Clapham Community

Is the focus of your church its programs or its people?

If you were to visit 100 conservative, evangelical churches and ask their pastors about the importance of making disciples, I dare say all 100 would say it is vital. If you then asked those same 100 pastors to describe the methods they use to accomplish this task the vast majority of them will describe to you some combination of Preaching, Sunday School, and Bible study. All of these methods are good in their own right but do not themselves constitute discipleship; at least not the kind taught in the New Testament.

The discipleship that Jesus practiced, that He passed on to His disciples, and that they in turn practiced and passed on to others was not based on programs such as Sunday Worship, Sunday School, or Bible study. Discipleship that is modeled for us in the Gospels and throughout Paul’s epistles was infinitely more personal. It was Jesus choosing His twelve, and knowing His three intimately. It was Paul training Timothy and then challenging him to train other faithful men. This is hard work that is time-consuming, sometimes frustrating, and always requires vulnerability. It is also what Jesus meant when He said in Matthew 28 to go and “make disciples”.

So why do many churches focus on strategies to keep people busy rather than diagnose their members and match them with other members who can train them up to make them trainers of others? Apart from the already stated fact that it is hard work, it is also hard to quantify and sometimes requires churches to do addition by subtraction. Nobody wants to lose members but that is certainly what will happen when the vast majority of consumers that grace your pews are forced from larger, uncommitted groups to smaller more intimate settings that require honesty, vulnerability, and humility.

There is also the factor of power and entrenchment. The longer a pastor or pastors have invested in the philosophy that drives the system of programs they practice, the more they stand to loose by changing things. Especially if that change is from a program focus to a people focus. What pastor really wants to employ a system of discipleship that naturally leads some of his best and brightest to leave every few years to start new churches? No matter how committed to the gospel a pastor is such missional defections are hard to take.

I have struggled for a long time wondering why I see this and believe it but men of far greater spiritual stature than I don’t. The answer lies in the fact that I don’t have as much invested in systems as they do. Were I in their shoes I would see things the way they do. Its easy to be a “radical” when you are outside the circle. And yet I am bound to believe that there are some pastors who sit in their studies when no one is there and ponder this very thing. My prayer is that they will have the courage not to let numbers, tradition, or the desire for ministry comfort keep them from placing all areas of their ministry on the table for examination. Anything that stands in the way of discipleship has to be looked at with a questioning eye. Even if it means trading adult Sunday school for covenant community groups where members have to sit across a coffee table from one another and confess their sins to one another. Its not unheard of, its been done before (Acts 2, James 5:16).

It all begins with one simple question: people or programs?

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