Use Simple Discipleship to Equip Disciples

Welcome to Dr. Tom Cocklereece, author of Simple Discipleship, as our guest blogger. He has written an excellent article for us on the question of discipleship in mission settings. We are planning to use his book ourselves in conferences in East Africa. If you have not yet read his book, please follow the links below and order yours on-line!

Use Simple Discipleship to Equip Disciples

Christians and churches in the United States generously provide money for missions to reach people for Christ in third world countries. Increasingly, church members are volunteering to go on short-term mission trips to help build church buildings, directly share the message of Christ, and equip church leaders there. While all of these are altruistic and expected missions activities of which should be encouraged and increased, western churches may be exporting some of our own problems and replicating them in other nations. Specifically, while American churches are wealthy by third world standards and should help them, doing so may create an attitude of dependence. However, more troubling is the fact that third world church leaders are copying American church methods, structures, and models.

I have been providing leadership and discipleship coaching for a church leader in Uganda. The leader pastors a church of about 100 congregants and virtually begged me to teach him Simple Discipleship principles. I initially resisted coaching my pastor friend from Africa primarily because of cultural and contextual differences as compared to American churches. The pastor’s persistence won the day, and he convinced me to train him in the Simple Discipleship concepts.

Since Simple Discipleship was published, I have further developed and refined the process and have begun to use the survey and balanced scorecard as an initial church spiritual vitality analysis. The reader of this article should know that Simple Discipleship uses four primary values of Worship (red), Word (blue), Ministry (yelow), and Missions (green) which are measurements of what I call Dynamic Necessary Attributes (DNA) needed for healthy church growth. In preparation for working with the pastor in Uganda, I asked him to provide numbers for the average resident attendance, worship, Bible study, ministry participants, and missional involvement.

Set Free Christian Church is located in Lugazi, Uganda of east Africa and is a city of 32,700. The church ministers to a total of about 150 people weekly (average resident attendance) in some way, and 85 of that number attend worship, while 35 attend Bible study, 17 people serve in a ministry activity, and 20 people assist in missional outreach. Respectively, the percentages of 150 would be 57, 23, 11, and 13. Simple Discipleship uses horizontal measurements or what is called balanced discipleship. This means that if Set Free Christian Church were the perfect church, 100% of the 150 people would be active in each of the four areas measured. Of course, there is no perfect church this side of heaven, but the pie graph illustrates the real numbers and a lack of balanced discipleship. Balanced discipleship could be illustrated by a pie graph with four parts that are close to equal in size. As you can see, the graph illustrates four unequal parts. In this case, a large percentage of the people connect in worship, and fewer develop in Bible study, engage in ministry, and deploy in missions.

The point is that though the context and culture are different, Set Free Christian Church reflects some of the same problems as American churches, i.e. silo methodology, compartmentalized ministries, and a focus on evangelism without equal attention to teaching, hands-on ministry, and missional invlovement by every Christian.

Simple Discipleship is a new paradigm for discipleship or at least its application restores biblical values-based discipleship. I look forward to seeing Simple Discipleship principles applied in churches in all nations that desire balanced discipleship and to empower total missional involvement that will activate Christians to be better evangelists as well.

Blessings!

Dr. Tom Cocklereece, author
Simple Discipleship

To read more Simple Discipleship principles, go to the following websites:
http://drthomreece.wordpress.com

http://www.simplediscipleship.com/store.html

A Walk on the Beach

A walk on the beach

---

I'd like to share with you three photos I took as I walked down Harris Beach in southern Oregon, and my reflections on each of them. The beach was lonely and deserted. I could imagine it on a sunny day filled with screaming kids and families and dogs, but today the fog had rolled in and the only other sign of life were a few seagulls. As I walked along, I saw a pattern in the scattered driftwood and rocks - structure and symmetry. This is what I saw:

I asked myself, "Could that have happened as a result of the wind and waves?" And of course I knew it couldn't. I could spend 70 years walking the world's oceans, and perhaps just one time would I ever find that the waves had left one rock on top of another on top of a log. "Aha," says the theoretician, "but if it could happen once, then given eons and eons of time, oodles and caboodles of time, then the chance exists that the waves and wind could theoretically leave a string of stones on top of others (except the one in the middle), on top of a piece of driftwood. Putting aside the theoretician for the moment, if I asked 100 other people walking by if the scene above was made by a person or if it happened by chance, I'm confident that all 100 would confirm that, without a doubt, someone had been there.

As I continued walking down the beach, my eye was once again captured by symmetry and structure, and once again I pulled out my camera. This is what I saw:

Our trusty theoretician might argue that all the shapes in the castle can be found individually elsewhere in sand - not very often, in fact hardly ever, but it might just be possible that the wind could carve one of those shapes in the sand somewhere on earth. And if it can happen once, then given enough time, oodles and caboodles of time, then it just might be possible that the structure above came about by wind and chance. But once again, if I asked 100 people walking by what they thought, I'm convinced that all 100 would tell me that the sandcastle was designed by someone with intelligence - someone with a lot of patience and a real gift for making castles!

As I continued walking down the beach, I wandered down by the tide pools and a splash of color caught my eye. Once again I saw form and symmetry, and out came my camera. This is what I saw:

Upon first glance, the starfish appear fairly simple, but in contrast with the first two photos where the structure and patterns are only surface deep, I know that the symmetry in the starfish is much more complex - because they are alive! They move and breathe and eat and have complex systems of circulation and reproduction and digestion. In fact they are billions of times more complex in their structure than either of the first two items I came across. Ah, but now if I ask 100 people walking by how the starfish came to be here, a majority will confidently tell me, "Well, of course, they evolved."

(And in their hearts they would be thinking, "Anyone who would think otherwise is a fool.")

So there we have it. Go figure!

I want to leave you with one final thought. Here's God's take on the whole thing. According to him, the fool is the one who says in their heart, "There is no God." (Psalm 14:1)

---

By Stephen Payne. If you'd like to pass this on to others, feel free.

For more of Stephen Payne's writing and photography, see www.TheCreatorsCanvas.com

Selected Proverbs and Scenery from Equip Disciples Missions