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Welcome to the lead on podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. But today, in my role as podcast leader talking with you about practical issues related to ministry leadership. On this podcast, we talk about the ins and outs of ministry leadership, the daily work of what it means to lead a church or a ministry organization. I've been working through a short series here on the podcast entitled, a ministry is difficult, but it's not complicated.
Jeff Iorg:Now that statement may, need some explanation. I wanna fully acknowledge upfront that ministry is hard. There is not much about it today that isn't hard, whether you're dealing with financial challenges, people problems, programming shortfalls, building deficiencies, all the kinds of things that make ministry hard, but we've compounded that difficulty by making ministry far too complicated, especially church ministry. We are trying to do too many things, too many different ways that really have very little to do with the core function of what a church is supposed to be accomplishing. Now, at the beginning of this series, I talked about that most people think that the church has 5 functions, evangelism, sometimes called missions, discipleship, ministry, fellowship, and worship.
Jeff Iorg:Now those 5 words can be put into any order. You could make a case for any one of them being a priority, but those five functions are what we're talking about right now
Jeff Iorg:in the podcast, and we come today to talking about how discipleship is hard, but it's not complicated. So let's talk
Jeff Iorg:today about what it means to build a disciple making church, and to
Jeff Iorg:have that as a centerpiece of what we do. Now let's start by talking about a definition of discipleship. Now some people define discipleship as turning weak Christians into strong Christians, and I wanna say as clearly
Jeff Iorg:and as forcefully as I can, that is wrong. Discipleship is not turning weak Christians into strong Christians. If that's your definition of discipleship, then your disciple making efforts will result in a 1 generation Christian movement, which will die out when the people who view who you have strengthened through your disciple making processes come to
Jeff Iorg:the end of life. A better definition of discipleship is discipleship is turning unbelievers into growing Christians.
Jeff Iorg:It's turning unbelievers into growing Christians. This acknowledges a very important distinction that many people do not make
Jeff Iorg:when they're when they're writing or speaking about discipleship, and that is the disciple making mandate or imperative actually begins with sharing the gospel with lost people.
Jeff Iorg:Now you say, no. Disciple making begins by taking the people who are already Christians and turning them into better Christians or stronger Christians. Well, then how do you fulfill the disciple making mandate in a culture or community where there are no Christians? For example, when I went to plant a church near Portland, Oregon a number of years ago, I went into a community that had very, very few Christians, and I planted a church that did not have a large core group of people. If I was going to make disciples, which was my biblical responsibility and mandate as a Christian leader, If I was gonna make disciples, I had to fulfill the full spectrum of the disciple making responsibility or mandate, and that was first of all, share the gospel and see the gospel produce converts, and then help those converts grow to maturity or to maturing, I should say, in Jesus Christ.
Jeff Iorg:Now, this is a better definition of discipleship. It's turning unbelievers into growing or maturing Christians. So I want you to think about that as we talk about how we can uncomplicate discipleship today. Now when we think about how discipleship models are currently structured in most churches, unfortunately, they are built around what I will call a participation model. Now a participation model of discipleship emphasizes things like, come to our service or our class to demonstrate your commitment.
Jeff Iorg:A participation model says join our program, and in our program, if you just do what we ask, then you will live out your commitment. A participation model says, complete our seminar, or fill in the blanks of our notebook, or go through some kind of, intellectually based training so you know all the answers and and, think or do things just like the rest of us, and you will be discipled.
Jeff Iorg:Now, some balance here. Participation is important. You really can't
Jeff Iorg:accomplish discipleship unless people participate in various aspects of it with you. So I'm not against participation models. I'm just simply saying though that a participation model, meaning that you define discipleship and its outcomes, either by attendance in a service or a class, or by joining and completing a program, or by attending a seminar, or filling out a notebook, or completing an intellectual study so that you know certain information. If that's your definition of discipleship, then you're limited in what you call discipleship to the completion of whatever it is you're asking people to participate in as an expression of their disciple making responsibilities. I think there's a better way to approach it, and that is to move from a participation model to what I'll call a transformation model, and that is where you measure how people are actually changing and that you look to life transformation to validate the discipleship work you're doing rather than simple participation.
Jeff Iorg:Now, I have to admit that I got a lot better at understanding this while I served for 20 years as a seminary president than I did when I was a pastor. One of the shortcomings of my pastoral, life was that I focused too much on participation as the measure of discipleship. I counted attendance at worship services, at classes, at seminars, at workshops, conferences. I counted attendance and sometimes even counted the number of people who completed, like a 1 on 1 training program or something like that, I counted participation and made that the way that I measured discipleship progress. And then I went to the seminary, and I discovered that our faculty had far more sophisticated ways of measuring whether actual transformation was taking place than just class attendance.
Jeff Iorg:In fact,
Jeff Iorg:I had professors who didn't even take role, who really felt
Jeff Iorg:that measuring attendance wasn't a true measure of whether a person was learning or even experiencing the material that was being taught, that beyond that, transformation had to be measured. So while attending a class or a program or a meeting or a seminar or a workshop or a service, while attending can be a means, a step toward transformation, it really doesn't measure
Jeff Iorg:transformation. So measurement has to be about life change.
Jeff Iorg:How do you measure, quantify, evaluate if people are actually changing or growing? So let me give you some simple illustrations and then challenge you to think even in a more complex way about the ministry that you're particularly leading. Let's take just a simple thing like reading the bible on a regular basis, and let's say that in order to motivate people to do this and to help them learn how, that you actually have a class or a seminar on this, and you say that for the next 2 hours, I'm gonna teach you, methods of bible reading, approaches to to to daily devotions, how to keep notes or records, different programs you can use, different apps that could be accessed, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You're going to offer some kind of training about the importance of reading the Bible on a regular basis. Now, if you're measuring your discipleship by a participation model, you're going to count the number of
Jeff Iorg:people who come to your class and complete it, and that's gonna be the
Jeff Iorg:people that you label as being discipled in this area of daily bible reading. But a transformational approach would say, come to the class and learn the information, get the basis of action established, but now we're gonna measure progress. And so you ask people, I'd like for you to take this card, and for the next 30 days, every day that you read the Bible, I want you to put an x on the date for that particular day
Jeff Iorg:of the week, and then at
Jeff Iorg:the end of 30 days, let's bring the cards back and turn them in. Be honest now, don't cheat. Tell me the truth about what you really do, and let's measure the progress we make in daily bible reading. And so you can do that. At the end of the month, you can see that a person read the bible 9 days or 23 days or whatever, and you can see that happening.
Jeff Iorg:Then you say, now let's measure it again, and you maybe measure it for the following month, or maybe you measure it every 3rd month or something like that, but what you're looking for is progress. Are you seeing actual transformation in a person's behavior as they're consistently reading the bible on a more frequent basis? You could do the same thing about prayer. You say, well, I'm gonna teach a prayer seminar. Well, fine.
Jeff Iorg:And if a person comes and completes your prayer seminar, you would label them as discipled in the area of prayer. No. They're just showing you they know how to participate in your seminar. A better model of transformation would be to say, now, I want you to track this next week how many days you set aside for prayer, a time of prayer within your day. And then when you do that time of prayer, just note down how much time you actually spend in prayer.
Jeff Iorg:Is it 2 minutes? Is it 5 minutes? Is it 10 minutes? So that you're looking to see our people actually, from the seminar that I've taught them, being transformed in the way that they pray, and we see that by the frequency of the times of the week that they're praying and by the amount of time that they're praying each time. This measures transformation.
Jeff Iorg:Same thing in gospel sharing. You say, well, come to the class on sharing your faith. Well, that's great, but participating in the class doesn't necessarily produce life transformation. But you say now that you've been through this class, let's start field testing this, and let's keep a record this week of how many people that you attempted to have a gospel conversation, how many gospel conversations led to the point of the gospel being presented, and how many people actually prayed with you to receive Jesus Christ. Let's measure some actual function of what you're supposedly learning in this class context, and let's see if any transformation has taken place.
Jeff Iorg:Now, you can think about ways to measure other spiritual growth issues as well. For example, you may say, well, I wanna disciple people in their knowledge of theology, and so we're going to have a series of theology classes or a series of theology lectures. And you could say, and to measure transformation, we're gonna develop a little pretest and a posttest to help people test what they knew at the beginning and what they knew at the end to see if we've actually learned anything over the process. Let's say you're trying to help the men in your church to spend less time, you know, accessing pornography or something like that. Well, it would be important to say, let's establish a baseline.
Jeff Iorg:How much time have you been spending involved in pornography? And be honest now, and let's be transparent about this. And then when you've identified that, say now, let's track it over the next week, and let's see if we can reduce that time. And when the temptation comes, if we can turn to a friend, and we can find a way to have an alternative activity or an alternative solution to what we're dealing with that's motivating us back toward porn. And so, you measure the progress a person's actually making.
Jeff Iorg:And you say, well this sounds really complicated. Not really. It can be as simple as something that a person has as a checklist or a card that they keep in their Bible, or a pretest or a posttest, or something they keep as a log, or something they put on their calendar every day, as a record of what they've done. All I'm challenging you to do is think about discipleship in terms of transformation more than in terms of participation, so that a person's life is actually changing, and that you're actually measuring the things that you really wanna see change over time. There's so many other illustrations I could give about this, but let's just say, for example, that that you, wanna track a person's, financial stewardship and their giving pattern.
Jeff Iorg:Well, you can you can help them to establish a pattern of giving, and then have them do a monthly evaluation and keep that for a year, and then take a look at it and see how the development went over the time, that kind of thing. So we're gonna focus more on transformation than on participation. Now, again, back to some balance, participation is important. Sometimes, you need people to come to the class or the seminar or the workshop. You need them to be involved in whatever it is you're offering in terms of the teaching ministry of your church so that they have the basics of information.
Jeff Iorg:But you're going beyond that because as you move toward transformation, you wanna be able to measure the actual behaviors that you're trying to change and see if you're actually resulting in people who are becoming more mature or who are growing in their Christian faith.
Jeff Iorg:Now, how do you build this transformational model? Well, let
Jeff Iorg:me give you 2 or 3 suggestions that I think would help. First of all, you have to commit to a strategic process. There's not really anything that's going to happen with just a one time shot at making disciples in a church. It had to be a strategic process, which means that you're going to have to develop some things that you're gonna do over and over and over again. You're going to have to have a way of training new believers in bible reading and prayer and giving and simple basic things like security of the believer and baptism, other core doctrines.
Jeff Iorg:You're going to have to have a way of developing Christian leaders and helping develop people for particular responsibilities in terms of church leadership. And so you've gotta have, a strategic process. Now, I I'm all for new things, and I think there's always a time to do something, as a special event in a church and and have a special emphasis. That's not a problem. But what I'm talking about here is the meat and potatoes, the red beans and rice, the grits and gravy, the the, bourguilli and kimchi.
Jeff Iorg:I'm talking about the the basics. I'm talking about what you do over and over and over and over again, and that you measure over a prolonged period of time, so that you really have a sense of the transformative work that your church is doing in the lives of people. Now, don't be afraid to commit to a strategic process. Something that's repeatable. Something that's planned and intentional and comprehensive, and that you could do over and over and over and over and over again.
Jeff Iorg:You know, I was fortunate enough in my formative years from age 13 to 23 to be in a church that was a very strong disciple making church. And that church recognized that its discipleship responsibility started with sharing the lost, seeing people come to faith in Jesus, and then it had a very clear process that it took every new believer, through a 10 week training, 1 on 1, helping people to understand the basics of what it meant now to live as a Christian in the light of their new commitment. And we kept very clear records about this, and the church did this for years, used the same curriculum for years so that there was a sense of continuity and measurement and a sense of accomplishment of really measuring the transformative work of how we share the gospel and help people launch in their Christian faith. And then the same church had a series of classes, that it repeated over and over again every year. There were a half a dozen of these courses that were offered, and they were repeated every year, sometimes twice a year that were in things like Baptist doctrine, like basic evangelism, like family of money management, these kinds of things.
Jeff Iorg:The core things that you really wanted to help people be transformed, those areas were repeated over and over and over again by our church. Now, you know, it's interesting to me that some churches, you know, they're they're what I call perpetually creative. They think you constantly have to be able to, create something new in order to attract people's attention or to engage people. Well, there's certainly the place to create new things, and there's certainly a need for for for creativity and newness in in in expressions of church life. But undergirding that needs to be a commitment to a strategic process, to having repeatable, intentional, comprehensive methods of dealing with these core issues of our faith that help people to have a continuity of transformation in a congregation.
Jeff Iorg:A second suggestion I would make about a transformational model is to create a process where you move people along in their training. Now some churches have used bases, or some people use stations, some people use levels or arrows, some people have a circular set of responsibilities that feed in one to the other. Lots of different ways to image this, but you wanna have a process, meaning that people move from point a to point b to point c to point d or from step 1 to step 2 to step 3 to step 4, and people have a sense of accomplishing something as they move along. Now, don't, again, over complicate this. It can be as simple as, here's the training we offer for new believers.
Jeff Iorg:Here's the training we offer for new members to get you engaged in ministry. Here's training that we offer for families. Here's training that we offer for finances. Here's training that we offer in doctrine. Here's training that we offer in sharing our faith.
Jeff Iorg:These are the 4 to 6 things that we do, and we process people through them. We want you to move through every one of these phases, and over the 2 or 3 year period of time, walk through a process of very intentional discipleship with us, leading to transformation in these key areas that we've identified are very significant. Now, a third thing that you can do is to build a more transformational model is to celebrate transformation, not just participation. Now, of course, we celebrate participation. We talk about attendance and, and that's important, but transformation celebrates the change in life that happens.
Jeff Iorg:Transformation is demonstrated, for example, through worship service testimonies, through videos that you make of people who report how their life is changing in their Christian faith and work through your church. Transformation focuses on identifying the cumulative reporting of the transformational work your church is doing so that, for example, you're able to say, this year, this percentage of people in our church increased their daily bible reading. This percentage of people in our church increased, over last year in terms of people attempting to share their faith with others, so that you celebrate not just attendance at events, that's participation, but transformation, and that is behavioral change that really represents to people the kind of changes that we're trying to produce. Celebrating transformation requires some more intentionality than perhaps celebrating participation. I know that, for example, it takes time to not only measure transformation, but then to record and to communicate what that transformation looks like, and sometimes, it can be a little bit threatening at this point because while we can easily measure participation and say so many people came to our
Jeff Iorg:event, it's
Jeff Iorg:a little harder to own up to measuring transformation, especially if the transformation isn't really happening. And we have to take a step back and reevaluate and say, you know, what we said was gonna be transformational turned out not to be. How can we back off from that and make it transformational going forward? And so, when you measure and celebrate transformation, you're going to have to produce some, and that can be very pressuring and frustrating as people think about, no, I'd rather just measure participation. Now another way to build a transformation model rather than a participation model is to allow people to learn by doing, to serve in meaningful ways and to grow along the way, not just after they are, quote, fully trained.
Jeff Iorg:This means you you take people on mission trips, you take people into ministry activity, you involve people by giving them responsibility, perhaps well before you think they're fully trained and ready to take that on. But you do so because you want people to have the opportunity to be transformed through the process of involvement. Now, I saw this really firsthand in in in a dramatic way with my oldest son. When my oldest son was a teenager, he was a committed Christian and was, as most teenagers, you know, up and down hot and cold, but trying to grow in his relationship with God. He was very frustrated, however, by having to go to so many Christian events, and finally, we reached the breaking point 1 year when he just told me, I I can't go to 1 more youth camp.
Jeff Iorg:I I just don't wanna do it anymore. Instead, he said, I I I wanna go to, something that was called Impact Northwest. It was kind of a world changers event if that terminology means anything to some of you.
Jeff Iorg:It was a hands on ministry project work week. Now let
Jeff Iorg:me set it out for you a little more. These teenagers got up every morning at 6 o'clock, had morning devotions,
Jeff Iorg:full breakfast, and were dressed and ready to
Jeff Iorg:go to the job site at 7 AM. At 7 AM, their teams left, went to the job site. They worked until about 11, 11:30. Lunch was delivered on-site. They had a break, had their lunch, and they worked afternoons and tried to finish around 4.
Jeff Iorg:They would finish and then come back to the school where they were staying, take a shower, get cleaned up, and have a meal, and then a worship service to follow, and then to bed, and then to bed meant they slept on cots or sleeping bags on the floor of the gymnasium at the school where they were working and living. That's Impact Northwest or world changers type event. Now think about that. Sleeping on
Jeff Iorg:the floor, getting up at 6 o'clock in the morning, working a full 8 to 9 hour day, having only the lunch break and that served on-site, And yet, for 4 years, every summer, my son did this,
Jeff Iorg:and I saw it transform his life.
Jeff Iorg:It was transformative, because it wasn't about going to a class and learning about doing something. It was about doing something. It was about constructing. It was about working with a team.
Jeff Iorg:It was about praying together as a group. It was about building community quickly so you could get work done together. It was all of those things.
Jeff Iorg:You know, some people really learn
Jeff Iorg:a lot by doing, and we're making a mistake by telling Christians, especially younger Christians, oh, you can't do anything yet. You gotta be trained first. You gotta be discipled, and you've gotta go through these months, if not years, of classes before we're ever gonna let you do anything.
Jeff Iorg:That's a huge mistake. Now you want them to participate in those things for sure, but also, many of them will learn much more rapidly and be personally transformed
Jeff Iorg:if you get them involved in some service early on in their Christian faith or in their Christian commitment. So these suggestions I've given you today are about moving from a participation to a transformation model. Let me wrap it up today by just highlighting that there are different ways to combine the participation model of coming to be a part of a class or a course or a training with a transformation model of being engaged with someone in such a way that their life actually is different. There are lots of different methodologies for doing this. The first one that I like is what I call 1 on 1 pairs.
Jeff Iorg:It's where you work 1 on 1 with another person, and I've seen this work best in 2 different contexts. The first is training new Christians. First of all, when I was a new Christian, this was done for me, and then when I was a pastor, I did it for dozens and dozens of people. And that is, I set up a process in our church whereby every new Christian had a more mature Christian help them for the first 10 to 12 weeks of their Christian commitment understand the basics of what it means to live now as a Christian. To be 1 on 1, not only 1 on 1 teaching, but 1 on 1 coaching, 1 on 1, guiding, 1 on 1 consulting, and in some cases, being 1 on 1 involved in helping them even get involved in early stages of ministry.
Jeff Iorg:But it's that 1 on 1 connection that proved to be so transformational, especially for new believers. And then the other place I've seen this work well is on training leaders, where you work 1 on 1 with people for 3 to 6 months to help them to be shaped and placed in a particular leadership responsibility in your church or ministry. And then, of course, another way to combine participation with transformation are small groups. These can be closed small groups or open small groups, meaning that they're either open to enrollment or closed by enrollment for various different reasons or purposes. But these small groups can be places where there's teaching that goes on, but also where the relationships are are done well enough that you can have connections made that help people personally engage on in such a way that transformation can only take place, but be measured.
Jeff Iorg:And then the 3rd level, or what I would
Jeff Iorg:call the most general or the most public levels, Conferences, seminars, and even preaching, where you have large groups of people coming together. Now can this also be transformational?
Jeff Iorg:Absolutely, it can be, but you have to work
Jeff Iorg:at it by being careful about application, and by creating ways to measure the transformation or the outcomes that you're trying to accomplish, and also, by using these venues to call for, to crystallize the commitments needed as a part of the transformation process. So these 3 broad categories of methodology, 1 on 1 teaching, small groups, open and closed, and then large groups, conferences, seminars, preaching experiences, and worship services, All of this can be participation that leads to transformation if you're very intentional in planning how you're going to bring about the transformational component of the teaching and how you're going to actually measure the life change that you're calling for. So think about how you can combine these and do more than just measure how many showed up, but think about measuring the life change that really takes place. Well, one of the five core functions of a church is disciple making. Disciple making is not turning weak Christians into strong Christians.
Jeff Iorg:It's turning non Christians into growing Christians. It's starting the discipleship process by sharing the gospel, and then helping people to get to a place where they're maturing or growing in their relationship with God. I've advocated today, moving beyond a participation model. Again, not eliminating participation or measuring participation, but moving beyond that. So that we don't just count how many came to an event and call that our discipleship result, But instead, we move to another level of actually asking the question, what are we hoping to see change through this through this process?
Jeff Iorg:And then, how can we measure that? And how can we adjust along the ways that we are actually seeing life transformation take place? The discipleship mandate is one of the core functions of the church. It is hard to make disciples, but it's not that complicated. Move beyond participation to measuring transformation, and then adjust along the way until you see real transformation happening.
Jeff Iorg:Put this into practice as you lead on.