Five Commitments of a Disciple Maker

Today I’m sharing with you content I made recently for 12Church, which is the new venture alternative church model we’re a part of. This training really is about the five commitments that are actually required to be an effective disciple maker. It’s based on the learnings from our past year of more focused disciple making, and some of these things will be principle based and fairly obvious. Others are gonna be a little bit more tactical, practical focused, and you might be surprised in particular at one of them which is a very specific methodology that is showing up around the world in disciple making movement.

This past year has been a huge learning curve in many ways, unlearning things I’ve learned after decades of ministry and decades of being a Christian and inputting some new information, ideas and convictions that will help us be makers of disciples. So today here are the five simple trajectory, changing commitments that are required if we’re going to be disciple makers.

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The Church Vision Hamster Wheel

Your church doesn’t need a vision statement. In 12Church, we are figuring out how to be and make disciples in this time and this place, which includes of course, being all in on mission with Jesus. I really wish that’s what all churches were obsessing about rather than going through all of these exercises, trying to figure out their unique vision and unique mission and all that kind of stuff. There is a little place for that, but not the level of obsession that I’m seeing in many churches.

Before I address the fruitless, time-wasting, unbiblical practice of church vision statements, a bit of background. I pastored three different churches over 18 and a half years and spent some time in the professional speaking, internet marketing world. For the last decade plus I’ve been a transitional pastor and coach going into churches typically in crisis between lead pastors, walking through a process, getting them back to a semblance of health and helping them find a new leader.

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Introducing 12Church

Today I’m very pleased to announce that 12Church, a long time theoretical concept, has finally come to some sense of fruition. At least the seeding of it has happened in that we have officially started our alternative model of church based on missional communities, with some other little tweaks to the set-up. The basic idea is we’re built around groups that have a heavy emphasis on evangelism.

We never plan to have a building. We never plan to have a full-time pastor. In fact, my role, even at this initial roll-out stage is just kept to 20 hours a week and we intend to keep it that way. It should be a lean mean, scalable, sustainable system.

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