Ben Sternke

Field notes on life and mission with God after Christendom

Notable Posts

People Can’t Imitate Your Intentions

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One of the most important lessons we’ve learned through being involved with 3DM is that imitation is a vital component of discipleship. It’s not enough to give people the right information and then send them straight out from there to try to implement it. There is a necessary experience of imitation in an apprenticeship environment that must take place.

When I first heard this, I instantly realized I was really good at giving people the information, but I was not very consistent in providing people with an example to imitate. I realized that people couldn’t imitate my intentions, they can only imitate my actions, which meant I had to lead by example or I was never going to make a disciple.

So we’ve slowly been developing new rhythms in our life that we can invite others into, so they can “imitate us as we imitate Christ.” My friend Jason Smith asked me awhile ago about what these rhythms looked like, and I promised him a blog post on it! Here we go.

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But WHY Discipleship?

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Recently I finished an interesting book by Simon Sinek called Start With Why. The basic premise is that while many people and organizations know WHAT they do, and a few know HOW they do it, very few know WHY they do what they do.That is, what’s their purpose? Why do they get out of bed in the morning? What’s the point?

His basic argument is that why we do something is far more important and powerful than what we’re doing or even how we’re doing it. And while I’m not sure it’s a perfect application of the principle in the book, I began relating this question to discipleship.

It seems to me that lots of churches know that they should be pursuing discipleship (WHAT), and some churches have a plan for it (HOW), but do we really know WHY discipleship to Jesus is a big deal? Why pursue a discipling culture in the first place?

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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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Why It’s Hard to Invest in Exponential Growth

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You’ve probably heard most of the illustrations about the power of exponential growth vs. linear growth. For example, if you were able to keep folding a piece of paper in half indefinitely (essentially doubling its height every fold), it would only take you 42 folds to reach the moon. Or, if you started with one dollar and doubled your money every day, by the end of the first week you’d have $64. But by the end of the first month you’d have $268,435,456!

When you think about it, making disciples of Jesus could be like this. If I make, say, 8 disciples, and they all make 6 disciples each, and all of those people make 4 disciples each, you end up with 248 disciples of Jesus by the third generation. The exponential equation only gets more incredible after that. And all I have to do in the first generation is make 8 disciples. So why do we find it hard to invest our energy in making disciples who can make disciples? I can think of a couple reasons.

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Centralization Before Decentralization

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Why do some missional ventures that look so good “on paper” fail so miserably in real life? Why do some of the best-laid plans for mission end up not actually accomplishing all that much? Because of how I’m wired up, I have a propensity to believe that an efficient system, a simple plan, an elegant strategy should automatically yield good results. But this just isn’t the case sometimes. Why is that?

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