CPM works where nothing else has

I lived in Thailand for 16 months, and am very well aware of the difficult challenge that country has been for the missionary community. There is no shortage of missionaries there and there are Bible Colleges and Seminaries built by missionaries, but I’ve seen estimates of the Evangelical Christian population ranging from 0.01% to 1.0% of the population. That may be changing now as a result of CPM. Watch this video of an interview with Lorraine Dierck, and then I’ll make some observations.

I see Four things in this video that are characteristics of every CPM/DMM.

1. It all starts with Prayer. She tells how she was burdened to see churches planted, and prayed for church planters for various communities with populations in the hundreds of thousands that had no church.

2. Anyone can be the catalyst that starts the movement. After all this praying, Lorraine said,

“Finally God said, ‘You, I want you to do it’ I was so shocked. I was horrified. I didn’t tell anybody. I’m a children’s worker! I’m not a church planter.”

If you google Lorraine Dierck, you will come up with numerous web pages that detail her work as a children’s worker in Thailand because she has been doing that work for many years. You will find almost nothing except 3 youtube videos on her CPM work.

3. The emphasis was on training others to do the work. Not seminary or Bible college type training, but the MAWL (Model, Assist, Watch, and Leave) CPM methodology is seen clearly in her approach.

“You lead somebody to Christ, and then you train them how they can lead somebody to Christ. You baptize them, and then you train them how they can baptize somebody. So it becomes like a chain like that. And in the early years I might have been involved in leading a few people to Christ, but pretty soon it wasn’t me doing the evangelism, it was them doing the evangelism.”

4. The LEAVE in MAWL is seen clearly in this video, even though she has not left the country yet.

“I just keep myself totally in the background and normally you would never see me. You just see the Thai’s, John and Nok and….”
“Now they are totally responsible for their own work. They are leading their own work. They are like apostles, they are like pastors, so they are leading their own work. So I think it is really good because it has taken the westerner and the foriegner out of the picture.”

Street Deacons

The most important central theme of both CPM and DMM is the determination to push ministry out of central control or central leadership to every believer.  Every time I come across another story of a leader who entrusted others with ministry opportunities, it illustrates how embracing the principle of 2 Timothy 2:2 always leads to significantly greater impact of the gospel.  This little story comes from the book Misfits Welcome by Matthew Barnett, who started a ministry to street people in Los Angeles.  Obviously this is a very different type of ministry than CPM / DMM, but the principle of 2 Timothy 2:2 is illustrated none the less.

Let me tell you about some people God used. When my church finally started to grow, we were hitting an attendance level of around fifty people. The challenge is that more than forty of those fifty were people who came on our buses from Skid Row. Skid Row is a place where people line both sides of several streets in the Los Angeles business district, sleeping around bonfires, cardboard boxes, and tents. Sadly, women and children occupy these cold, dark streets. There are pockets of Skid Row where people line up against walls and practically inject needles until they die— hence the name Skid Row. Many years ago, our church received its first donation of a brand new bus. We were so excited. We took that bus down to Skid Row, and during the course of a few months forty homeless people began regularly meeting us for rides to church. Can you imagine looking out on Sunday morning and nearly every person in the church being homeless? I was a pastor who didn’t understand anything about homelessness, and I had a congregation of homeless people who just came for the free food after every service. A misfit pastor and a misfit congregation. We were all out of place. Shockingly, the people started to come to church and bring their friends. Since 80 percent of the people in our church were homeless, we didn’t have many volunteers, so God gave us an idea for a position called “Street Deacons.” (Don’t judge. You have to work with what you have!) I appointed these guys as church staff to help me get as many people on the bus to come to church as possible. You should’ve seen the smiles on the faces of some of these men. They couldn’t believe someone would love them, believe in them, and give them such a great title. One man cried when I told him that he could be a Street Deacon. Several of the men stopped drinking because they were so honored that they would have this chance. Many of the guys sobered up, dressed up, cleaned up because a pastor had given them a chance to have a role in the church. They went out on the streets and gathered up friends. Every week they would check in with me and give updates on their progress. They lived for this chance and they made the best of it. They just needed someone to believe the best in them. The first staff members who joined me were an interesting collection of individuals. However, they were the seeds that would later grow into the miracle we now call the Dream Center.

According to Wikipedia,

When the church began in September 1994, there were 39 members. The congregation grew from an average attendance of 48 on Sunday morning to reaching more than 35,000 people each week in the Center’s 40 services and 273 ministries and outreaches.”

So giving ministry to skid row “misfits” seems to have worked!

The Importance of Obedience Based Discipleship

In this video (part 2, see part 1 here) Jerry Trousdale (author of Miraculous Movements) covers counter intuitive aspects of Disciple Making strategies. Some highlights for me were:

  • discussion of the importance of obedience based discipleship (starting at 18 minutes)
  • This is what a Discovery Bible Study looks like…” (starting at 24.5 minutes)
  • David Garrison is the author of Church Planting Movements.  David and I were together comparing notes as he was writing his new book A Wind In The House of Islam.  As we compared our data, we realized that from Indonesia to Africa and all over the world the same thing is happening.  And then David said, You know Jerry, since I wrote Church Planting Movements people often ask me to come and see the movement that is happening where they are.  And often times I’ll go and discover that it is not really a movement, because it is not really multiplying rapidly.  It is more like church growth on steroids.  It’s good, but its not really a movement.  You know what is the one thing that makes the difference, the one thing that makes the difference between a church planting movement and church planting on steroids?  It is obedience.  When you have the obedience [based discipleship] DNA, you get movements, but when you don’t have it you can have good church planting but you’re not getting multiplication because you’re not having the dramatic transformation.”  (from 34 to 36 minutes in)

Now the side benefit of this is, that this makes enormous numbers of disciples” (starting at 29 minutes)

Replication and multiplication happen very naturally” (30:30 minutes)

Rapid Multiplication of disciples among Muslims in Africa

In this video Jerry Trousdale tells stories from Church Planting Movements in Muslim countries of Africa, including his own journey from preaching and teaching to becoming a catalyst for Disciple Making Movements in Africa. His book Miraculous Movements is one of my favorite books on DMM/CPM, but he fills in some of the gaps in this video.

“In this process, maybe 300 people have lost their lives.
Many of those were only one or two days old in the Lord.”

“Often the most difficult places yield the greatest results”

Giving Up Control: Why Movements Are Preferable to Revival (Book Review)

givingupcontrolThis little e-book is available on the Kindle for only 99 cents, and it may be the best money you’ve ever spent.   Author A.J. DeJonge was a staff member with Cru (Campus Crusade) in Australia, and this book details his own journey from the traditional Cru approach of staff led campus ministry to the Catalyzing of student led movements on campus. Although his ministry context is the university campus, the principles that drove this change were derived from the CPM and DMM approaches to cross cultural ministry, and he mentions various authors that anyone with knowledge of CPM / DMM would be familiar with.

One of the counter intuitive practices of DMM / CPM is the necessity of giving up control. In most churches and ministries, the mindset is that control is necessary to prevent heresy and enable growth to maturity of babes in Christ. But control leads to several problems that most of us in ministry are blind to. For one thing, control limits the size of the ministry. If you need a Bible College or Seminary trained man to be a pastor or to plant a church, the growth of your movement will be severely limited. There are a very limited number of them.   DeJonge saw this in his own campus ministry. The growth of the ministry was directly constrained by the number of people they had on staff to disciple students, lead Bible Studies, and organize activities. The ultimate goal of multiplication wasn’t happening, and would never happen unless they had access to hundreds of full time staff (they had 3).

Giving up control is scary. Giving up control means there will be a lower level of quality and professionalism. It means giving people room to make mistakes. In our western business mindset, control is good. If we want to produce a high quality product, we need strict quality control to make it happen. And we want quality. High quality is good. But ministry is not business. The Holy Spirit fills and works through weak people.

Strong quality control can lead to a big ministry, but it cannot produce a movement. Consider the mega church. If you’ve ever been to Willow Creek (or similar mega church), you know that everything is done at a high level of quality and competence. The weekend service is a production, and a very good one at that. It is polished. But it isn’t reproducible. At least not for most of us. There are a few people in this world who have the natural leadership talents and intelligence to take Bill Hybels’ model and implement it in a new city with success. Bill Hybels and Andy Stanley are what business writer Jim Collins would call a “Level 5 Leader”. Since there are very few leaders of that caliber, we will never win the world to Christ that way. Most people who visit Willow Creek will go home saying “If that is what an effective church is, I could never start a church”. High control means low reproducibility.

His own journey into experimenting with the catalytic approach to campus ministry resulted from his own disillusionment with the results of his ministry and his experience of burnout in having to make it all happen. These opened him up to exploring other options, which were at the time being encouraged by the leadership of Cru. In addition, he sort of discovered the effectiveness of the student led model by mistake when he gave his wife permission to develop an international student ministry on the side IF she only gave it 4 hours of her time each week. That necessitated giving control and responsibility for that ministry to the students, and relegated her involvement to a training / equipping / support role. The result was a dynamic and growing ministry among the international students that far exceeded their expectations.

DeJonge details in the book how he applied the principles of CPM/DMM to campus ministry. He borrowed the concept of MAWL (Model, Assist, Watch, Leave) from Curtis Sergent and tells stories of how they applied this and the challenges they faced in doing so. It became clear to him that many of their discipleship or Bible study methods were not very reproducible. Church planter Peter Roenfeldt told him:

“When I started teaching church planting to people, I wrote manuals on the topic that became thicker and thicker over time. But the complexity became their downfall, and I realised that if what I want to impart is going to be transferable, it has to be simple. So simple that one could fit them on a bookmark. So now I limit myself to a bookmark and use the Bible for our manual.”

DeJonge took this to heart and applied the same thing to their campus ministry. Roenfeldt also challenged him to think wider and deeper than just evangelism and discipleship. What was the ultimate goal, and how would they get there? He says:

“In Cru we often speak of WIN- BUILD- SEND as a strategic progression for spiritual multiplication and the path to seeing every University student reached with the gospel. But for many years of my staff career, I saw SEND simply refer to the process of graduating students into the workforce as more mature believers. Catalytic methodology is in my mind a sharpening of that focus on SEND – recognising the need for students to be empowered and released not at the point of graduation, but during their University careers.”

How many churches are doing the same thing? So much energy is focused on Bible Studies and preaching and worship services and programs, but where is the reality of sending people out in ministry?

Another core principle of CPM/DMM is to invest time and discipleship energy into those who put the training into practice.   Some DMM practitioners call it “Obedience Based Discipleship”, and wait for the disciple to put what has been taught into practice before teaching the next thing. This principle is seen in the book as well, but possibly not to the extent utilized in most CPM / DMM contexts. The Cru catalytic approach that he was learning (or developing on the fly) was certainly a hybrid of historic Cru programs and practices and CPM/DMM philosophy, and this was one of those areas that they had to wrestle with. In my opinion, from what he described in the book it appeared that this area needed more work.

Along the way, DeJonge faced some significant challenges in the transition. These included questions such as:

  1. How do we staff pull back and get students to step up?
  2. When they did pull back, they made mistakes in how to communicate to the students the new approach
  3. They made mistakes in selecting, retaining, and training leaders. He shares lots of real life experience in this area.
  4. When they did pull back, they had to redefine what their job as full time ministry staff was. What would they do with all the additional time they now had on their hands?

In his 1927 classic The Spontaneous Expansion of The Church, Rolland Allen discussed at length how the fear of losing control hindered the spontaneous expansion of the church that Paul and the apostles experienced:

By spontaneous expansion I mean something which we cannot control. And if we cannot control it, we ought, as I think, to rejoice that we cannot control it. For if we cannot control it, it is because it is too great not because it is too small for us. The great things of God are beyond our control. Therein lies a vast hope. Spontaneous expansion could fill the continents with the knowledge of Christ: our control cannot reach as far as that. We constantly bewail our limitations: open doors unentered; doors closed to us as foreign missionaries; fields white to the harvest which we cannot reap. Spontaneous expansion could enter open doors, force closed ones, and reap those white fields. Our control cannot: it can only appeal pitifully for more men to maintain control. There is always something terrifying in the feeling that we are letting loose a force which we cannot control; and when we think of spontaneous expansion in this way, instinctively we begin to be afraid. Whether we consider our doctrine, or our civilization, or our morals, or our organization, in relation to a spontaneous expansion of the Church, we are seized with terror, terror lest spontaneous expansion should lead to disorder. We are quite ready to talk of self-supporting, self-extending and self-governing Churches in the abstract as ideals; but the moment that we think of ourselves as establishing self-supporting, self-governing Churches in the Biblical sense we are met by this fear, a terrible, deadly fear.

Pastors, missionaries, and Christian workers of all varieties will have to choose between control and greater fruitfulness.

This is not a long book, but anyone interested in DMM/CPM practice will enjoy reading about AJ DeJonge’s journey into Catalytic Student Led Movements. The book appears to be written primarily for Cru staff, but anyone in ministry from pastors to missionaries in any context can learn from this book. It is an illustration of how the principles of CPM / DMM being rediscovered in our generation (previously well known to Roland Allen and John Nevius) can be applied in other ministry contexts.

DMM vs. T4T

Two approaches to Church Planting movements have emerged.  When I was just beginning to learn about CPMs, I learned about both and since the whole CPM paradigm in general was a new way of thinking, it took me some time to really sort out the difference between the two different approaches to Church Planting Movements.  The first is DMM (Disciple Making Movements) pioneered by David Watson in India and now being used extensively around the world by several organizations, especially CityTeam.  The book Miraculous Movements by Jerry Trousdale is an excellent introduction to this approach, as well as Contagious Disciple Making by David and Paul Watson.  The second is T4T (Training For Trainers) pioneered by Ying Kai in China and explained in the book T4T: A Discipleship Re-revolution by Ying Kai and Steve Smith. Both have been extremely effective and have much in common, but also have some significant differences. This little video is an excellent explanation of the two approaches.

For those interested in a more in depth analysis, Ted Esler’s article Coming to Terms With Two Church Planting Paradigms is also a good analysis.

Discipleship in 3 Simple Steps (Part 3)

Yesterday I promised that I would explore further the issue of questions and their power.  As I was investigating this some time ago, I somehow ran into the discipline of Coaching.  I confess that I had heard the terms Life Coach or Executive Coach, but I didn’t really know what it meant.  I assumed it meant a mentor, but as I was reading on the issue I discovered that is not at all what a coach is.  Coaching is a fairly new discipline that has some similarities to counseling, but is focused not on problems, but on healthy people who want to move forward.  Sometimes healthy people just get stuck, and don’t know how to move forward toward greater productivity or effectiveness.  This is what coaches specialize in, and there is a growing number of Christian coaches who apply this discipline to the Christian life and ministry.  Tony Stolzfus is one of the best in that category, and I’ll be quoting extensively from one of his books in this article.  When I read his book Leadership Coaching: The Disciplines, Skills, and Heart of a Christian Coach, at many points I felt like I was reading a textbook on discipleship.  He used the language of Coach / Client because he does this for a living and charges a fee much as a counselor does, but what he is really doing is discipleship.

The secular coaching community often has a very “new age” feel to it, with the presupposition that you have everything within you to be a success, you just need to draw it out.  And the way the coach draws it out is through asking questions.  Christian coaches recognized the kernel of truth in that and endeavored to separate the kernel from the husk.  Christian coaches start with the presupposition that as a believer, you have the Holy Spirit living in you, and He is there to speak to you, and lead you and guide you into a life of greater holiness and spiritual effectiveness.  He is always speaking, but we are often not listening.  The Christian life or ministry coach asks you questions to help you discover what the Holy Spirit is saying to you, and then asks you to decide what you will do about it (does that sound familiar?).  At the center of this is this basic truth:

Change is more a function of motivation than information.

That is a paradigm shift.  Our Christian Discipleship programs have historically been heavy on education, with a curriculum or using a book to study together.  Christian education is an obvious necessity, but the problem I see in the American Church (I currently live in a foreign country but attend an American Church) is that we have far more information than obedience.  What we need is life change, not more theological knowledge.  Our American Church system has pretended that if we just preach good expository sermons and teach solid doctrine, it will lead to spiritual maturity.  But that is clearly not true.  Some may indeed assimilate that information into life changing action, but many (most?) do not.  So the question for discipleship is how to bring about life change in accordance with Biblical truth.  The discipline of Coaching has something to teach us about discipleship.

A mentor gives advice, but the person receiving the advice may not be motivated to do what they mentor is telling them.  They may even know the mentor is right, but if they are not motivated to make the change, it won’t happen.   Tony says,

Most of the time we have a pretty clear idea of what God is asking of us.  God initiates change in our lives — He has a personalized change agenda for us and is always speaking and arranging circumstances to bring it to our attention…. when we believe the most important factor in change is motivation, we ask questions and encourage people to come up with their own solutions, because we know that buy-in and motivation are highest for steps that we develop and choose on our own…. Coaching prioritizes buy-in and motivation over giving people the right solution.”

And as for you, the anointing which you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you; but as his anointing teaches you about all things…. abide in him.”  I John 2:27

The gulf between God’s holiness and yours is larger than the universe.  If we saw a true picture of God’s holiness alongside our own depravity, it would literally kill us (See Exodus 33:18-23).  Yet of all our infinite number of shortcomings, how many is God explicitly prompting you to work on right now?  My experience is that I can count that number on the fingers of one hand.  Of all that God sees in me that needs to change, He only chooses to reveal a few things at once.  Applied to coaching, I call this the See/Say principle: Just because I see something doesn’t mean I’m supposed to say it.  Seeing a problem in a client’s life doesn’t make me responsible to address it.  At any moment, God sees many things wrong, but asks for change on only a few.  Therefore, I need to figure out what things God is speaking to the client about and limit my agenda to match His.”

People are most motivated to act on their own plans and ideas.  Therefore, if you want to maximize growth, you’ll allow people to set their own agenda, because that’s where the motivation is the highest.  Letting the client lead is also an expression of faith in God’s work in the person’s life.  God initiates change.  That means God was at work in this person’s life before a coach ever came on the scene, and He is actively leveraging every circumstance in the person’s life to bring him or her to maturity…. When you believe that God is already at work in a person’s life, it follows that the one who has the best handle on God’s change agenda is that person.  Therefore, the most dependable way to get in line with what God is doing is to let the client set the agenda.”

The purpose in a man’s mind is like deep waters, but a man of understanding will draw it out.”  Proverbs 20:5

People only do what they want to do anyway.  Push people where they don’t want to be pushed and you’ll only get resistance.  So it doesn’t matter at all what you see, or what great insights you have – the only thing that matters is what the client sees…..Once the client sets the agenda, the coach takes responsibility to focus the conversation and push it toward action.  The coach’s job is to help you think more clearly, to push you to go deeper and reach higher, to provide the structure you need to stay focused on the agenda you’ve chosen.

I need to pause here and emphasize that in discipleship there is a place for education and confronting the person with the truth.  There are certainly times when they need more information and they need the discipler to point out a scripture passage that applies to their life.  But if the individual has agreed to be in a discipleship relationship in the first place, it is fair to say that they are desiring to do what God wants them to do.  The discipler has the role of coming along side of them and helping them take the necessary steps, but should not become the authority in their lives.  The authority must remain with the scripture and the Holy Spirit.  The amount of time or attention given to education versus asking questions and letting them set the agenda will likely be proportional to the amount of Biblical knowledge this individual has.  A new believer will need more teaching, and a Bible College graduate will need more coaching type of questions.

Tony’s book then goes on to detail how this is done, what kind of questions to ask, how to recognize areas that need to be probed deeper, and how to help the client set appropriate goals that will move him or her toward the ultimate goal of Christ likeness.  It is not a book about discipleship per se, but has much that applies to the discipleship relationship.  I highly recommend it.

Now for a quick quiz. How many questions did Jesus ask as reported in the gospels (excluding those in the parables)?   See the answer to this question HERE.

Discipleship in 3 simple steps (Part 2)

Yesterday I started discussing three simple questions for effective discipleship, and got through the first two.  If you haven’t read that post yet, either scroll down to do so or access it here.  I won’t waste your time reviewing what was said there.

After my exposure to Mike Breen’s approach I came across a book on discipleship by Ralph Moore titled Making Disciples: Developing Lifelong Followers of Jesus.  Ralph started a church in Hermosa Beach California that grew into a mega church.  He always had a strong emphasis on personal discipleship through small groups and the system he uses was developed there.  He left Hermosa Beach to move to Hawaii and start a second church in a park that grew into another mega church.  But the important thing is that both of those churches gave birth to many daughter churches that gave birth to other daughter churches.  Here is how Ralph tells it:

Now, many miles down the road, I’ve still only personally started one youth group, planted two churches and had a direct hand in multiplying just over 70 church plants from the congregations that I pastored.  Somewhere along the way, the multiplication process got out of control.  Those few churches have become a movement that keeps generating new congregations.  To date we can identify more than 700 church plants.

The interesting thing about this movement is that Ralph does not go to Bible Colleges and seminaries to find pastors and church planters to do this.  Every one of those pastors and church planters has come out of the churches started by the movement, most of them getting saved and baptized and discipled in his church and starting a new church without formal Bible education.  Hmmm…. that kind of sounds like the book of Acts.  What kind of a discipleship program produces that?

He describes their Small group system in the book, and the description is so simple it only takes up only one page of the book.  Each small group (they call them mini-church) does this every week:

  1. Eats a meal together.
  2. Then each person speaks a word or two (yes, 1 or 2 words) that characterizes the previous Sunday sermon.
  3. Then they go around the circle and each person answers this question, “What did the Holy Spirit say to you while the pastor was talking?”
  4. Then they discuss what they will DO because of what the Holy Spirit said.
  5. Then they close by dividing up into 2’s and 3’s and praying for each other.  But they do NOT take prayer requests.  Instead they restrict the prayer time to praying for help to do what they felt the Holy Spirit was telling them to do.  Along with the prayer comes the promise, “If I pray aloud for you in this meeting I am committing to pray for you for the next 7 days.”
  6. The following week, while they are sharing food, they find themselves asking, “What happened to you since we prayed for you?

After describing this system, Ralph makes this statement:

“This simple process is at the center of all our organized disciplemaking efforts.  It has birthed more than 700 congregations in four decades.” 

By now you have noticed that this process includes the first two questions that are at the heart of Mike Breen’s especially effective discipleship process in Britain, but Ralph adds one more that is asked the following week.  So here are the three simple steps (questions) that highly effective discipleship revolves around:

  • What is the Holy Spirit saying to you?
  • What are you going to do about it?
  • The next time you meet you start with the question, “You said you were going to do x.  How did it go?”  (or What has happened since we prayed for you?”)


I see a lot of similarity between Mike Breen’s and Ralph Moore’s approach.  They were developed on different continents without any knowledge of what the other was doing.  But in both cases, they have resulted in exponential growth of churches and movements.  And an impressive part of that is that in both movements, all of the leadership is developed from within, with common lay people getting saved, growing up in their faith, and going on to preach the gospel and make disciples resulting in new churches being planted.

Tomorrow in part 3 I’m going to explore the whole issue of questions, why they are so powerful, and why these questions in particular are so popular.

Discipleship in 3 simple steps (Part 1)

Does that promise sound too good to be true?  I am not interested in oversimplification or catchy sound-bite titles, but I’ve gradually come to believe that discipleship is simpler than most of us make it.  It requires no curriculum other than the Bible and a disciple maker armed with 3 simple questions.

 
A couple years ago I was reading everything I could get my hands on by Neil Cole.  I continue to highly recommend his books.  He wrote Search & Rescue: Becoming a Disciple Who Makes a Difference on a discipleship idea he developed called Life Transformation Groups or LTG’s.  An LTG is 2 or 3 people that meet together and do three things:

  1. They read 30 chapters of scripture together each week.  If one of them fails to read all 30 chapters, the group reads the same 30 chapters the next week and each week until everyone completes the 30 chapters in that week.  Repetition is good.
  2. They each pray daily for the salvation of 5 people they know by name who do not know Christ.
  3. They ask each other a list of accountability questions.  Neil has a list of those questions in his books, but different users of LTG’s have added here and subtracted there and come up with different lists, which Neil has no problem with.  Neil emphasizes that the purpose of the questions is not accountability as much as an opportunity to confess sin.

 I like the system all except for the 3rd part, the accountability questions.  The concept of an accountability partner of the same sex has been around a long time in Christian circles.  Some believers report that they have benefited greatly from the practice, but others complain that it doesn’t work for them.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with it.  Why?

  •  Unless the person really wants to be accountable, it doesn’t work.  People will lie about hidden behavior if they aren’t motivated to change in that area.
  • No matter what list of questions you come up with, it may not be the right questions for a particular person.  There is always a question about viewing pornography on the guy’s list, but some guy’s real temptation may be anger or cheating on his expense form.  No prepared list of questions will nail each person exactly where they are on their spiritual journey.
  • It smacks of legalism.  I’m not saying it is legalism, because encouraging victory over sin is not legalism.  But legalism is whenever we take outward actions in response to spiritual truth and apply the same outward behavior to all believers regardless of what they feel God wants them to do with that truth.  In other words, the focus of these questions is more on the outward behavior than the disposition of the heart.

 
Some time later I was studying Mike Breen’s approach to discipleship in Building a Discipling Culture.  Mike grew an old dead Anglican Church in a worldly and secular town in Great Britain into a dynamic church exploding with growth through his discipleship methods.  I had to know what he was doing, because whatever he was doing it was working amazingly well in a place that is famous for dying churches.  Not only did it work while Mike was there, but it continues to grow at an exponential rate under younger leadership that Mike discipled prior to moving to America over ten years ago.  But honestly, as I studied it I couldn’t understand it.  Mike has this tool called “Life Shapes” which is a series of simple shapes that represent certain areas of life we need to give attention to in order to grow.  But it didn’t make sense to me.  The shapes were supposed to make it simple and memorable, but they only seemed to confuse me.  But I knew he was on to something because what he did worked, and it continues to work long after he left that church to move to another continent.  Then I heard one of his disciples teaching on the subject of the “huddle”, which is the term they use for a small group discipleship method for developing future leaders.  This guy said, “All discipleship comes down to two simple questions.”  My ears perked up.  This sounded simple.  Maybe I would finally get the heart of this thing.  He went on to explain that the two questions that all of discipleship hinges on are:

a) “What is the Holy Spirit saying to you?” and

b) “What are you going to do about it?

Suddenly a light went on for me.  I have seen how the spirit of God works in my life by zeroing in on different things at different seasons of life.  A prepared list of accountability questions may not hit the areas the Holy Spirit is trying to work on in my life.  And if you ask the average Christian that first question, many if not most of them would not know how to answer.  But in the huddle they ask this question weekly, and the huddle members learn to look at the circumstances of their lives and the scriptures they are digesting and begin to expect the Holy Spirit’s voice, and begin to recognize more and more how he is speaking to their particular sins and life issues.   Eventually they have no trouble identifying at any given time what the Holy Spirit is saying to them.  The second question takes it from the realm of theory and moves it to where the rubber meets the road.  The answer to the second question should be an action step that is specific and measurable.  If the answer to question #1 is, “The Lord has been convicting me of my meager prayer life”, then the answer to question #2 is not “I need to pray more”.  The answer to question #2 might be “I need to set the alarm x minutes earlier to allow more time for prayer every morning” or something equally measurable and specific.  But the key here is that each person sets their own action step based on what is realistic to them and what they believe the real answer is.

I realize that some people are going to be uncomfortable with the subjectivity of asking “What is the Holy Spirit saying to you?”  Some of us (myself included) come from such a strict cessationist background that if we can’t cite a verse of scripture for something then it can’t be God speaking.  But if the Holy Spirit indwells our very bodies, then what is he there for?  Yes, everything has to be evaluated in the light of God’s Word.  The Holy Spirit uses the Word, so the voice of the Holy Spirit may be heard in a sermon, or He may be heard as we dig into God’s Word in our daily time with the Lord.  But He may also be heard through the circumstances of daily life.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks through your spouse.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks through the death of a friend or loved one or some kind of major emotional event in your life.  Recently the Holy Spirit spoke to me quite clearly when I became aware of an area of my life where I had been less than honest.  I was deeply convicted of my sin and had to take some specific action steps that were very costly to me.  That didn’t happen as a result of reading my Bible or hearing a sermon (although my knowledge of Biblical teaching on the subject certainly played a part).  It happened because of a life circumstance that brought something to light in a way I couldn’t ignore.  I have no doubt I was hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit.  If you still find yourself uncomfortable with this concept, consider the fact that this takes place in a small group where input from other members can bring balance and a scriptural perspective that others may need.

OK, so now you know two of the steps (questions) in this successful discipleship system.  What is the third?  Sorry, I’m out of time today.  I promise an extended discussion of the third step and the rational behind it tomorrow in part 2.