Having a strong discipleship process that leads into a progressive leadership pipeline is vital to the health of any church and its long-term effectiveness in the community it sits in. Unfortunately, too many churches have no leadership pipeline and their discipleship process is geared toward capturing people over 50 and struggle to engage Millennials.
For a church to have successful longevity and maintain relevance in its community without sacrificing biblical principles, it needs to develop a discipleship process that is mobile, inspiring, principle-oriented, and Biblically grounded. It needs to lead into a leadership pipeline that equips God’s people to be the body of Christ inside and outside of the church, boosting their confidence through competence, and showing the Great Commission is the greatest expedition of all.
Introduction
In a recent article by Kaveh Waddell, a private prep school in Seattle, Lakeside, has made a bold move to redesign its entire curriculum to prepare its students for the future workplace. The current trends reveal a major shift coming in the job market where AI will play a much larger role and their human counterparts will need to find new roles to fill. Many factory jobs, computing and calculating jobs, and manual labor jobs will be replaced by AI in the next 20 years and Lakeside is making an attempt to get ahead of the curve.
What many experts are predicting is that the human workforce will find its place with non-technical skills that AI cannot replicate. Areas such as decision-making, ethical direction, and caring for the human condition will be placed in our hands. It will be up to us to understand what to do with the endless sea of information that will come our way in the years to come.
This means Lakeside’s curriculum, and that of other schools who will likely trek down the trail Lakeside is creating, will have some “casualties… Some teaching styles, assignments or even entire subjects might be shown the door.” It will become more necessary to focus on teaching humans to be, well, more human. To develop their soft skills like decision-making, character growth, and leadership skills.
This is where your church and its discipleship process and leadership pipeline come in.
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The world is moving toward people being better versions of themselves. The incentive for the transformation is to have a job and provide for their families. That can be a pretty compelling incentive. Well, there is one place that has been in the business of helping people be better people for the last 2000 years. The church.
Being a Better Human is Not New
For you and me, those of us who have committed our lives to serve the spiritual development of those God has placed in our lives, we know that to be a better human being is to reflect the life of Jesus Christ. There is no better human to have walked this earth. Our study of scripture is to know him more intimately so we may more accurately reflect him. To be like Christ is to develop a high moral character focused on pleasing our Father by reflecting the Son.
To be a better human is to develop a greater moral compass. This is the path toward being a better version of ourselves, which in the coming years will also be the path to a job and financial stability. The church is uniquely gifted and qualified to lead people to the best version of themselves, however, I am afraid too many churches are ill-equipped to meet the needs of their communities because their discipleship process is outdated and their leadership pipeline is nonexistent.
Developing a Discipleship Process
If you are like most pastors and ministry leaders I know, the challenge is having the time to create the curriculum necessary to effectively develop disciples of Christ. It takes time to do the research, to write the curriculum, to make it progressive and systematic, and have it engaging enough to keep people moving through each level.
When I created Expedition Life, these are the challenges I faced. As a full-time pastor with an endless list of responsibilities and a sea of people needing my attention, I knew I had to fight for time to design curriculum that would make a difference. As a new Dad holding my little Aiden in my arms, I wanted to design something suitable for the development of my own children to become productive, Jesus-glorifying, powerful leaders when they are adults.
I didn’t want something that would just pacify a need, but I wanted to develop a program that would take an individual from the moment they enter a relationship with Jesus all the way to full-time ministry service if they felt called.
I wanted to create something that would equip a volunteer in any area of church ministry and give them the tools and confidence they needed to serve God and people with energy, focus, a smiling face, and warm heart. Our greatest calling is to be about the Lord’s service, and I wanted to show that serving the mission of God didn’t have to be done begrudgingly and at the expense of personal health and family relationships.
So, I set out on a quest to create a discipleship program that was rich in biblical truth and theological understanding, but understandable for anyone willing to learn. Once someone was finished with the discipleship process, they entered into the leadership training program that was grounded in a biblical worldview but was practically applied in any life setting.
I wasn’t interested in making better church volunteers, I wanted to start a movement of Christian leaders who had strong character and a toolbox of leadership skills at their disposal. Rather than focusing on making better Christians to impact the world around them, I honed in on making better leaders with a biblical worldview.
(Listen to this episode “3 Reasons Small Groups Aren’t Great for Discipleship”)
It Looks Different than Sunday School
Now, if you feel like it is time for a change in your discipleship process, I believe you have two options:
- Find a quality curriculum you can implement and build off of
- Write a curriculum that can be the backbone of your faith community
If you choose to write a curriculum, I want to encourage you to do a few things:
1. Give yourself plenty of time
This is not something you can do in a month or two. You need to plan out the process your people will go through. What does the experience look like? What are the on and off ramps you will use to get people into the different phases and into areas of leadership? These questions take time, take brainstorming meetings, plenty of people talking into it, and eventually the hard work of developing. At the very least I would suggest to give yourself 6 months. If you start now you may be able to roll something out in the fall. For myself, in total, I estimate it took 2 years developing the discipleship program and the leadership pipeline, with many revisions and updates to the overall experience.
2. Think systematically in a learning progression
In order to build a discipleship process that will develop strong leaders with deep biblical values, you will need to think in a systematic process that moves through a clear learning path. Just as when you learned how to do math you didn’t start with multiplication, but you began by identifying numbers and then moved to add them together. Well, spiritual development works in the same way. If you don’t create a strong Biblical foundation for the whole process, then the whole thing will be shaky. Once your Biblical foundation is established, then begin to build off of there.
For Expedition Life, it takes the established biblical foundation and begins to build character traits and leadership skills on top of it. So when the character trait of discipline and the leadership skill of time management are trained, it is done with a Kingdom mindset, not just a self-help mindset. As an individual moves from leading yourself all the way through leading departments, the character traits and leadership skills build on one another in a progression to better equip leaders to make an impact wherever they go.
3. Consider the method of delivery for a younger audience
We live in a digital age and Millennials are the natives of this age. Unfortunately, we do not have enough quality discipleship programs that utilize the digital format. Too often as ministry leaders, we are stuck on having people sit in a room like a class and learn from a teacher like they are back in high school.
As I am sure you have noticed, people are busy and they have short attention spans. We can bemoan this reality, or we can just move past our frustration about it and find a way to disciple our people despite it.
I want to encourage you, if you are going to develop your own discipleship curriculum, consider making an online version of it with videos, activities, downloadable sheets, and other online elements to engage the Millennial mind.
The greatest tragedy is that the wonder of biblical discipleship is unreachable to so many because it isn’t designed in a medium they prefer. This is why Expedition Life is an online discipleship and leadership pipeline first with an analog option.
Though it is online, it can be used in a variety of ways. I have used it one-on-one and served as a coach leading an individual through it. I have used in a group setting where the students do it on their own and we have a group coaching session together. Then I have run full classes that use the online piece to prime the pump so when we come together in the classroom everyone is ready to discuss, do activities, and go deeper into the content.
Find a way to use an online medium to capture your Millennials, and you may be surprised how many of your non-technical Boomers really enjoy the experience. I have been.
Plug and Play Option Available
Now, if you feel like you simply do not have time to develop a curriculum that will meet your needs sufficiently, consider seeking out a curriculum that meets your needs while providing a systematic process and engages Millennials. If you are interested in joining the hundreds who have gone through the Expedition Life curriculum to see if it is a fit for your congregation, I would love to have you be part of the Modern Inklings community. You can click the banner below and it will take you to Modern Inklings University where you can create a free account with us and then purchase the curriculum.
Lakeside is breaking from the traditional classroom and redesigning its curriculum to better prepare people for the future workforce. As the cornerstone of human development, the church should be considering a shift toward a new curriculum as well that will teach our faith communities to exemplify the character and leadership of the greatest human ever. Let’s together be ready to answer the call to train great leaders with a Biblical worldview and a Christ-centered heart.