Most churches “do discipleship” as if they are constructing a 2000-piece puzzle with no picture on the box, which can be a frustrating and futile endeavor. In this month’s forum, Dr. Chris Shirley and Dr. Jim Thomas discuss the importance of a having an intentional disciple-making strategy that includes the most importance piece: the gospel.
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Chris Shirley 0:01
Well, good morning. My name is Chris Shirley. I’m the Dean of the School of Educational Ministries at Southwestern. I’m also a professor of educational ministries as well teaching in the area of discipleship and family ministry and Bible teaching. And with me today, I had Dr Jim Thomas, who is a friend, yes, as well as a colleague, because Dr Thomas is now teaching for us, adjunctly, in the leadership area, in the Terry school. But I’d like for Dr Thomas to tell you a little bit more about his background.
Jim Thomas 0:36
Welcome everybody. Good to see you today. I am an adjunct professor here at Southwestern teaching the area ofChristian leadership. My day job, though, I’m the senior pastor at Northside Baptist Church in Weatherford, Texas, about 30 minutes west of Fort Worth, and have been there for a little over a year now, served as senior pastor in a Baptist church just outside of Atlanta, Georgia for the last 11 and a half years, and then God had other plans and moved me back to the promised land and have been pastoring here for the last year.
Chris Shirley 1:07
Dr Thomas and I connected with one another for the first time through the Bonhoeffer Project. We were both associated with the Bonhoeffer Project for a number of years. He more so than I, but I was a trainer in the Bonhoeffer Project. What’s your official title with the project?
Jim Thomas 1:24
Well, I had a couple of them. I was on the national leadership team. I started out as a cohort leader. We had cohorts of pastors come together, and we walked them through a process of understanding a biblical disciple making model. And so I started off as a cohort leader, and then was asked to join the National Leadership Team. So I served as the trainer for the cohort leaders for a while, and then we established our own publication imprint. And so I became director of Bonhoeffer Press for about two or three years. And so served with Bonhoeffer–for not Dietrich, but the Bonhoeffer Project—looking good if I served with Dietrich right now! But I served for about 10 years with them, yeah.
Chris Shirley 2:04
And at the national conference that he and I attended, we met each other, got to know each other, spent several hours talking to each othe about discipleship, and so we share this common passion with with one another, and that’s how we know each other.
Jim Thomas 2:21
I think we went out for fried chicken we did, and that bonded for life. […]
Chris Shirley 2:25
And so when I needed somebody here at Southwestern that’s teaching in the area of Christian leadership, I went to a friend, and I’m thankful that he’s a part of southwestern right now, but he’s also a Southwestern alumnus, as well. Yeah, when did you graduate?
Jim Thomas 2:39
Yeah, I graduated in ’94 . So, ’91 to ’94 I was here. Got my master’s degree back then, it was the MARE, Masters of Arts in Religious Rducation, the MACE now, but that’s what I got then. So yeah, undergrad at Baylor, then PhD at DBU.
Chris Shirley 2:55
Yeah, the commonalities just keep flowing. I graduated in ’94, as well.
Jim Thomas 3:01
And if you graduate ’94 you will lose all your hair.
Chris Shirley 3:06
And if the glare gets a little bit too much for you, just kind of look away, avert your eyes. […]
Chris Shirley 3:17
Let’s talk about disciples. So both of us have experience in churches. You know, you as a pastor, you as executive pastor, youth ministry, etc. I’ve been associate pastor for a number of years. I was in family ministry as well as youth ministry, and in my last assignment, I was in charge of Christian development or discipleship in our church. And so both of us have come to a point in our ministry where we recognize that discipleship, disciple making, was a missing piece of the puzzle in churches. Talk a little bit about that, and when you recognized that.
Jim Thomas 3:55
I think it started early in my ministry. It was around ’94-’95 when I graduated from Southwestern, I went to my first full time church in Northwest Arkansas, and I was a youth pastor at the time, and I had spent my four years at Baylor and then my three years here at Southwestern, and had entered into disciple making relationships with a group of young men my age, and these were guys who had been discipled previously and grabbed a hold of me and taught me character formation, taught me spiritual practices, taught me how to share my faith, taught me how to walk with Jesus and abide in Him every day, which I didn’t get because I came to Christ when I was 16, and I grown up in the church, but no one had ever really mentioned discipleship unless it had the word “training” behind it […] For an hour, for an hour on Sunday afternoon, and a corn dog was usually involved somehow, and it was near youth choir that was all kind of sandwiched together, right? But this idea of living for Jesus every day in everything I do and say was a totally foreign concept to me until these guys got a hold of me. And so I think what you said. The hole in the research there, the hole in the problem came when I got to that first church and I realized, hold on, this isn’t happening here. And as I talk to others now, as a professional minister […] I started to see the holes in most churches around me, that disciple making was really not something that we were doing. And so as a youth pastor at the time, I started to integrate some of those ideas within the life of my youth, youth ministry. But again, didn’t see it happening church-wide. And as I you know now, 30 years into ministry, continue to see that as a whole within the life of the church.
Chris Shirley 5:36
I was kind of the same way. I had the same journey […] unlike you, I was not invested in early on […] I grew up […] through the Holy Spirit and Jesus itself […] and into what I was able to understand of my faith, right? But I was nurtured in the church. And what I did gain about living the Christian life came through my relationships in the church. People there, the way they poured into me, you know, personally, maybe not in a formal way, but in an informal way, right? Based on the roles that they had, I began to discover that, you know, this is something that we we need to capture in the church that we don’t currently have. We’re not recognizing the potential and the energy we have here to disciple, and then recognizing what Jesus says in the Great Commission about making disciples, he’s telling that to the people who were the nucleus of the church. The leaders of the church, as they started their work for Him after His ascension, that was to be priority number one, yeah. And yet, today, in today’s culture, it’s not priority number one. It hasn’t been, that’s right? And so we come to the word discipleship, and it’s a word– We have to define this word first before we can move on to the word “culture,” right? And yet that word “discipleship” has a variety of different meanings to people. Why is it so hard to define discipleship?
Jim Thomas 7:10
I think because we’ve co-opted the word. I think language is so important in the life of the church. In fact, one of the things we ended up doing at the church I served in Georgia was actually add a glossary at the end of our disciple making plan, so that people understood this is our common language now. And I think people come into churches from obviously, from all different backgrounds, whether they didn’t know Christ, or they’re coming from another church, or they’re coming from another denomination. So there’s a lot of theological reformulation in our church that we have to do with people that come from non-Baptist churches, and so they all come with their assumptions and their definitions as well. And I think when we start talking about discipleship, people can think of several different things. This is all about information, that it’s just education. I just am being informed of what it means to know about Jesus. Some come with the ideas of a “disciple” being for some type of “higher class” of Christian, that it’s not really something that we’re all called to, but it’s something that maybe is [for] the the professional Christians, like Christian Jim, you know, they’re called to be disciples, but I can just come to church. So there’s a lot of misunderstanding of what that is. And I think to help get us back on solid ground, we have to go back to Scripture and therefore to define what a disciple is as a local body. We’ve got to start with what Jesus said a disciple was, and he defines that all the way throughout. We see it several times in the Gospels. Obviously his main mandate to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me, becomes what he says, If you want to be my disciple, this is what this looks like, right? And so then to go deeper into each of those three concepts, to help us to come up with the definition of what a disciple is. So I think it’s not been defined. I think that’s one of the main problems in the life of the church, is that we, just as leaders, have not defined what a disciple is and [have] allowed people just to operate on whatever they think that that might be.
Chris Shirley 9:03
And of course, the word itself, “discipleship,” is not in Scripture. And so we have to understand the context of what a disciple is and then realize that the the word, or the the letters “s-h–i-p,” following a word have to do with “being in the state of something,” and being formed by something.
Jim Thomas 9:29
[…] .Yes, “stewardship is what stewards do.” […]
Chris Shirley 9:41
And discipleship is what disciples do, right? And discipleship, then is the journey.
Jim Thomas 9:49
Yeah, until we define what a disciple is, it’s hard to say what a disciple does. And so I think both of those go hand in hand and become a catalyst and a foundation for actually everything in the life of the church.
Chris Shirley 10:05
My definition […] of discipleship is, “My journey with Jesus and with those he loves.”
Jim Thomas 10:13
I think “To live and love like Jesus” has become a very simple definition for me, that this is how we live and love like Jesus. […] The phrase we use in our church is, how do you walk the Jesus way? So Dallas Willard’s famous statement that he takes the word disciple and transforms it into this idea of being an apprentice to Jesus. And so the idea of actually doing what Jesus did and does as he is living his life through us, through the power of his Spirit, becomes that living and loving like Jesus for me. […] That is done individually, but also, I think[…] one of the big missing pieces, is that is done corporately, then we see the church have massive impact in the culture around them, because we are living the the Jesus way, as His people, not just as his person.
Chris Shirley 11:04
And that’s why I tacked on the end of my definition, “And with those he loves.” Because we’re not on it, not just Jesus and me through life, it’s Jesus and us. And so it’s learning how to live in the kingdom of God, taking that journey with him, and with those he loves, meaning that we’re part of the community, part of the church, and so the the role of the church itself is so important in the disciple making process, and building a culture for making disciples is important as well. I know that there’s some front work that has to be done before we slap a disciple making process down on our church, right? And so let’s talk about that for just a minute. What is a disciple making culture?
Jim Thomas 11:48
Yeah, everybody wants to run to the what and the how, right? What is disciple making and how do we do it? But they never address the why. Why are we going to do the what and the how? And I think those three things have to go together. But if you don’t start with the why, it kind of becomes behavior modification. If we’re not careful, if we give people the what and the how, but we don’t tell them why we’re asking them to do what we’re asking them to do, it just becomes dead orthodoxy. It becomes this idea of just “doing church.” And so the why of disciple making comes back to the five commission texts that Jesus gives us, and the whole of Jesus’ teaching within the life of the Gospels. And we see the fifth text being in Acts 1:8. And I would say that whole first part of chapter one, 1-11. But the idea of a disciple making culture has to start with the gospel. It has to start with what. What are we in? This is a big question that I’ve asked the pastors. What are we inviting people to? Are we inviting them simply to a decision to go to heaven, which is kind of a Traditional Plan of Salvation thing from 20th-century evangelism, right? That the end point is for saving souls, which I believe Jesus saves all of me, not just my soul, but the idea that we’re not just inviting people to the starting line of faith, we’re actually inviting them to follow Jesus, making disciples.
Chris Shirley 13:04
Just getting people into the water, but it’s about giving them a hand out of the water and taking them on a journey.
Jim Thomas 13:09
Yeah, about it’s about new creation. It’s about everything being renewed. It’s about a new life. You know, I actually had a conversation with a guy. I mentioned John 17:3 and Jesus’ definition of eternal life is knowing the father and knowing him. And I said, you realize that eternal life doesn’t start when you die physically. Eternal life starts when you come to know Jesus. You’re in life now. You’re no longer dead, you’re alive. And he had never heard of that before. He had come to the starting line of faith, pitched a tent, put out his barbecue, and was going to live there until he died or Jesus returned. And I said, Oh, but you remember what Jesus said about abundant life, that comes as we abide and live in him, right? And so disciple making is not some add-on to our salvation. It’s what we’re saved into. And so I think we have to start with the gospel, and so as a pastor, it challenged my invitation. At the end of a service, after I preach, or after the service is concluding in a worship context, what am I inviting people to? Am I inviting them to a decision, or am I inviting them into a whole new life of following Jesus? So I think a disciple making culture has to start with the gospel that we proclaim.
Chris Shirley 14:23
Exactly. Because people need to understand that they’re not not just being saved from something. They’re being saved to something and to someone.
Jim Thomas 14:32
And that changes how they live. There’s a biblical ethic on the other side of that salvation decision that says, I now live differently, not to try to earn God’s favor, but because I have God’s favor. And again, I love what Dallas Willard says. He says the gospel is not opposed to effort. It’s opposed to earning, right? And so there’s effort in the Christian life. There’s a responsibility we have […] “make every effort.” […] And so […] our invitation is so critical to setting up a disciple-making culture in the life of the church, because, again, what we’re inviting people to is to be a disciple. That will determine the culture that we make.
Chris Shirley 15:10
I would imagine the ordinances […] as we’re baptizing […] we’re taking communion, the Lord’s Supper. How are we using the ordinances to teach people about the gospel, and about discipleship?
Jim Thomas 15:28
Yeah, I’ve added a word. I don’t know if it’s a real word or not, but [I’m] just creating a new lexicon. […] This is an effort in “gospeling.’ What we’re doing here as we baptize, we’ll do that this Sunday at our church, when we take the Lord’s Supper, we are gospeling. We are making a proclamation to the world that my life has been changed, and now my life is different, and therefore I’m going to live differently as a result. […] This is a quick baptism story. Just about two months ago, we had young college student from Weatherford College who grew up in a very rough background. And he’s African-American young man. I say that because he had incredible dreadlocks, and so when he came out of the water, it was very dynamic, right? And just sweet, sweet kid. And I’ve never heard this response. And this is how our college pastor put it. This is how we’re kind of doing our baptisms. Have you repented of your sins, believed in Jesus, and do you commit your life to follow after him the rest of your days? And the kid just looked at the audience, he goes, “Absolutely!” I love it. And it was just one of the best, I mean, and the whole college group just exploded in applause, right? And then the dreads went in and water went everywhere. And it was amazing. It was amazing. But the ordinances then become that opportunity to say, this is more than just about the decision they’ve made. This is about their new life in Christ.
Chris Shirley 16:48
And the cost of it, because I was part of a baptism service one time at our church, where our Farsi church was baptizing and the candidates would have to. at the end of their recitations, would have to agree with the statement from the pastor that they were willing to give their life, even to the point of death, which some might have to do. They might as Muslims. They might. So establishing a culture is based on an understanding, a true understanding of the gospel. What the gospel is, it’s about the words we use and the things we say to one another, and how we define those words. So we’re speaking the same language with each other. I want to do a shameless plug right now. You wrote a book about that. So please tell us the name of that.
Jim Thomas 17:34
Yeah, it’s a quick read. A friend of mine out in California is a pastor out in San Diego, and I wrote this book. We were both in the Bonhoeffer Project, and it’s called The Language of Disciple Making. And basically what we’ve done is we’ve taken seven key terms […] starting with the why, moving to the what, and then to the how. That’s kind of the invisible model that we used and tried to spur pastors and leaders on to consider, what is the language you’re using, and where is it leading the people that you’re over and that you’ve been entrusted with. And so we take these seven words, starting with the gospel, “what is the gospel?”, and then work through those to help develop a lexicon for your local church that becomes normative language in how we decide and how we make disciples in that setting through our language. Because I think language change is one of the first catalysts to culture change. […] We saw this in the church I served in Georgia, we started using words and phrases that they had not used in that church before. And it was two to three years, and then some of our people started using that language back to us, and we went, oh, something’s changing. They’re getting the language, but more importantly, they’re getting the concept and the definition that’s being lived out through their lives now. And so I do think so, buy the book! Or don’t buy the book. [laughter]
Chris Shirley 19:03
You may or may not agree with me on this, but I would go to the next step, and I think that one of the next steps would be to examine everything you do in the church, okay? And how that relates back to right? Discipleships, right? Asking yourself the question, in worship, how are we making disciples? In our small group, how are we making disciples? In our mission teams, how are we making disciples? Looking at everything we do and relating it back to discipleship. And sometimes it’s making decisions about how we do those things, that pulls us back into a discipleship mode in those areas. Would you agree with that?
Jim Thomas 19:42
Yeah! The word I’ve been using with our team here in in Texas has been “holistic discipleship.” So going back to Jesus’ idea, and really the Old Testament idea in Deuteronomy, [and] a little bit [in] Leviticus. So, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength. So that’s holistic. It’s a holistic view of the individual. But we ought to look at disciple making, the life of the church, as holistic, as well. And getting back to the point you just made. […] I think that’s really important, that if we don’t have an end goal, which goes back to our language and our definitions, and we don’t know what we’re trying to make, then we’re just going to be–excuse the phrase–we’re spitting in the wind, right? We’re seeing what’s going to stick to the wall out there, instead of having an intentional plan to move them toward an intentional–Tim Keller calls it a “theological vision,” right? And so the idea that there’s an end point here, and the way I define a theological vision is something that’s worth chasing, but we know we won’t reach in this life.
Chris Shirley 20:34
Well, we tell people, you kno we’re leading you towards conforming to the image of Christ, toward looking more like Jesus, like you said. Well, what does Jesus look like? Helping people to understand that, explaining to them, putting the picture out in front of them, nailing it to the wall. Yeah, that, look at that.
Jim Thomas 20:52
Yeah, that’s where we’re going with. And then it gives you the freedom to evaluate programs, to evaluate strategies, events, partnerships, even to evaluate documents, to evaluate bylaws, constitution, employee handbooks, everything. Is it leading toward the goal of what Christ has called us to do as his local body? And I think it will expose some holes.
Chris Shirley 21:21
Pedagogically wonky here for just a second, because I work at a seminary. This is what’s called backwards design in pedagogy, where w–what’s the goal, right? Where do we want to be, and what do we want our students to do? Now we have to explain that to them up front, and then we work backwards. And now, how do we get there?
Jim Thomas 21:43
The largest church I ever served had about 9000 members. I was a high school pastor. I had about 400 kids. So it was my mega church experience, if you will. And […] there was no end goal. And in that church, a good friend was our young adult pastor there, and they had 40 Bible studies going on Wednesday night […] and I asked him one time, what’s the end? I mean, what’s the goal of these Bible studies? And it was basically to get to the end of the Bible study, and they would give you a certificate from Lifeway. And then you were a disciple. […] And I’m like, but what’s the end? What are we trying to produce? What are we trying to make? And we really couldn’t answer that question at the time, because there was no vision. There was no goal toward the end that we could build toward. We weren’t doing that backwards and saying, Okay, that’s what we want to try to produce. And that gets back to the definition of disciple. If you can’t define what a disciple is, you don’t know what you’re trying to produce.
Chris Shirley 22:40
And up to this time, we have not said word one about D groups yet, right? So […] we typically go and say, well, we got to get some D groups going here. I got to get some small groups going.Where does that fit into the model of creating the culture?
Jim Thomas 22:59
That’s in the downstream aspect of that. If you start with the why, move to the what, you start to see the formulation of strategy at that point. And then, actually, I think D groups, and curriculum, and some of those questions end up in the “how.” In many of the conferences you and I’ve spoken at, with pastors and leaders we’ve spoken to, we try to supplement that “how” as the primary thing, but until we set the foundation of what disciple making looks like in the local church, the what and the how, again, can be really janky, we can buy all the curriculum in the world, and then we get to the end of the curriculum, and then we go, what do we do now? We establish a D group, but we don’t establish them with a theology or ministry philosophy that moves toward multiplication or replication. And all of a sudden we built cul de sacs instead of on ramps, yeah?
Chris Shirley 23:49
And all these groups are kind of [like] floating islands They are there, yeah? And nobody understands who [is] in them. Don’t understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and what this has to do with [anything].
Jim Thomas 23:58
I had a pastor from South Mississippi call me one time. He went through the Bonhoeffer Project with me, and he basically said, Okay, I started, I got done, and I started 20-30 groups. And I was like, wow, that that’s amazing, and they love them, and they’re growing great. And he said, I can’t blow them up. None of them want to go disciple anybody else. And I said, Did you start with the premise that the goal is to multiply and make more disciples? He goes, No. And I went, well, there’s your issue. So now you’ve got to reverse engineer this thing that’s already in motion and give them the ultimate vision of what we’re trying to do through a small group system of helping people grow in those relationships.
Chris Shirley 24:39
Part of building that culture is helping people to understand that the point yeah is multiplication.
Jim Thomas 24:45
Yeah, it is, and not just for numbers’ sake, but for life transformation, right? That’s the goal. […] Why is multiplication the right word? I think multiplication is the right word because it’s what we were called to do. From the beginning. It was to go and make disciples. There’s movement involved in that, right? It’s not static. It’s active. The making of disciples is global, right? It’s not just a local church endeavor. In fact, our goal, our one of our new outcomes for our church here in Texas is that we we’re developing new vision statement, new core values, new new goals. And our outcome is that everything that we’re doing within the life of the corporate body will then be multiplied globally, through our partners as well around the world. And so I think movement and multiplication go together, because Jesus started a movement that multiplied, and that’s what he’s called us to do. And if we’re setting a culture in the church, then we’re not just looking at it microscopically. We’re not saying, Okay, well, discipleship is just connecting two people together, that’s right, and that person’s gonna get another person, yeah, that person’s gonna get another person. That person get another– that’s more addition, yeah? […] It’s looking at it in a multi-faceted way. Yeah. So maybe […] the connection of those two people is important to your plan, right? But it’s just one part. And I do think that one of those catalysts for multiplication is transformation. What makes you want to go and invest in someone else, because someone has invested in you, and that’s our story, right? Someone invested in us, and we knew that that was the vehicle that the Spirit used to help us to start to grow in our walk with Christ. I want to help someone else do that as well.
Chris Shirley 26:26
Ao you’re multiplying by using small groups, by using personal relationships, by equipping parents to to be disciple makers in their home, by being a a disciple making preacher.
Jim Thomas 26:41
And let me land there for just a second, because that’s one of my primary duties as a senior pastor. The question has come up in different settings, Can you disciple from the pulpit? And my immediate response is, absolutely you can, and you should know that preaching isn’t the end of discipleship. It ought to be the beginning of discipleship in the sense that that’s the setting where the whole church gathers, right? And you can start in smaller groups and start in smaller settings with the why, but why not start from the pulpit with the why and say, This is who we are as a church. This is who Jesus called us to be. And then work as a team, whether you’re the only one on staff, or whether you have many on staff or wherever that is, and start to build around a common vision that leads toward that common goal. But I do think the pulpit is a critical area for that to be a part of.
Chris Shirley 27:30
Yeah, what are some of the challenges that we face in building a disciple making culture in our church?
Jim Thomas 27:30
Yeah, I think there are several. I think one of them is just the misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, of what discipleship is. I think, whether we see discipleship just as a program– I had a guy come up to me. I told you earlier, before this webinar today, a guy came up to me said, Yeah, when’s that discipleship thing start? You know, he’s still program minded. I said, Well, were you here this morning? It was a Sunday evening. He was, yeah. I said, You’re in it! You know, this is holistic. It’s everything we’re doing, right? But does it start at five? I said, Well, if you’re going to something at five, yeah, it starts at five. But this is a bigger-picture idea. So I think misunderstanding, right, or a lack of understanding. I think past paradigms or programs. I’m not opposed at all to traditions. I am opposed to traditionalism, the idea that this is what we’ve always done. “We can’t ever do anything else,” I think, is a static mindset in ministry. I love traditions, right? We’re doing a lot of that around Christmas time right now. I love the tradition because […] it helps to find who we are. But if we’re not willing to change, which always comes at a cost, then we’ll never move forward. And that’s corporately and individually, right? And so I think […] that traditionalism can be a barrier. I think spiritual immaturity, both on the part of the people and on the part of the leadership of the church, could be a barrier. And one that came up several years ago that I didn’t see is– how can I put this gently? Pastoral pride? If pastors don’t have a vision for disciple making, and then they see this is the missing hole, like we started with, right? Do I change everything? Are they going to still trust me? I’ve put my reputation into the life of this church, or into the life of this youth ministry, or to wherever you’re happy to be serving. And now we’re going to say we’re going to change things? That’s an issue of pride in a leader’s life. And if we’re not willing to humble ourselves and embrace what Christ is calling us to and what he originally called us to, then we’re just going to continue to see that cycle of dead orthodoxy being played out in the life of the church.
Jim Thomas 27:53
Yeah, the more you establish a disciple making culture in your church or in your ministry, it becomes less about you.
Jim Thomas 29:50
And it becomes more about them, and more about Jesus’ actual commission. And it goes back to something you and I have talked about. It’s a big question. We may not have time for it today. What is success in ministry? Is success in ministry what we used to call nickels and noses? Money in the bank and people in the seat? Or is it something more than that? Is it something bigger than that? Is it something that makes me as a leader actually expendable? Is success in ministry actually doing what Jesus asked us to do? And if it is, what do I need to do, then, to accomplish that? I really don’t believe when we show up before the throne of grace, he’s going to say, how many did you have in Easter services? I don’t think he’s going to ask us that, but I do think he’s going to say, Did you do what I asked you to do? And honestly, if it’s about just church growth, which I’m not opposed to, but I don’t think it’s the end, then we’re failing as a convention. Because the average number of attendees in the Southern Baptist Church is, what, 100 or less? Well, we’re not succeeding then. But if we’re making disciples…? So if we can go back to […] success being what Jesus actually said, then everything changes. But then we have to humble ourselves, right? And be a part of that.
Chris Shirley 31:15
Yes! I want to go to the Beka for just a minute to see if we have some questions from our participants today.
Beka Hodges 31:24
All right, so like Dr Shirley said, we’re going to transition to a time for you guys to ask questions. As you were listening, if you thought of a question related maybe to the area of ministry you serve in or discipleship in general, you can drop those in the chat and I will read them off to them. Or you can hit the Raise Your Hand button at the bottom of your screen and ask your question. If you hit the Raise Your Hand button, I would encourage you to turn your camera on while you ask your question. But while you guys are thinking, I don’t want to put you on the spot. So while you’re thinking, I had a question for Dr Shirley and Dr Thomas, to get us started. So we have a handful of people on this call that serve in a variety of ministries, or maybe even some people who are not currently serving in ministry, just attending church and are interested in discipleship and discipleship models in their church. So for those people, who are either serving in ministry or not, that feel like they want to start a discipleship conversation, whether with the leadership or with their church in general. What would you say is the first step to easing people into that, introducing that conversation for a church that maybe feels like they’re doing just fine in the discipleship area, but could use a little bit of tweaking or encouragement.
Jim Thomas 32:37
That’s a great question. So Beka, you’re talking about people on staff or just lay people, or both? Either? I think one of the hardest questions we’ve ever received is really from those who we would define [as] sitting in the second or third chair, right? So you’re not the senior leader in your church, but maybe you’re a children’s minister or youth pastor or senior adult pastor. Whoever you are. And we’ve had this question, my senior pastor doesn’t see this as the priority. Noo senior pastor would say, the Great Commission is not a priority, but he gets back to definitions at that point. It’s definitions at that point. But how do I, as a second or third chair person, help foster this? And I think it’s twofold. I think number one, respect your leadership, honor those who God’s placed over you, and understand, have honest conversations. If you’re able to have honest conversations with that person, be sensitive to their leadership role, their personality type, and still honor them. And then be obedient in the area of area of ministry where God has called you, to do what Jesus has called you to do. And so in the churches where I served, where my senior pastors had no understanding or vision for disciple making, I just started to make disciples among teenagers, and started to invest in their lives and raise up adults to be able to do that in my area of ministry. The thing is, we never got to the point where the whole church embraced that, but those students are now doing that 20-30 years later. And so we saw the multiplication effect not come out of that season of that church, but come out of the students that we invested in as leaders in that youth ministry. So I think, honor that leadership, serve under that leadership, and then invest in the area where you do have authority, and when you’ve been given authority by your senior leader and by the church itself.
Chris Shirley 34:26
And I say something similar to my students whenever they ask me that as well. And I tell them, Well, do what you can do right now. You have authority to do and bloom where you’re planted. I said, there’s nothing that brings success better than success, and so I trust pastors enough to know that when they see something happening successfully within certain ministry, they will recognize that. It’ll make a difference.
Jim Thomas 34:54
It will make a difference. And on the other side of that, let me go to the lay person side of that. too. Sometimes senior pastors don’t necessarily listen to every opinion their staff has, because the senior pastor has this vision for the church, right? But they will listen to lay people. And when a lay person gets a vision for disciple making, and they get an audience with that senior leader to be able to sit down and go, This is what God’s convicting me of what are we doing here, there is a different type of temperature in the room, because he’s now listening to one of the people he’s supposed to be leading, right? And so […] have those conversations. […]Sstart the conversation. I think that’s the key. Don’t try to get to the end at the beginning, but start the conversation and see what God does and allow the Spirit to move.
Chris Shirley 35:44
It’s the same way with the discipleship process. You know, sometimes we want to front load everything all at one time. Start slow.
Jim Thomas 35:56
Don’t announce the revolution. Just start. […] Yeah, and we did that at Northside a year ago, when I came. I just grabbed seven guys, put them in a D group (there’s the D group model!) and I just started walking with them, and all of a sudden my staff started to do the same. And six months in, this is nuts. This has never happened in 30 years of ministry. People started calling the church office, saying, Will someone disciple me? I had a Bible Study leader three weeks ago. Adult Bible Study leader walk up to me and say, I need to talk to you, which for a pastor that’s either gonna go good or bad right on a Sunday morning, right before you preach. It’s usually bad, by the way. But he pulls me aside. He’s looking at me, and this is a very erudite guy. He’s very intelligent and studies the Word of God, and he pulled me aside. He goes, I need someone to disciple me, because I have a lot of knowledge, but I’ve never been discipled. And so our discipleship pastor has decided to [connect] him now to watch this, to set things in motion and watch the Spirit move, and to be responsible over how we can help foster what he’s calling us to do, but then watch him do stuff and not get in his way.
Beka Hodges 37:11
We do have a handful of questions in the chat, and as a reminder, you can continue to drop those. We’ll roll through as many as we can with the time we have. So Lawrence asks, How do you measure discipleship growth?
Jim Thomas 37:22
Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, it’s very easy to measure, and we’ll call it spiritual growth. Okay, if Lawrence is talking about the growth of the individual over the growth of a strategy or a church or a program. For talking individually, then obviously, qualitatively, you can measure that [in] conversations, testimonies. In my personality type, I like to move on to the next thing. So to pause and to tell stories is a discipline for me. But I think telling stories individually and telling stories corporately is a qualitative way to be able to say, look what God’s doing. But I do think there are quantitative ways as well. And I think you start to look at what Jesus said a disciple should produce. He should produce fruit. She should produce fruit, right? So, what are the fruits of the Spirit? What’s the different type of fruit that should be produced over a period of time? Just taking Galatians 5, right? Do you see more joy in your life? Do you see more patience in your life? Are you progressing forward in a way that is measurable? […] I did a series on the fruit of the spirit this fall, and we did a front end and a back end measurement tool with our people to see what effect teaching on that, both in small groups and from the pulpit, had in the life of our people over a 12-week series. And so I think there are qualitative and quantitative ways to be able to measure that.
Chris Shirley 38:53
Well, I think too, that there are churches that in their small group, disciple-making groups, they have assessments with one another/ And so, that’s a good way to do it, where you and I are regularly meeting together to look what a disciple does, where our disciples should live. And we’re talking about it. We’re assessing it, we’re we’re quantifying it. And we’re also telling stories about it, as well.
Jim Thomas 39:23
And organizationally, I think you can measure growth. The way we put it at Northside is, how many people are involved in intentional multiplying, disciple making relationships? Okay, so, “intentional.” So we have to define what that means, multiplying, they’re not static. Then we’re not building cul de sacs. We’re building on ramps to disciple making relationships, and there comes our strategy, right? So how many people are involved? How many people are multiplying, and how many over a certain period of time, becomes a very quantitative way to be able to measure organizational growth in disciple making. How many people are we sending out? How many people are engaged in mission projects, locally, domestically or internationally, that weren’t before, who are involved in intentional multiplying, disciple making relationships?
Jim Thomas 39:24
So we’re seeing fruit being born out of their lives, organizationally, [and] that helps us as leaders. But individually in the disciple’s life, to help them to understand what’s happening to them. They need to regularly assess themselves. They do. They need to have opportunities to regularly assess themselves, [to] talk to people about it and to be accountable for that, as well.
Beka Hodges 40:34
So Emery asks, what shifts would you make in a traditional worship service to help build that culture of disciple making?
Chris Shirley 40:43
I’ll take this one because we made a change here. You know, there’s always risk when you make changes. And we were answering the question at our church, how do we how do we adjust what we do on Sunday morning, to try and make disciples? We flipped our service times. The pastor said, we’re going to start at nine, okay? And then we’re going to move to our small groups after that, so that we can begin a sermon-based approach to the teaching. I’ll exegete right at the beginning, during the sermon. I’ll set it up, I’ll tee it up in the sermon, and then we’ll move to our small groups, where we’ll apply it and where people talk about it, right? And […] begin to have those important, necessary conversations about how we live it out in our lives. But it’s hard to do that up front. […] And so, we flipped the service to do that, also to give that the small groups more time to be together, as well, and to build their relationships with one another more.
Jim Thomas 41:49
We’re set up a little differently, where we have two Sunday morning services, and they’re contingent with our two different hours, because of space issue […] So I would say, in the context of the worship service, I think schedules can help. I think language and teaching. I mean, if you go back to the Great Commission, especially Matthew 28, “baptize and teach,” right? So as we perform the ordinances and as we teach our people, we integrate languages and concepts. And I want to throw this word out here, because none of us today will like this word, okay, I’m just gonna throw it out there, because we avoid this at all costs. And that is “tension,” right? That we create through the way that we lead our people toward a new understanding, a theological reformulation of understanding the gospel that leads to disciple making, a healthy tension. You want someone after a service to come up to you and go, I don’t know if I agree with that. Okay, let’s have a conversation, right? […] You are confident in the Word of God, but they lack of understanding or are misunderstanding. You can speak into that on a personal level or on a small group level, but you’re not being intentionally provocative, necessarily, as much as […] you’re creating new theological concepts out of Scripture. The Bible being the foundation that pushes people to consider, how do I follow Christ? Am I following Christ? And it produces questions as much as it gives answers. In the context of a worship service, does [the] music lead or the songs you’re singing lead to a life of following faithfully with Jesus? The way we pray, who we put on stage? Are these examples, stories through video, personal stories from stage, other things like that.
Beka Hodges 43:38
All right, so we have quite a number of questions. So I’m going to roll through these for you, and I might combine a couple of them that relate to each other. So Sarah asks, what are some priorities in communities with largely mature believers? And then Carl asks, How did you start discipleship groups in your church?
Jim Thomas 44:03
I’m going to quote my favorite […] Methodist preacher. Can I do that in the Baptist setting? Yeah, but Craig Groeschel says, if you’re not dead, you’re not done. And so I think most of our theological reformulation around disciple making is among the older generations because of what they were taught growing up regarding what a disciple actually is. And so I think […] the majority of the people […] that are coming to us right now, after a year of integrating new language and theological concepts of what disciple is, are older adults. Some of them are coming to us. […] Some of us are coming to us with shame to say, I can’t believe I missed this. For how many years since I’ve been a Christian? Literally, had a guy come to me in my church in Georgia who’s now 85 (he was 80 at the time), and he said, How come no one ever told me about this? He got integrated into a discipleship group and started to learn how to follow Jesus. And showed up after about six months being there, and he said, I have something to say. I learned this week, I’m supposed to walk in the power of the Holy Spirit. How come no one ever told me that? And this is an 80-year-old ready to learn to walk with Jesus, right? You know the Eugene Peterson quote, “a long obedience in the same direction.” This isn’t a quick fix. There’s no silver bullet. […] This is a long marathon, and we have to start where we are and start moving people one at a time, especially even in our older generation.
Chris Shirley 45:39
And you brought up an issue that we haven’t even dealt with: intergenerational. I spoke to a group of older adults not too long ago.A guy came up to me afterwards and said, Okay, you’re challenging me to disciple others. You’re challenging me to mentor the younger generations, and yet, we go to our own Sunday school classes, we go our own trips, we do our own activities. We’re always away from one another. We’re never together. He said, How do I meet these people? And he was serious. He wasn’t saying it snarkily. He was saying, I want to do this, how do I do this? And so, because I was in another church, […] you need to talk to your leaders, right? This needs to be a conversation you have with your leaders. You need to be challenging them, saying, Why are we never in proximity with people of other generations here? And given opportunities to build friendships that’re gonna lead to discipleship opportunities.
Jim Thomas 46:38
Yeah, we all walk our own path on Sunday morning, don’t we? We go in the same door, we go down the same hallway, we go to our same group. Intentionally vary that up, and even go to someone else, maybe a preschool minister or a youth pastor or whoever in your church, to say, Hey, can I just drop in and see what you’re doing on Sunday morning? To get them intentionally involved in other areas of the church, to see that the church is much bigger than them and their little path on Sunday morning. I think the second part of that was D groups. Am I correct in that? How do you start D groups? I would start with you. Don’t make a big announcement from the stage. We’re starting D groups! Sign up! I would start with you. I would pray through who God may put in your path and who you have influence over. Start discipling them. There was a pastor at a conference one time who had a guy walk up and said, How do I do small groups better? And he said, Tell me about your small group. And the guy said, I’m not in one. He goes, we have nothing to talk about. So if you’re not doing it, it’s hard to lead others to do it, right? So I’m discipling. I have a leadership cohort in my church where I’m leading 10 of our men and women through leadership principles, and I have a discipleship group that I lead, personally, of seven men. […] In my preaching, I won’t ever give away anything in the confidentiality of the discipleship group, but in my preaching, I say, you know, “In my D group last week, this was a concept we wrestled with.” What I’ve done is not only speak to the message of the sermon, I spoke to a context that some of our people are not aware of. What’s a D group? Well, that’s a great question. Let me talk to you about that. So I do think it starts with you discipling people that God has placed in your path, and then challenging them to do the next thing. And it just depends on the specific context of the church. Are you ready to launch it organizationally and holistically around the church, or does it just need to start with you?
Chris Shirley 48:32
And I think it’s important to have conversations with people about how we approach people for those relationships, because some of the folks like you were talking about that– “I don’t know how to get in touch with these people and how to talk with them, how to lead them into relationships, because we don’t do that.” […] And so teaching them about how to build those relationships as well as how to have them.
Jim Thomas 48:57
Yeah, one of our new core values at our church is intergenerational relationships, and we had to change our language, because it was multi generational relationships. Well, that just means we all are there, we just all exist on campus, but we’re not interacting unless we just stumble into one another, or we have a Thanksgiving dinner or whatever. But how are we intentional in those interintergenerational relationships? And I think it starts with raising of leaders to be able to impact those of other generations
Beka Hodges 49:25
Okay, so I know this next question probably has a very lengthy answer, so maybe give your your top answer to this: What are some areas of knowledge of discipleship a disciple needs to know? And then, how do we know that he or she is really a disciple? Do we need to measure according to his or her behaviors?
Chris Shirley 49:50
Let’s take the first part of it. What is it the disciple needs to know? […] I think Jesus said, Teach them to obey everything that I’ve commanded. And so we have a curriculum laid out for us, right from the very beginning, everything they need to know. I think we also look at […] the the early church in Acts, and what they were learning along the way. They were learning about how to worship. They were learning about how to build relationships with one another and fellowship. They were learning about the Word of God and the message of God, the teaching of the apostles. They were learning about the scriptures. They were learning about their own ministry and how they contributed to the kingdom of God through the gifts that they had. They were learning about how to share Christ with other people. Those are just some things right off the bat.
Jim Thomas 50:48
You know, Jesus gave us a three-year master class in following him. And then we saw the church live that out in different contexts, not just in a Jewish context, but then in a pagan context in Acts and beyond. A great book by our friend Bill Hall, called Conversion and Discipleship. And there’s a chapter called Ways and Means, and it talks about Jesus’ way of making disciples. And there’s a four-tiered process that A.B. Bruce actually discovered back in the late 1800s in a book called The Training of the Twelve. Bill adds to this book, and it actually helps you to develop a Jesus style of disciple making. […] That’s just a good resource.
Chris Shirley 51:32
Here’s my shameless plug for people who would like to take Strategies for Disciple Making here at Southwestern. You are welcome to take the course for Master’s credit, but you can also audit it as well.
Beka Hodges 51:46
Okay, I’m going to combine a couple of questions to make sure we hit all of these. So someone asks, should everyone be involved in disciple making, or should be left for those who are interested? And in addition to that, how do we raise up discipleship leaders?
Jim Thomas 52:16
Okay, first of all, it’s easy. Yes, all who are called to salvation are called to discipleship, no excuses, no exceptions. Discipleship is disciple making. It’s being a Christian. Exactly. So, a disciple is not a higher class of Christian. It’s not just for the intellectual, it’s not for the bookworm. It’s for everybody, which kind of breeds another question that they didn’t ask. But do you have to teach to be a disciple maker? Do you have to have the gift of teaching? Do you have to be able to sit down in a small group and teach a lesson to be a disciple maker? That’s a tough question. I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that, no, you don’t. Say your gifting is with your hands, not with your head. And you can’t teach a lesson or speak publicly to save your life. That would put you into an anxiety attack. But, man, you can fix a car. And you can model the life of Jesus in patience and in love and in joy, and you could help someone understand, this is how I live when I do this. That’s making disciples, right?
Chris Shirley 53:18
And that’s why it’s so important that disciples be in community. Because it’s within the community of the church that what I can’t do, others can do. If I can’t, quote or teach the Scriptures with the same level of understanding and effectiveness as my pastor can, or my my teacher can […] then someone’s there to take care of that.
Jim Thomas 53:42
But if it’s serving, serve! Or whatever your gifting happens to be, discipleship is learning how to live like Jesus, and that’s not just through teaching, even though that’s a primary way Jesus [did it].
Beka Hodges 53:55
Okay, we’ve got two questions left. We’ll see if we can knock them out in the last five minutes. Okay, so someone asks, Are there indicators or signs that you can recognize when it might be time to step away from a church or ministry, particularly if the church is resistant to change in areas like discipleship?
Jim Thomas 54:16
We’ll get back to the word tension. […] Just one example. I was leading a Bonhoeffer Project cohort that had one of my discipleship pastors in it. And he called me one day. He was pacing his parking lot, and he said, I’ve talked to my pastor about establishing a disciple making strategy here. And he said, No. He said, I just want you to grow the Sunday school. And he goes, What do I do with this? And I said, Well, man, you know you need to submit to your leadership. You need to understand that you may disagree with this, and then you need to seek the Lord and see what God would do in that setting, or if he would remove you from that setting and put you in a setting where he can use you to the best of your ability, or his ability through you. And in that situation, about three or four months later, God moved him to another church in that same state, whose pastor had a vision for disciple making. […] They had a hospice, they had a school, they had just a ton of stuff. And he went through this disciple making process, and went back to him and said, I can’t make disciples if I’m doing all this stuff. And the board their church said, Well, this is what we hired you to do. And he said, Well, I guess I’m going to have to go do something else. And he went and planted a church [with] a disciple making DNA. Those are radical examples. But […] not to be too simplistic here, it’s a matter of prayer, and it’s a matter of calling.
Jim Thomas 55:54
The first step along the way, be obedient where you are while you’re there. Don’t be somewhere else. Be obedient where you are while you’re there.
Chris Shirley 56:08
And God may have put you there for just such a time as this. To pray for the pastor, to try to to walk with Him, to be patient with him, and to help him, through friendship and conversation, come to the point where he sees what you see.
Jim Thomas 56:22
And the end of that is that your struggle right now may not actually be about you. […] It may be about something or someone else.
Beka Hodges 56:30
Okay, so Lawrence asks, how do you incorporate the unsaved into the discipling process, such as children or guests who are seekers?
Jim Thomas 56:37
Yeah, that’s good. We were talking about this earlier, weren’t we? My preschool minister came to me, and kids pastor came to me, and they both said, how do we disciple kids who aren’t believers yet? And I said […] we set a foundation educationally around the gospel and around the principles of what it means to be a Christ follower, then when they do come to faith in Christ, they have a base of knowledge to do that. I mean, the disciples had a base of knowledge before the Messiah came. It was called the Old Testament, right? And then they integrated that into the revelation of the Messiah as they realized who he was and started to live out of him, fulfilling everything they knew, right? And so theologically, we see that happening in Scripture, and I think we can see that happening, especially with with toddlers and preschoolers and children and pre teens as well.
Beka Hodges 57:31
Okay, this is the last question. How do you multiply groups without them looking like dividing the group?
Chris Shirley 57:41
Mm, hmm. We never use the word divide.
Jim Thomas 57:42
Well, it’s always multiplied, it’s never divided. We don’t have bars, we have counters in Baptist churches, right? […] This is in the building of the strategy you start with. This is about multiplication. […] Not everybody […] who’s gone through, say, a discipleship group or discipleship process is ready to lead and may not ever be. And so I kind of use a baseball bullpen analogy. I’m always looking for the next reliever. And it may not be everybody in your group, but it may be that one lady or maybe that one guy. And we had these people waiting over here ready to play, if you will, and we need to call them out.
Chris Shirley 58:31
But it’s harder to do that when your expectations are set at the end of the process, rather than the beginning. So always at the beginning, let them know what this is about.
