Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

3DM

Coaching Huddle Opportunity

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One of the most important elements of my own growth and fruitfulness over the past few years has been the coaching I’ve received from 3DM. Being invested in week after week in this way has allowed me to grow in my capacity to build a discipling culture in my context that is simple and sticky enough to be readily reproducible and powerfully transformative.

In the course of this journey I’ve been able to pass on this investment to others as a 3DM coach, and I wanted to let you know about an upcoming opportunity for coaching.

I will be starting a new 3DM Coaching Huddle soon, focused on helping leaders establish a discipling culture in their ministry context both personally and strategically.

If you’re a church leader and are interested in this, contact me and I will give you more details. Here’s some more info on what 3DM Coaching is all about:

Strategy, Synergy and the Spirit

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This post is the second part of a short series detailing the process grafting our church plant together with another to form one network of Missional Communities in Fort Wayne. Check out the previous post to get the full scoop.

As I said in the first post, we began this process by simply talking and praying together with another 3DM-influenced church in Fort Wayne, and in the end felt like God was daring us to think outside the box in terms of partnership. As surprising as it was to us, this feels like the next natural step in our original vision, which was to cultivate and multiply communities of discipleship and mission all over the Fort Wayne region (and beyond).

The most important factor in this is that we are sensing God’s direction, but as we’ve discussed and prayed together about it, there are a number of practical and strategic considerations that seem to confirm this as a Spirit-inspired move.

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Kingdom-Minded & City-Focused

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Three years ago our family and a few others embarked on a journey of planting a church. Our hearts’ desire was to cultivate “kingdom beachheads” all over our city, attempting to put discipleship and mission at the center of what we were doing. Like many, we found out that it was more difficult and humbling than we imagined, but God has been faithfully leading us into fruitfulness as we follow the promptings of his Spirit.

Some interesting recent Spirit-promptings have led us in a direction that was initially surprising to us, but in the end felt natural and right. As so often happens when the Holy Spirit is involved, no one could have guessed it from the beginning, but in the end we laugh about how God is accomplishing his will through it all: we are in the process of grafting our church together with another to form one network of Missional Communities in Fort Wayne.

Since this blog is dedicated to sharing what we are learning in church-planting and disciple-making, I wanted to take a few posts and outline what has been happening and how we came to this decision.

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You Have to Die to Make a Disciple

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In reflecting on the process of making disciples that I’m learning to practice, I’ve realized that it involves a real death to self for the leader at every stage along the way. As Jesus said, “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” This is certainly true in making disciples.

In fact, the success of the discipling process depends largely on the leader’s willingness to die to their own desires, laying down their lives for those they are discipling. The death is slightly different in every stage, but it is a death nonetheless, which perhaps explains why many find it easier to just keep doing ministry as usual. Here are my observations about how a leader dies to self in the first couple stages of the discipling journey.

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Making Disciples Series: Links

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Over the past few weeks I wrote a six-part blog series that outlines my philosophy and practice of discipleship, a distillation and condensation of the stuff I’ve learned over the past few years from 3DM and others, a (somewhat) coherent “manifesto” on discipleship, if you will.

I put all the links on one page, for easy reference. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the whole series, I’d love to hear your thoughts!