Creating a Disciple-Making Culture: A Perspective Shift for Churches Part 1

Bobby Harrington recently sat down with Bart Shaw and Renee Sprouls on our Disciple Maker’s Podcast to discuss the importance of establishing a disciple-making culture in a rapidly changing world. You can listen to the Podcast along with other resources on our Disciple Making Culture Resource Page!

Creating a disciple-making culture, much as it might sound overwhelming and complex, can be simplified into core components founded on values, beliefs, behaviors, and a narrative. What matters is understanding the DNA of a disciple-making culture and the disciplines necessary for each believer to make disciples efficiently and effectively. To instigate this transformation, church leaders must lead by example, creating significant changes that seem small at first.

Culture has power over strategy in directing behaviors and actions within any organization, including churches. Church leaders must normalize the culture of making new disciples by empowering individuals in the congregation to become disciple-makers, regardless of whether or not they are leaders. The emphasis is on setting achievable goals and establishing small wins, emphasizing the need for simple and accessible goals over complex ones that might impede progress and result in complacency.

Here are some of the insights from Bobby, Renee, and Bart’s conversation about how to create a disciple-making culture:

Renee Sproles opened, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is the thing. It’s the water that we swim in, and we’re the fish. And a lot of times we don’t even know the assumptions that we bring to the culture around us.”

Bart Shaw, Discipleship Pastor of Traders Point, replied, “Culture does eat strategy for breakfast. It is the core of everything that we do. We can have all of the fancy strategies, the missions, the banners; those are great, but you have to look for the fruit. What are the things we actually do? What are the things, the stories we tell, the stories we celebrate, what are we seeing the Lord do in our midst? That’s really who we are in our culture, and so the church has a little bit of an identity crisis and we’re trying to right that ship. We’re trying to find who we are in this new world, and it’s going to require cultures in a lot of churches to shift from consumers to producers and that’s a big disciple-making shift.”

Bart went on to state: “It’s like the old analogy of a cruise ship. It takes a long time to move that big ship. But when it moves, it’s really hard to move it back in a different direction. We know we have to put a lot of energy and effort into making that shift. And it always takes time. Never as fast as we want. But it’s going to take all of those little tweaks and changes to get us there. We’re trying to be intentional. working from the top down. If our leaders and staff don’t live it out and embody the true shifts that are required to be, make disciples and be disciples, our people never will live it out. It will die with me and any of us that are trying to do that. We’re trying to build it from the leaders down and that’s where we’re starting.”

Renee further explained what a culture is, “The Harvard Business Review described it this way, ‘It is the values, beliefs, and behaviors practiced in an organization formed over time because they are rewarded or punished by formal or informal rules, rituals, and behaviors.’ Well, that sounds a little bit sophisticated and it definitely is a business concept with reward and punishment, but psychologically, the same things are true in a family or a community or in a church.”

Bart continued, “Strategy is not the main driver that makes culture happen, but you have to have good strategy, accountability, goals; metrics like those are so essential. You can’t have nothing. When we talk about making disciples, making cultural shifts, it will require accountability to those things that we uphold. It will require some new metrics that we’re evaluating to see if we’re actually hitting the mark. The stories we tell will have to change. Listen for what your people are doing and saying. To me, those are some really big buckets that you fill as you’re making that cultural shift.”

Bobby interjected, “Because we’re made in the image of God, we are culture makers. Humans are by default culture makers. So, it’s not if we’re going to create a culture in our churches, it’s what kind of culture are we going to create? It’s going to happen. It’s inevitable.”

In part 2 of this blog series, we will look at how to use values, beliefs, behaviors, and narrative to create a disciple-making culture in a church.

Check out our other resources on our new Disciple Making Culture Resource Page!