content, you will need to train them on the content itself, how to teach it effectively, and maybe even on best teaching practices. They should also be equipped to answer questions, facilitate discussions, and take students deeper into the content when possible.

Begin by answering, what roles need to be filled in order to make the discipleship experience work?

When roles have been identified, list what each person will need to know in each role.

Finally, list names of volunteers or staff that you want to entrust these roles to.

This exercise should only take an hour or two to accomplish.

Step 5: Evaluate and Iterate

Evaluation is necessary. You can only grow what you measure.

Evaluation has two sides: the metrics of growth and reasons why things do or do not grow.

Measurements should include the number of people who enter the process as well as the number that finish. The evaluation is asking why people don’t finish and then iterating to increase the completion rate.

Measurement should also include the time it takes for people to complete the experience if it is self-guided and then identify where in the process people are getting stuck or taking the longest.

Along with the measurements, though, you need information like testimonies of how the experience has impacted the lives of those who have gone through it. This becomes fuel for others to engage in the process and be a part of it.

Be willing to adapt the experience based on the metrics and evaluations to make improvements and increase engagement and completion rates.

Conclusion

Discipleship is central to growing in a relationship with Jesus. More of our congregants need to know how to grow and to take things to a deeper level. An engaging discipleship experience is the key to making that happen. It will take time and energy to build and implement, however, the results of such an experience in your church will be incredible.