Discipleship

Please Stop Helping Me Fulfill My Potential

If your ministry is about helping people reach their full potential, I have a favor to ask.

Leave me alone. Please.

I’m not interested.

I’ve chosen to be a follower of Jesus. A disciple. Something I do imperfectly on my best days. But from the moment I chose do that, even poorly, I gave up ownership of my life.
My life is no longer mine. It’s his. So my goals don’t matter anymore. Fulfilling my potential is not enough. Not for me, my church, my family or my ministry.

I don’t want my best. I want God’s best. Because his ideas are different than mine. And his best is be

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Please Stop Helping Me Fulfill My Potential

If your ministry is about helping people reach their full potential, I have a favor to ask.

Leave me alone. Please.

I’m not interested.

I’ve chosen to be a follower of Jesus. A disciple. Something I do imperfectly on my best days. But from the moment I chose do that, even poorly, I gave up ownership of my life.
My life is no longer mine. It’s his. So my goals don’t matter anymore. Fulfilling my potential is not enough. Not for me, my church, my family or my ministry.

I don’t want my best. I want God’s best. Because his ideas are different than mine. And his best is be

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What If We Made Disciples And Left Church Growth To God?

We’re often told that one of the reasons so many churches remain small is lack of faith. But I wonder… Could it be that the reverse is true? Might our obsession with bigger and bigger churches be rooted in a lack of faith?

Are we afraid that God might not do his part (building his church) if we simply stayed faithful to do our part (making disciples)? Is it possible that the glut of church growth books, seminars and classes in the last few decades has been our attempt to help God out?

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One And Done: Why Small Church Discipleship Is Always A Moving Target

The days of finding or creating a discipleship program, then using it for years, is over. Especially in a small church.

Our church created and implemented a great a discipleship class last year. In our church of 180 (average Sunday attendance) more than 60 adults took the class and got a lot out of it.

It’s been a huge win for us.

But I’m not going to tell you what our idea was. For two reasons.

First, because it was very specific to our church, our needs, our teaching style and our current circumstance, so the likelihood of it working elsewhere is slim.

Second, because, even though it worked really well, we’re not going to do it again.

What worked last year won’t work next year. Especially if the discipleship you’re doing is actually producing growing disciples instead of just frequent attenders.

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The Value of a Small Church: Personalized Major League Coaching

When public schools cut back on funds and have to let teachers go, what’s the biggest worry for every parent? They don’t want the class size to be too big. Even if there’s a teacher’s assistant, they want their child to have the teacher’s attention.

We understand the value of breaking into smaller groups for schools and sports. Even megachurches understand the value of getting their members to join a small group. So why do we devalue it in smaller churches?

Yes, there is value in large groups. I love big and megachurches for what they add to the body of Christ. But there is something wonderful to be gained in a church youth group where the youth pastor knows every kid by name, school and family situation.

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7 Steps to Start Becoming a Church People Want to Commit To

People who don’t go to church, don’t want to go to church. They’re not rolling out of bed late on Sunday morning wishing they had somewhere more churchy to be.

In fact, a growing number of people who do go to church don’t want to go, either. If we don’t give them something worth committing to, they’ll be gone soon.

If we don’t challenge people through a genuine experience of worship, fellowship, discipleship and ministry, they’ll do one of four things: 1) go to a church that challenges them more, 2) go to a church that entertains them better, 3) show up physically, but disengage in every other way, or 4) stopping going to church entirely.

People want to go to a church where they’re challenged by something bigger than themselves and where their gifts are being used to further that cause.

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9 Bad Habits that Limit a Church’s Ministry Capacity

Last Saturday I spent the day with our church’s key leaders and we reached one simple conclusion.

We can’t work harder. We have to work smarter.

Our church has to restructure in a way that allows for greater ministry capacity.

This is not about church growth. Although that might happen, and we’ll welcome it if it does. It’s about ministry growth. Equipping disciples better so they can do more effective ministry.

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Mentoring Is Better than Curriculum: Seven Steps to Better Discipleship

We need a serious attitude adjustment about the value of mentoring.

Small churches don’t have to mentor, we get to mentor!

If we want to feel sorry for anyone, we should feel sorry for the big churches. They have too many people to mentor, so they’re stuck using curriculum. (Not really, but it’s nice to think about, right?)

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Movies In Church: Use Pop Culture, But Don’t Let It Use You

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

When I wrote my last post, Uh, Pastor… Being Right Is Not an Excuse to Be Mean, I ended it with those words from the Spider-Man comics.

It is perhaps the most famous quote from superhero comics and movies (thanks to Stan Lee and Peter Parker’s uncle Ben).

Because I used that quote, I was tempted to make it the title of my post and use a photo of Spider-Man to accompany it.

Here’s why I didn’t.

The Sign On the Front Door Matters

There’s an old, true saying in leadership circles:

What you win them with is what you win them to.

I didn’t choose to attract readers to my last post with a Spider-Man quote and photo because I wasn’t interested in attracting them to Spider-Man or superheroes.

When people were done reading that post, I wanted my readers to be thinking about how pastors need to be careful with our words, so that’s what I put in the title and accompanying photo.

In today’s post, I want you to walk away thinking about how we need to be careful about how we use words and images from popular culture, so I put that in the title. And I used a photo of a little dog in an ill-fitting Spider-Man suit because I think it illustrates the point of this post well – there are some ideas that might seem cute at the time, but they don’t fit like they should.

Provide an Alternative, Not More of the Same

I have no problem using references from pop culture to illustrate truth – I used a Spider-Man quote in my last post, after all. And I’ve made multiple references to pop culture in previous posts (including quoting Keith Richards, Reality TV shows and The Big Bang Theory sitcom, among others). But I’m beginning to tire of the tendency among pastors and Christian bloggers to link so much of our speaking and writing directly from the popular culture.

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