The core question of effectiveness for a church – the question that ultimately matters – is whether the people who are getting saved are being conformed to the likeness of Christ, according to Jim Putman in his book Discipleshift: Five Steps That Help Your Church to Make Disciples Who Make Disciples. Are we making mature disciples of Jesus who are not only able to withstand the culture but are also making disciples of Jesus themselves?
Unfortunately, most churches do not rate highly when discipleship is the measure of success, and accordingly the book proposes that we need to be making five key shifts in the direction of the church:
- From Reaching to Making: Instead of focusing all our efforts on reaching the lost, we should be focusing our primary efforts on making disciples.
- From Informing to Equipping: Instead of concentrating on giving people information about Jesus, we need to concentrate on equipping them with the character and skills of a disciple.
- From Program to Purpose: We need to replace our emphasis on having good programs with an emphasis on the purpose of making disciples.
- From Activity to Relationship: Instead of seeing ministry as being primarily about activities, we should see ministry as being mainly about relationships.
- From Accumulating to Deploying: The way we measure our success needs to change from the number of attenders, converts and size of budget to the number of mature disciples actively deployed in disciple-making ministry.
I found the book to be helpful and challenging in equal measure – helpful, because it provides quite a lot of information on how to start making disciples, the key areas in which a disciple needs to grow, what the role of a leader should be, what you actually equip disciples to do, how to achieve alignment between your church’s ministries and your discipling purpose, how small groups should work, and how to measure results; and challenging, because I can see how difficult it might be to implement.
This book is the title book for the 2013 Exponential Conference, and Exponential have released a number of free ebooks on the discipleship theme, recognising the subject as one of the key weaknesses of the church in the US. Another useful recently-released book with a similar theme is INsourcing by Randy Pope.