The Trellis and the Vine (16 page)

Chapter 12.
Making a start

We began, some time ago it now seems, with a vine, a trellis, and the Great Commission. And we made a promise at the start that we would offer no new special technique, no magic bullet, and no guaranteed path to ministry success and stardom.

We did this because Christian ministry is really not very complicated. It is simply the making and nurturing of genuine followers of the Lord Jesus Christ through prayerful, Spirit-backed proclamation of the word of God. It’s disciple-making.

This is not hard to understand, nor even hard to do—unless, of course, you happen to be a sinful person living in a sinful world. The deceptively simple task of disciple-making is made demanding, frustrating and difficult in our world, not because it is so hard to grasp but because it is so hard to persevere in.

This is why we are such suckers for the latest ministry expert, who has always grown a church of at least 5000 from scratch, and who has a guaranteed method for growing your church to be like his. Every five or ten years, a new wave comes through. It might be the seeker-service model, or the purpose-driven model, or the missional-cultural-engagement model, or whatever the next thing will be. All of these methodologies have good things going for them, but all of them are equally beside the point—because our goal is not to grow churches, but to make disciples.

Let’s tie together our thoughts with the following propositions.

1. Our goal is to make disciples

The aim of Christian ministry is not to build attendance on Sunday, bolster the membership roll, get more people into small groups, or expand the budget (as important and valuable as all of these things are!). The fundamental goal is to make disciples who make other disciples, to the glory of God. We want to see people converted from being dead in their transgressions to being alive in Christ; and, once converted, to be followed up and established as mature disciples of Jesus; and, as they become established, to be trained in knowledge, godliness and skills so that they will in turn make disciples of others.

This is the Great Commission—the making of disciples. The touchstone of a thriving church is that it is making genuine disciple-making disciples of Jesus Christ.

2. Churches tend towards institutionalism as sparks fly upward

Churches inevitably drift towards institutionalism and secularization. The focus shifts from the vine to the trellis—from seeing people grow as disciples to organizing and maintaining activities and programs. As pastors, we come to think only in structural and corporate terms. We fret about getting people into groups, increasing numbers at various programs, putting on events for people to come to, and so on. We stop thinking and praying about
people
and where each one is up to in gospel growth, and focus instead on driving a range of group activities—attendance at which (we assume) will equal growth in discipleship.

But going to groups and activities doesn’t generate growth in discipleship, any more than going to hear the Sermon on the Mount made you a disciple of Jesus. Many of those who hung around with Jesus, and followed him at different times, were not genuine disciples. The crowds flocked to him for many reasons, but they just as quickly flocked away again.

3. The heart of disciple-making is prayerful teaching

The word ‘disciple’ means, above all else, ‘learner’ or ‘pupil’. And this is how we become disciples and grow as disciples: by hearing and learning the word of Christ, the gospel, and having its truth applied to our hearts by the Holy Spirit. The essence of ‘vine work’ is the prayerful, Spirit-backed speaking of the message of the Bible by one person to another (or to more than one). Various structures, activities, events and programs can provide a context in which this prayerful speaking can take place, but without the speaking it is all trellis and no vine.

4. The goal of all ministry—not just one-to-one work—is to nurture disciples

There is no one pure context or structure for discipling. In some places, the ‘discipling movement’ has hijacked the language of disciple-making to imply that only one-to-one mentoring constitutes true disciple-making, and that church meetings, small groups and other corporate gatherings do not.
The goal of all Christian ministry, in all its forms, is disciple-making
. The sermon on Sunday should aim to make disciples, as should the small group that meets on Tuesday night, the men’s breakfast that happens once a month, and the informal gathering of Christian friends that happens on Saturday afternoons.

The pendulum seems to swing in these matters. As we write this, in most of the churches we know and visit, the problem is that there is not nearly enough one-to-one personal work happening. Structured activities and group events have taken over, and those on the pastoral team spend their time organizing and managing rather than chasing and discipling and training people. They themselves spend very little time working with and training individuals, and those individuals in turn spend very little time meeting with and training other individuals. The focus has shifted away from individuals and their growth as disciples, to activities and events and growth in numbers.

5. To be a disciple is to be a disciple-maker

Jesus gave his disciples a vision for worldwide disciple-making. No corner of creation is off limits, and no disciple is exempt from the work.

We naturally shrink from the radical nature of this challenge. It replaces our comfortable, cosy vision of the ‘nice Christian life’ with a call for all Christians to devote their lives to making disciples of Jesus.

‘Disciple-making’ is a really useful word to summarize this radical call, because it encompasses both reaching out to non-Christians and encouraging fellow Christians to grow like Christ. As Matthew 28 says, to “make disciples” is to baptize people into Christ, teaching them to obey all that Jesus commanded. Disciple-making, then, refers to a massive range of relationships and conversations and activities—everything from preaching a sermon to teaching a Sunday school class; from chatting over the proverbial back fence with a non-Christian neighbour to writing an encouraging note to a Christian friend; from inviting a family member to hear the gospel at a church event to meeting one to one to study the Bible with a fellow Christian; from reading the Bible to your children to making a Christian comment over morning tea at the office.

6. Disciple-makers need to be trained and equipped in conviction, character and competence

If this disciple-making vision is correct, then an integral part of making disciples is teaching and training every disciple to make other disciples. This training is not simply the imparting of certain skills or techniques. It involves nurturing and teaching people in their understanding and knowledge (their convictions), in their godliness and way of life (their character), and in their abilities and practical experience of ministering to others (their competence).

This sort of training is more like parenthood than the classroom. It’s relational and personal, and involves modelling and imitation. For most congregations and ministries, thinking about training in this way will require a number of significant ‘mind-shifts’ about ministry—from running programs and events to focusing on and training people; from using people to growing people; from maintaining structures to training new disciple-makers.

7. There is only one class of disciples, regardless of different roles or responsibilities

All Christians should be disciple-makers, and should seek to ‘grow the vine’ whenever and however we can. However, among the variety of gifts and roles that different Christians have in this task, some are given particular responsibility as pastors, overseers and elders to teach, to warn, to rebuke, and to encourage. These are the foremen and organizers of Christ’s disciple-making vision, the guardians and mobilizers, the teachers and role models. Pastors, elders and other leaders provide the conditions under which the rest of the congregation can get on with vine work—with prayerfully speaking God’s truth to others.

At a profound level, all pastors and elders are just players on the team. They do not have a different essence or status, or a fundamentally different task—as if they are the players, and the rest of the congregation are spectators or support crew. A pastor or elder is one of the vine-workers who has been given a particular responsibility to care for the people and to equip the people to be disciple-makers.

8. The Great Commission, and its disciple-making imperative, needs to drive fresh thinking about our Sunday meetings and the place of training in congregational life

What stands in the way of Christ’s disciple-making vision in Christian congregations? In most cases, it’s not a lack of people to train, or non-Christians to reach out to, but stifling patterns and traditions of church life. These obstacles may be denominational and long-standing; or they may be the result of jumping on board the latest church-growth bandwagon. They may be in the mind of the pastor, or the minds of the people, or—most likely—both.

If the goal of all our ministry is disciple-making, then many churches (and their pastors) will need to do some re-thinking about what they are seeking to achieve in their regular Sunday gatherings, and how that relates to other ministry activities during the rest of the week. This may mean starting new things, but very often it will mean closing down structures or programs that no longer effectively serve the goal of disciple-making. It may mean clearing out some of the regular activities and events so that congregation members actually have time to do some disciple-making—to meet with non-Christian friends, to get together one to one with newcomers at church, and so on. It may mean a revolution in the way the church staff see their ministry—not as service-providers, or managers, but as trainers.

9. Training almost always starts small and grows by multiplying workers

The temptation with training is always to start a new program—to run a multitude of training courses, and whack as many members of the congregation through them as possible. We bring our structural, event-based, managerial mindset to the task of training, and try to work out how to do it in bulk and efficiently. But you can’t really train people this way any more than you can parent this way. Training is personal and relational, and it takes time. It involves sharing not just skills, but also knowledge and character. It involves imitation and modelling. Training courses and other resources are very useful tools to help us with this task. They can save enormous amounts of time (in not having to devise and refine training content ourselves), and can provide excellent frameworks within which the personal, relational work of training can take place. But it must start with people, and focus on people—not programs.

In other words, if we want to start training disciples to be disciple-makers, we need to build a network of personal ministry in which people train people. And this can only begin if we choose a bunch of likely candidates and begin to train them as co-workers. This group will work alongside you, and in time will themselves become trainers of other co-workers. Some of your co-workers will fulfil their potential and become fruitful fellow labourers and disciple-makers. Others will not. But there is no avoiding this. Building a ministry based on people rather than programs is inevitably time-consuming and messy.

10. We need to challenge and recruit the next generation of pastors, teachers and evangelists

When the training engine begins to gather steam, and people within your congregation are being mobilized into ministering to others, some ‘people worth watching’ (PWWs) will float to the surface—people strong in conviction, character and competence. These PWWs are the potential ‘recognized gospel workers’ of the next generation. And if you are a pastor or elder, it is one of your God-given responsibilities to recognize, nurture, train and entrust the gospel to these “faithful men who will be able to teach others” (2 Tim 2:2).

Many churches have found a ministry apprenticeship program to be an extremely effective way of advancing this process (such as the one developed and supported by the Ministry Training Strategy).

Making a start

We hope that reading this book has set your mind racing with ideas and challenges for the ministry you are engaged in. However, it is often difficult to translate a racing mind into a set of concrete goals or action steps.

To help your thinking and planning, here is
just one
suggested plan for starting to reshape your ministry around people and training, rather than around programs and events.

Step 1: Set the agenda on Sundays

If you want to change the culture of your congregation in the direction of disciple-making and training, then this new direction needs to shape your regular Sunday gatherings.

You could, for example, preach a sermon series on ‘What is gospel growth?’, or on ‘Disciples and disciple-making’. You could set out the biblical vision of the Great Commission, and how it leads to disciples who make other disciples.

But more than that, in your regular exposition of the Scriptures:

• show how the gospel of grace shapes a life of praise and sacrifice for Christ

• enthuse the congregation with the grand eternal purposes of God to make disciples and build a fellowship of disciples under Christ’s lordship

• call the congregation to radical discipleship

• communicate the expectation that what is being taught from the pulpit is what also should be passed on to others (you might provide summaries or discussion questions for use in personal ministry)