Do You Want to Learn How to Make Disciples?

In our process of planting a network of missional communities, we’ve discovered that discipleship is an absolutely essential foundation to have in place if you want to see any fruit in terms of mission. Through our friends at 3DM, we’ve been learning how to build a discipling culture that is radically reproducible and leads to what Jesus called “fruit that lasts.”

Through this process, here are a few things I have come to believe:

• You can’t teach people into missional living, you have to disciple them into it, like Jesus did.
• If you disciple people like Jesus did, it almost automatically leads to mission. It fundamentally changes the whole direction of people’s lives.
• Making disciples is what Jesus told us to do. If you don’t know how to do this, your ministry won’t be producing kingdom fruit, no matter how “successful” you appear to be in terms of attendance at meetings or money in the bank.
• You can’t take people where you’ve never been. If you’ve never been discipled into discipling people to disciple people, it is nearly impossible to create ex nihilo a community that can do that.
• The church in the West is faltering because of a massive lack of intentional discipleship.

Which means that for you as a leader, the whole issue starts and ends with your own discipleship. Sadly, most of us have never been discipled into making disciples the way Jesus did.

If you find yourself in that boat, I want to make you aware of an opportunity.

In the next few weeks, I will be starting a few Coaching Huddles. They’ll be focused on helping you establish a discipling culture in your ministry context. We’ll be working with 3DM’s memorable and reproducible tools, practices, and skills for imitating the life and ministry of Jesus and discipling others to do the same. Each Huddle will have up to 5 people in it and we’ll meet for a period of 9-12 months. The Huddle will happen weekly on a conference call, and you will have access to me outside of the Huddle calls. (If there is enough interest in Fort Wayne, too, one of these Huddles could be local).

Many people are becoming more familiar with Huddles as they have been used by Mike Breen and 3DM, and this discipleship vehicle has produced some amazing fruit in my own life and many others that I know. Huddles are certainly not the only way to disciple people like Jesus, but they are the best vehicle I’ve come across for producing people that increasingly look more like Jesus and are able to do the things that Jesus did.

These Huddles come with a high commitment level:

• You schedule other things around it. You get the most out of this if you commit to showing up every single week.
• We take accountability seriously. At the conclusion of each Huddle you will be able to answer two questions: 1) What is God saying to me? 2) What am I going to do about it? There is no growth in the kingdom without action.
• It will cost you financially. $100 a month, to be exact. I am doing this as a multi-vocational church planter, so your financial investment will not only help me feed my family, but it will go toward our mission of discipling people who can’t afford to invest financially and establishing missional communities in Fort Wayne and eventually all over the Midwest.
• You will start a Huddle of your own. I’m assuming from the beginning that you’re going to grow a lot, both personally and in your ability to disciple people. Sometime during our 9-12 months together, you will be expected to start a Huddle of your own, because part of being a disciple of Christ is making disciples of Christ.

If that sounds like something you’re interested in, contact me ASAP and let me know why you’d like to be in one of these Huddles and what you’re hoping to get out of it.

I look forward to hearing from you!