Stephen Prothero has confirmed statistically what we had perceived anecdotally. His book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know–And Doesn’t says that Americans are biblically illiterate. George Barna’s Growing True Disciples: New Strategies for Producing Genuine Followers of Christ reinforces that assessment. It’s no wonder that publication after publication today calls us to re-think our approaches to adult discipleship and the Christian Education that enables such discipleship to develop.
The challenges facing our work in adult discipleship parallel the challenges facing the entire ministry of our congregations. In our high velocity society, we can ill afford to follow the traditional practice of simply repeating last year’s program. We need to experiment with ministry designs aimed at developing adults as Christian disciples.
I say “experiment” because in our changing world, what we understand about ministry can actually mislead us. Those who once said, “I know how to lead an adult discipleship program,” need now to adapt and adopt new approaches to connect with the adults of today. So even before we begin to think about ministries of adult discipleship, we who lead them need an essential humility that holds back our preconceived opinions and opens us to fresh inquiry and experimentation.
Understanding our people
First, consider the pressures on our people today. They and we are enmeshed in a culture that consumes us with busyness and reshapes the American mind.
American culture may be described as “manic” — full tilt all the time. Adult participation in various church activities used to be the norm. All we had to do was advertise growth opportunities and people came. Today we have to compete, to connect with people face-to-face, because no bulletin announcement or brochure is going to induce them to add to their busyness.
Books like Applebee’s America by Sosnik, Dowd, and Fournier, help us understand our people’s heads and hearts. We must compete with the culture in order to grow our adults in spiritual maturity or we will continue to witness a decrease in religious literacy and in genuine discipleship.
Clarifying our goals
What are we trying to accomplish in adult discipleship? Formal educational planning uses classifications such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, centered on a combination of the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains of knowledge. Yet, the majority of adult Christian Education programs today promote information, not transformation. Do typical participants in our adult ministries experience any real and significant life change? Are they experiencing God and becoming genuinely knowledgeable about their faith and expressive in its practice? Or is their primary benefit from participating less about life transformation and more about belonging and “having a place?”
It helps to define the profile of the disciples we hope to see emerge in the lives of those we serve. We might take our clue for this from such works as Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline or Presbyterian pastor Glenn McDonald’s The Disciple-Making Church: From Dry Bones to Spiritual Vitality. By casting the vision for all becoming, “One who bears witness, prays, cares, studies the Word, is with fellow believers, is sent to serve and who gives,” you set a clear direction for your people to follow.
Making some shifts
Some recent shifts in adult ministries can help us to grow disciples.
One shift sets in motion a planning model that swings between large groups and small groups. The majority of adult opportunities today are class based or large group centered (with “large” defined as 14 or more participants). Such large size groups can offer excellent teaching, preaching, worship, and inspiration, but the attendees operate passively as “hearers.” Smaller face-to-face groups allow the hearers to become talkers. It allows them to express their own ideas and questions, to develop a conversational use of faith vocabulary, and, in the process to be known by others. It especially helps believers to pray with and for one another. Fruitful adult discipleship ministries offer this essential larger group–small group balance.
A second recent shift is from program-centered to relationship-centered ministry. As we see in the ministry of Jesus, growth in discipleship primarily results from the impact of life on life. Think of moments of spiritual development in your own life and you are likely to think of persons who shaped your faith and practice. I vividly remember taking the eight-week “blitz” Greek course under Dr. Cullen Story at Princeton Theological Seminary. In the midst of the academic challenge, Cullen would walk up and ask me how our newborn son, Lee, was doing, His personal interest and encouragement in the faith had an impact on my own discipleship that went far beyond the knowledge of language he was teaching. Materials such as Greg Ogden’s Discipleship Essentials are expressly designed to connect adults in face-to-face, relationally based, settings in which significant study and mutual encouragement lead to a remarkable development of adult discipleship.
A third shift moves through missional endeavor into adult disciple-making. The vast majority of church programs for adults today are aimed at church participants. When adult ministries realize that they exist not just to educate but to mobilize their members to reach adults who are not connected to the Christian faith, the whole approach changes. This leads to a “reach-grow-send” rhythm. The class or group reaches to draw in people of undeveloped faith, grows with them as disciples, and sends them to serve. Any adult ministry can experiment with reach-grow-send in order to engage in genuine missional endeavor while growing in discipleship and fellowship.
A fourth shift broadens adult discipleship from being the responsibility of one committee or program within a congregation’s life to being a defining characteristic of the entire congregation’s culture. Every group in the congregation is encouraged and expected to grow its own participants as disciples. For example, the Stewardship Committee becomes as focused on growing the discipleship of its own members as the ministry of stewardship to which they are called. Every group, team, and committee understands the growing of disciples to be their first priority.
This is an exciting time to engage in ministries of adult discipleship. We know we cannot just keep doing what we’ve always done and we realize there are many facets of American culture we must contend with, yet there is a great spiritual hunger in our land. Let’s go into our world and make disciples — beginning with ourselves, extending to those in fellowship with us, and reaching to those on the outside whose hearts are open.
E. Stanley Ott is the president of the Vital Churches Institute and the author of Transform Your Church with Ministry Teams.
