I’m incredibly excited about what is happening in our church right now. We’re really dialing in on discipleship, more than ever, in a variety of ways. As we assessed the health of our church, we evaluated the four “selfs” of a viable church plant.
- Self-Governing – a church led by a plurality of elders
- Self-Sustaining – a church financially supported by its own people
- Self-Reproducing – a church that multiplies disciples, missional communities, and church plants
- Self-Gospeling – a church that is equipped to apply the gospel to itself and to its own cultural context
Our Steps towards Viral Discipleship
After sharing our progress on each “self” on a Sunday morning, we have focused in on Self-reproducing. In order to avoid becoming a church that has a shelf-life, we need to reproduce on a micro and macro level. We need reproductive gospel DNA. Although our staff and some of our leadership were practicing reproductive discipleship; it was not viral. Therefore, I wrote a paper on “The Missing Ingredient of Reproductive Discipleship” and discussed it with our elders and staff. Then, after refining our thoughts, we then turned our attention to practical steps for cultivating reproductive discipleship. Those steps included:
- Casting Vision to our Leaders about Reproductive Disciple-making
- A message on The Mission of Making Disciples
- Working through a Gospel/Community/Mission Primer in our missional communities.
- Our MCs making a missional commitment to disciple-making.
- Identifying & training disciples through 12: Making the Gospel Viral
We’re hopeful that this will lead to viral discipleship and missional faithfulness in passing the gospel of Jesus on. Pray for us if you think about it.
