Life on life

I have often said it’s all about making disciples, but when it came right down to it, I was hoping it was happening in my church rather than being intentional about it happening in my church. What’s the plan? How do we bring people along in the discipleship process? "Uh, I don’t know, but it’s important!" Doesn’t make any sense does it? Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying we should buy a curriculum and have people fill in the workbook; I’m talking about being intentional about doing life on life.

Community groups

My church does it through our Community Groups. We are a new church trying to implement this plan, it’s messy and we’re having to contend for it, but we are seeing the fruit. The first year of our groups consist of telling the story of redemptive history. Believers need to know God story, know their place in God’s story, know that it’s not a story about them, and know that God is saying something about himself through their lives. We ask simple questions at the end of each story. Who is God? What did God do? Who are we? What do we do? They are not always formed the same, but essentially that’s what the questions are getting at.

The second year we tell 32 stories from the life and ministry of Jesus. We ask questions like, what do we learn about Jesus?, what is Jesus teaching his disciples?, what is Jesus teaching you?, and how can you make disciples like Jesus did?

The third year is 30 stories from Acts. Again asking questions about what the Holy Spirit was doing, what the disciples did, and how can we be disciples who make disciples?

Chronological Bible Storying

We didn’t invent any of this. One of our elders was trained by J.O. Terry and influenced by Avery Willis, both on the front line of what’s called Chronological Bible Storying, which is a strategy for making disciples who make disciples in oral cultures. If you want to learn more about CBS, you can read posts from Sam Poe by clicking here.