The Future of Discipleship

Discipleship means different things to different people, but all churches are designed to carry out the Great Commission of GOING and making disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, TEACHING them to obey everything He has commanded us. 

In other words, discipleship and disciple-making are pretty important to Jesus. 

Larry Osborne has defined discipleship as taking your next step of obedience. Eugene Peterson defines it as “long obedience in the same direction”. Both are great definitions, but at the end of the day, discipleship is about “becoming” and disciple-making is about helping people become. It’s an issue of identity and obedience, stepping into who God has called us to be. Obedience is the act of letting go of who we think we are and the sin that robs us of our purpose to become more like Jesus in the way that God uniquely created us to be. 

Discipleship is a personal and communal process. Disciple-making is an intentional strategy for churches to help people take their next step of obedience to Christ. 

Our purpose of being disciple-making churches has not changed, but as people’s behaviors and expectations change, so will our strategies if we are going to be effective in our purpose of making disciples. So what has changed? 

The biggest change in people over the past twenty years is a move away from something called a synchronous event (time and place) towards an asynchronous expectation (what I want when I want it). 

As an example, OneHope published an article on Gen Alpha (kids born after 2010) that terrifies me as a father of a 9 and 7-year-old. In short, Gen Alpha are true digital natives. Here are a few takeaways if you don’t have time to read the article:

• 66% of children have a tablet before age 5
• Gen Alpha spends an average of 2:24 DAILY on screens
• 64% would rather be a YouTube influencer than the President of the United States 
• Less than half of Gen Alpha lives with both of their parents 

• • “Only 1% of parents say that they want their church ministry to be the same as it was pre-pandemic”

Andddd….. People are now attending church on an average of just over once per month. If we thought Gen Z was tough to reach with our current models, just wait. 

In other words, in a completely synchronous model (bringing kids to church once per month), kids are being discipled by YouTube 72 hours per month (2:24 per day over 30 days), while being discipled by us just over an hour per month. Am I the only one terrified by that? 

Anecdotally, the most interesting and common perspective I have observed from leaders is that a need to focus on digital engagement may be “real”, but not important. It’s still not an integral part of the overall church strategy, just a project being managed by one under-resourced person on staff who has no team, financial resources, or real tools to build out a digital strategy. 

Gen Alpha is not alone. Most people spend way more time on screens and YouTube, listening to audiobooks, or watching Netflix than they spend at church. Asynchronous activity, whether it is content consumption or shopping, is the new norm. It’s what people expect:

“I need to find what I am looking for, now.”

How do we disciple generations of people who no longer see relevance in time and place events? Do we continue to try to convince them to adapt to us, or do we figure out ways to adapt to them (1 Corinthians 9:19-23)? 

I promised that I would not opine on my definitions of discipleship, but can we at least agree on this?: discipleship boils down to making the Gospel a part of people’s everyday lives through our local churches more than it is about weekly church attendance. If we agree on that, we can also agree that we cannot ask people to come to church every day, but what we can do with technology is take church to people every day and help them take daily steps towards becoming more like Jesus and fulfilling the unique purpose that they were designed for by Jesus. 

We recently interviewed Tim Lucas and Lauren Bercarich from Liquid Church in Parsippany, NJ. Last year, Ministry Solutions Group helped Liquid Church walk through its digital strategy, and Pastor Tim had a very unique vision to “turn devices of distraction into devices of discipleship” by making the Gospel a part of people’s everyday lives through Liquid Church. Here are the results:

• 10k app downloads in the first week 
• Over 4k weekly active users 
• During a 5-week series on prayer, they set a goal of 100k prayers submitted and prayed for and ended up having over 150k prayers 

Liquid Church, Crossroads, Saddleback, and others who are implementing these digital strategies of daily discipleship over weekly consumption are seeing that these two strategies are complimentary, not competitive. Meaning, that when digital strategies are focused on daily discipleship, both attendance and discipleship grow. 

So how do we do that, knowing not every person is designed the same way and called to the same thing? 

We help people identify the behaviors of a disciple versus forcing a linear discipleship pathway. 

Meaning, here are some examples of the activities that we want people to be engaged in if they are truly walking in their faith: 

• Daily time with God 
• Prayer 
• Generosity: giving and serving 
• Bible reading 
• Community: we grow better together 
• Sharing their story
• Inviting 
• Fill in the blanks with what is important to you 

Whatever those things are, we have the opportunity to use technology to help people on their journey, IF we get away from making that a time and place event once per week and focus on using technology to meet them where they are daily. What are some practical ways that might look like if our apps were designed for daily discipleship instead of sermon consumption and giving? 

• Daily guided prayer 
• Having an online prayer team praying for people during the week 
• Breaking down sermon series into daily focuses 
• Small group outlines with questions 
• One question per day to ask your kids at the dinner table based on what they are learning at church
• Daily questions for spouses to ask each other over 21 days 
• Searchable content: help people find what they are looking for when they need it most 

I want to share a personal perspective with you as the owner of a company that has managed and funded over $1B of church projects all over North America in the past ten years. Churches spend an average of $8k to $10k per seat on building projects. For a 750-seat venue, that’s $6M to $7.5M. However, when it comes to spending $50k on a useful app that serves thousands of people daily and has an unlimited number of “seats”, there is major pushback. Why is that? Don’t get me wrong, buildings are still incredibly important, and in-person engagement cannot be replaced, but do we not want our people to have guided access to Jesus and to each other during the week? For most churches, their apps simply don’t provide any level of a differentiated experience: sermons they can get on YouTube, bulletin boards they can get on a website, and options to give for people who don’t give or are already giving. And we wonder why our usage rates are so low. 

I believe that the Church of the Future will offer a holistic, synergistic, and daily experience for people, not a one-day, 60-90-minute experience. But a digital experience will cannibalize our in-person experience, right? Wrong. All the data suggests the opposite is true. The more relevant you are to people during the week daily, the more they will want to engage with you in person. 

We love helping churches create clarity around their strategies. If you are interested in identifying ways to reach more people and be more impactful in your disciple-making strategies, we can help! Click on the link below to schedule a free consultation with one of our consultants.