Article
Two Shifts to Spark Your Disciple-Making Movement
A discipleship pathway is crucial for the success of your disciple-making movement, but a pathway without a clear picture of who you’re developing will never work.
In the 1920s, it’s believed that two of every three cars on the road were a Ford Model T. Henry Ford changed the automobile industry forever. Not only did his Model T become the most popular vehicle of all time, but he also sparked the Industrial Revolution in North America. He did it by making two simple shifts: He got a clear picture of success and created a clear process to achieve it.
A Picture and a Process
In 1913, he created one of the most famous innovations of all time: the assembly line. Just as important, he stopped making the Model R and the Model S vehicles. He made only one vehicle. He made a Model T. And he did it in only one color, black. He’s quoted as saying, “You can have a Model T in any color you want as long as it’s black.” See, it was this clear picture of success that he got of a black Ford Model T that allowed the assembly line to work.
If Henry Ford had not clearly defined what his staff was to develop, they each would have created their own version of the car they were developing. The result would have been a chaotic process, a frustrated staff, and an underwhelming end product. Unfortunately, churches experience the exact same thing.
A Dream Disciple and a Discipleship Pathway
In the last few years, nearly every church I talk with wants to improve its church strategy. But many of these are set up to fail because they don’t know what their success looks like. They don’t have what we call a dream disciple. That’s a compelling and contextual picture of how their people’s lives will be different if they begin to follow Jesus and join the church’s mission. The result is that the staff all have different versions of what a disciple looks like. They’re not unified in what they’re trying to develop or who they’re trying to help their people become.
A discipleship pathway is crucial for the success of your disciple-making movement, but a pathway without a clear picture of who you’re developing will never work. You must have both a dream disciple and a discipleship pathway. A dream disciple has the individual traits that you’re trying to develop in your people. A discipleship pathway is the organizational environment that you create to help them grow into that. The dream disciple is who people are going to become. The discipleship pathway is what they need to grow into the dream disciple.
Henry Ford got a clear picture of success and created a clear process for it. These two shifts revolutionized the manufacturing industry forever. If your church can identify these same two shifts, a clear picture (a dream disciple) and a clear process (a discipleship pathway), you can spark your disciple-making movement.
For more discipleship training, watch the free Kingdom Multiplication course.
