I am in the middle of a series of posts based on some recent discussions at the Church Planting Leadership Fellowship. These are part of my closing comments there, expanded a bit, a reflection on what we should learn from church planting leaders around the world.

You can find part one here and part two here. In part three, we turn our attention to discipleship.

The third point is that we need a greater commitment to obedience-based discipleship. There is a term in missiology called obedience-based discipleship. I talked about it in my talk at the Verge Conference, which you can see here (and I start with the international connect there as well):

 

We heard a theme at the CPLF this year–Steve Murrell talked about it some in his presentation. He said if you measure the wrong things, you can be at peace, thinking that all is well in your church, when things can be far from healthy.

If attendance is primarily what you are measuring, your measurement will place value on consumers, rather than on disciples. This challenged me to go back to my church and say, “let’s make sure we’re measuring the right things.” It is easy, in our contemporary church culture, to value attendance (or the wrong things) above everything else. I get this wrong, at times, too. When I introduced Steve at CPLF, I shared that he was “the pastor of a church of more than 60,000 people each weekend”. Steve was gracious and later pointed out, “That’s not the most important thing to us. What’s most important to us are the disciples–obedience-based disciples.”

Every person who addressed the CPLF audience, who works on the international field, found some way of saying that it’s not about what you know, but it’s about knowing more this week than last week, and helping other people who know a little less to grow in their faith. So again, it’s not that there is a dismissal of knowledge, but I think particularly in North America we are knowledge addicts with experience deficit.

I think that’s a challenge for us, to think about how we might engage this obedience-based discipleship. We have developed a pattern in the US where proficiency is determined by the ability to provide correct answers to various questions. The Church Planting Movements that we see overseas, and the most aggressively growing churches in the Two Thirds world, are those who believe that providing correct answers is important to proficiency, but living rightly in response to those correct answers is most important.

In an upcoming book, The Insanity of God, the author, Nik Ripken, tells one story after another of traveling around the world and meeting with various persecuted. One particular story struck me as he tells about meeting with a group of believers and church leaders in a significant area of China. A young man, only 25 years old, was eager to speak with Ripken. However, an older pastor took Ripken to the side and said to him, “He’s going to be someone God can use in a powerful way someday. But you cannot trust what he says now; he hasn’t been to prison yet.” This short statement reflects the powerful commitment the international church has to a faith that is lived out and tried by fire. Those who profess faith in Jesus are not believable until they have proven their faith. It sounds a lot like James.

22 But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. 23 Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his own face in a mirror. 24 For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. 25 But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but one who does good works–this person will be blessed in what he does. (HCSB)

Movements are fostered by discipleship, not funding. As Jun Escoscar, President of Every Nation Leadership Institute, explained: it has to start with the discipleship DNA that is central to everything.

Indeed.