Tag: christlikeness

As we continue our discussion on creating a strategy for discipleship within your church or ministry, I want to look at four levels of growth people go through in the discipleship journey. (Click here for part 1 of our discipleship strategy series.)

These four levels will give us a grid for how to view our interactions with others, determined by where they are in their own journey with Christ. As we learn to keep disciple-making at the forefront of our minds in every interaction with others, this will help us to see where they are, and inform our efforts to help them draw closer to Christ and to maturity in Him.

Of course these four levels could be broken down even further into many sub-categories, but keeping it simple will enable us to grasp the challenges and opportunities we have with each group, and form a plan for raising them up.

1. The Non-Believer

While this is not technically a level on the discipleship spectrum, I want to include it here because it is the place all of us start from. In our efforts to make disciples, it is necessary to view every person in relationship to where they are in Christ, and so we might simply say these people are pre-Christ. They haven’t met Him yet. Which tells us how we need to be interacting with them .

Jesus loves the world so much that He gave up His own life to redeem ours. In Him, all of humanity has been called back to the Father and has a divine opportunity to be conformed to the image of Christ. Our interactions with non-believers should be intentional to speak in love, offering the life-giving gospel to them as the Holy Spirit gives us the opportunity.

The desired outcome of our time with these people is that as they would encounter Jesus through us, will be drawn to Him, and receive salvation.

2. The New Believer

Once someone has been born-again by putting their faith in Christ, the next step is to help them understand the foundations of the Christian life. They are no longer lost sinners, but unless there has been a supernatural breakthrough which brought them into salvation, they will likely still struggle with what it means to be a Christian.

It is at this stage that we must impart to the new believer the foundation of their new identity in Christ. The old man has passed away, and the new man is breaking through. Yet it is a process to see the new man come in maturity, so we must help them.

In developing a discipleship strategy for these men and women, it can be a good idea to use a topical approach in your discipleship meetings. We can use their hunger to grow, and take them to the basics of the Christian life. These would be things like:

• what is salvation and repentance
• how are we born again,
• what does it mean to pray, 
• how do you hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, 
• why is Bible study important,
• why they should join in a church fellowship.

This list can be much longer, depending on how the Holy Spirit leads you in developing your own teaching, and we will discuss this topic in more depth in a future post. But for now, we simply need to understand that the goal at this stage of discipleship is that these people would begin to leave the old life behind, and start taking steps to live as a follower of Christ.

3. The Growing Disciple

Once a person has integrated into the Christian life and is operating as part of the local fellowship of believers, there will come a day that topical lessons have less of an impact on their walk with the Lord. That is not to say that all believers cannot benefit from specific teachings on certain points of the Christian life. Simply that there will come a hunger for “the meat of the word,” and not the basic things – “the milk” – given to babes in Christ.

It is at this stage that we must ensure that these men and women can begin to walk out their own discipleship and growth, through the word of God and in intimacy with the Holy Spirit.

One practical way you can teach people to study the Word of God, as we have discussed in another post, is called the R.E.A.P. Method. While this is not original to myself, I love it because it is simple enough to teach and remember. You simply teach people that with every passage of scripture you should (R)ead, (E)xamine what it means and the principles it teaches, (A)pply these lessons to your life and decide how you will live them out, and then (P)ray for the Holy Spirit to help you do so.

As they are learning to pray for the Holy Spirit’s help, they must also be learning to hear His voice and discern His leadership in their lives. While your church probably has its own beliefs and convictions about how involved the Holy Spirit is in our daily lives, we must make sure we are not limiting Him through willful unbelief. We will discuss this topic in more detail in a future post as well.

The goal with believers at this stage is to let go of handholding Christianity, and enable believers to grow on their own. They will still need guidance along the way, but they cannot remain dependent on others for ongoing growth.

4. The Mature Leader

The final level of discipleship comes when a person has not only learned how to hear the voice of God and grow themselves in the Word of God, but they have a growing track record of practicing these things regularly.

When they reach the point of truly knowing who they are in Christ, and are living out a respectable level of Christian maturity, then the discipleship process turns to them becoming disciple-makers themselves. We might call this a vision-centered discipleship.

What I mean by this is that not only are they learning to walk in Christ more every day, but as their relationship with Him matures, they will begin to have God-given visions of gospel improvement to their family of faith, their neighborhoods and community, and even for national revival. They will no longer simply be pursuing their own growth in the Lord, but naturally they will being leading others toward growth in Him as well.

For these people, stepping into leadership may not be automatic, but it should be encouraged.

As far as it concerns a discipleship strategy, it is at this level that a church should be seeking to impart the vision and values of the ministry into the person, as they begin to lead others down the line. These people should learn what the greater vision God has given to the ministry and how the leadership strives to live it out.

For example, in my own ministry we have 5 “cultural values” which should mark every pastor, missionary, or leader in our ministry, and should be trickling down to every church member and short-term team member. These are things like “bible-loving” and “prayer-led,” which are vital to any ministry and to every maturing disciple. Yet we also have more distinct values such as “identity-driven” and “revival-longing.” Those things need pressed into people growing into maturity within our ministry.

Imparting things like their identity in Christ into the vision they have to serve others will prevent things like a spirit of competition or a poverty mindset. It is not simply a mental understanding of the new man that is necessary, but a practical outworking of their inheritance and authority as sons and daughters of God.

To teach them what it means to be revival-longing, is to impart the vision our ministry has for holiness, justice, community restoration, healing, deliverance, and mass salvations. These things drive how our ministry works from day-to-day, as well as how we pray and seek God as a team of ministers.

The point is that as a person begins to step up into spiritual maturity, our strategy must include a plan to help them become leaders within the church and community, and that means teaching not just the biblical theology and foundations of Christianity, but also imparting the specific callings and giftings that God has given to your ministry for your area of service. The goal is that they will continue the mission of making-disciples in the next generation of believers.

(Click here to begin exploring these four levels in depth.)

Photo by Andrej Lišakov on Unsplash