Katdish (Kathy Richards) asked a great question on a previous post of mine, and I realized my reply needed to be it’s own post. Here is what she asked:

We’re in the beginning stages of planting a church. I’ve been reading quite a few blogs about church planting. I like what I’ve been reading for the most part. My biggest challenge/question to date has been how do we convince the “regular” church people that they need to leave the building in order to follow Christ? I just think they’re missing out on what it means to really impact the world. The “build it and they will come” philosophy just isn’t working anymore — if it ever really did.

My basic answer is “If you can figure that out, you can write a book!” It is the number one question on the minds of most missional thinkers and leaders today. It is the “uncharted waters” of missional churches. Most “missional” churches are new church plants, and they launch with mostly new or non-believers. Very few people have been successful in taking an established church, and leading it to become missional.

One book that begins to deal with this issue is Breaking the Missional Code by Ed Stetzer and David Putnam. They suggest some ways that established churches can become missional.

Though I own the book (see my post from yesterday!), I haven’t read the book yet, but here are my suggestions:
1. Study Christ. In the teaching times of the church, emphasize the radical teaching and mission of Jesus. 
2. Study Culture. Help your church understand the culture it is in. American (or Australian, German, whatever), plus the more local microculture within your city and neighborhood. Figure out what kind of people are there, what they value, how they think, and what they do for fun.
3. Creatively bring the two (Christ and Culture) together. As you study the teachings of Christ, and you see how He lived what He taught, come up with tangible ways you and your church can do similar things in your own cultural context. He fed 5000. How can you feed 50 homeless people in your community? He showed love to a woman caught in adultery. How can you show love to prostitutes, single mothers, and strippers? When you have an idea, go do it. Even if only a few show up to help, that is a start.
4. Celebrate and share the stories. In your services, share the stories of the people’s lives you touched. This will encourage more to get involved the next time.

If you really want to get radical, try something a little subversive. A while back there was a man moving into our neighborhood, and for various reason I knew he needed help moving into his house, and didn’t have anybody to help him. I also knew that if I called around, I might be able to get 2-3 guys to help, but that wouldn’t be enough. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and so I went over to the man and said, “At 7:00 tonight, about a dozen men from our church will show up to unload your moving van. It’ll take us about an hour.”

How could I promise this? Here’s the subversive part: On Wednesday nights, we have a men’s Bible study. Generally about a dozen men come. I knew that if I called and told each man that we were going to “go help someone unload a moving truck rather than study the Bible” few would come. So I didn’t tell them. When they showed up, I said, “Hey, instead of study the Bible, we’re going to go serve our neighbor instead. Let’s go!” And we helped the man unload his truck. It took about an hour. And everybody enjoyed it. Well, one or two grumbled, but it was still fun.

You could maybe do something similar on a Sunday morning, although you might want to tell people in advance. Say “Hey, we’ve been talking about how Jesus loves children. Next week, rather than meet here for Sunday service, let’s all meet down at the kiddie park. I’ve been noticing that the benches need painting and lots of trash needs to be picked up. We’re going to go clean up the park for the kids. It’s not going to take any extra time, because we’re going when you would have been in church anyway. Instead of being in church, we’re going to go be the church.”

What is the best program for making good disciples? In other words, how can a person be adequately trained and prepared to be a follower of Jesus?

If you check with the local Christian bookstore, you will find that the most common way to disciple someone is to take them through some sort of discipleship manual. This book or workbook is designed to teach the person some basic biblical and theological truths as well as some instruction on basic Christian disciplines like praying, reading the Bible, attending church, and tithing. This is why discipleship almost universally takes place in a “discipleship class” and is often a subset of the “Christian education” department.

I’m not against such methods…except that they don’t seem to work. Very few people who go through such programs actually end up acting much like Jesus. If the goal of a discipleship program is to help a person act like Jesus, then our discipleship programs are failing.

Discipleship = Serviceship
The best discipleship program is one that follows the actual method Jesus used in making disciples. Did He teach His followers the Bible, how to pray, and what to do with their money? Absolutely. But unlike most discipleship programs today, Jesus always taught His followers within the context of service. They would go feed 5000 people, and then He would teach them. They would go heal the sick and then He would teach them. He sent them out two by two, and when they came back, He would teach them. Teaching was almost never isolated from mission and service.

You want life transformation to result from your discipleship programs? Add mission. Add service. Don’t just teach; obey (Matt 28:20). I have often thought that a better word for discipleship might be serviceship, or better yet, apprenticeship. How does an apprentice learn best? By doing.

All Together Now!
And this service and mission is not a later stage or second step to discipleship. It’s not (1) learn, then (2) serve. Ideally, learning and service go together. However, we often banish new believers off into the endless cycle of Bible studies so they can learn basic Christian doctrine before we let them serve. And instead of taking the class, and then going out and serving, they often just move from one class to another. They emerge thirty years later with a well-worn Bible, bloodshot eyes, and a hyper-critical, judgmental, puffed-up personality and ivory-tower attitude that is no longer useful for service.

To maintain a soft heart, a proper discipleship program trains both the head and the hands.