Be Intentional

Dear Discipleship-first Friends,

This is the sixth and final article in our series on often-overlooked advice on how to lead a church in Jesus-styled disciple making. To recap, the first five areas of advice we looked at were:

I thought it fitting to conclude with this last piece of (often-overlooked) advice… Be Intentional.

What I mean by being intentional is to be structured and purposeful in our approach to disciple making. Often in churches, we sometimes rely on things being “organic.” However, it might also be fair to say, in so doing, an unintended outcome can often mean “haphazard.” Yes, disciple making is a process that grows organically in relationships but there is a place for structure, as well. As Paul wrote:

“For God is not a God of disorder but of peace […]. But everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way.” (1 Corinthians 14:33, 40).

We want disciple making to grow organically, but we need to be organized and disciplined at some point. Think about it like a garden or a grapevine. They grow organically, but they need to be watered, weeded, pruned, and controlled to produce the maximum amount of fruit. Many plants including grapes, tomatoes, and roses grow best when they have a structured trellis or frame to undergird them. This is how disciple making should work in your church. Your church’s leadership, (and some who are reading this now are a part of your church’s leadership) must create a structured frame on which disciple making organically grows.

This is not opposed to how God works. Jesus stated:

[God] cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful (John 15:2).

God uses a structured, intentional process to control the organic growth of the members of the body of Christ.

I am a bi-vocational church planter, which means I work full-time for a fairly large corporation. One of the greatest differences that I notice between corporations and the church is how intentional the business world is—and so often, the church is not. At this point, you might be tempted to throw out the, “the church is not a business” objections. However, Jesus often used the business world as an example of what the kingdom of God is like. The two most famous examples are the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30) and the Parable of the Minas (Luke 19:11-27).

In both parables, King Jesus is explaining what the expectation for the church is while He is away, and who will be rewarded when He returns. In both parables, Jesus uses the business world and the expectation of multiplication that occurs within the business world to explain the expectation that disciples of Jesus will multiply more disciples of Jesus while awaiting His return. In the business world, there is some organic growth, however, it only occurs after hard, intentional work is put into creating a structure on which that growth can occur.

Moreover, in both parables, the servants who have been intentional with what their master has entrusted to them, are the ones who are rewarded with authority in the kingdom. Conversely, the servants who fail to be intentional are reprimanded, and in the Parable of the Talents, they are cast out of the kingdom.

The reality is that most average people work in settings where there is a production standard that must be met. Most people understand the importance of doing a job intentionally so that the expected outcome is accomplished on time. That is Jesus’ point in these two parables, there is an expected outcome that must be achieved by the servants and there is an expectation that the outcome will be achieved by a certain point in time (which is unknown to them).

For the last several years I have specifically worked as a production supervisor for a 12-hour night shift. The interesting thing about being a supervisor on night shift is that for those 12 hours, you are the highest-ranking person in the plant. There are people I report to, but for most of those 12 hours those I report to are at home, sleeping in their beds, and they don’t typically appreciate me waking them up in the middle of the night to ask them questions about what I should do; they have a reasonable expectation that I am able to make decisions, independently, to ensure that the plant produces the expected amount of production, in the expected amount of time.

I am like the servants in the parables. My superiors hand me the wealth of the factory and instruct me to intentionally manage and multiply that wealth over the next 12 hours until they return the following morning. Each night I make decisions that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and each morning I am expected to give an account of what the plant has produced while under my supervision.

When I first became a supervisor, there were several times that the plant did not produce what it should have produced while on my watch – and my manager would call (and wake me up) to ask me to explain what had happened during the 12-hour period the prior night. The wrong answer would have been for me to make excuses or say that I had just given up on the production goals.

My manager was a good man and I consider him a friend, but we both understood that the security of our jobs and the success of the company depended on us producing what we had been entrusted to produce. He and I also agreed that the jobs that our plant created in the local area were important to our community and we needed to perform our responsibilities to the best of our abilities to ensure this broader success as well. The greatest thing my manager did to help me to be successful in my role was to keep me accountable. He also helped me to understand that not only am I tasked with managing production, but I am tasked with creating a culture, on my shift, that supports and encourages productivity.

In that first supervisor role, I developed a bit of a reputation for walking bad employees out of the plant, when necessary. It was not that I walked that many people out of the plant, but that other supervisors often hesitated to walk people out.

However, I had a philosophy that obligated me to take action when someone convinced me they couldn’t adapt to the culture we were creating. My philosophy was that I couldn’t punish good employees by forcing them to work with bad employees, nor was I going to reward a bad employee by allowing them to continue to benefit from working there. I was intentionally creating a culture in which productivity could organically flourish.

It is important to note, before we separated from an employee, we would offer them the opportunity to adapt to the culture we were attempting to create. I have had quite a few “Come to Jesus” meetings with employees that involved me explaining what the expectations were and how the employee was not meeting those expectations. I am often amazed, after such conversations, at how truly blind people can be, at times, as to what is going on around them.

One of the most egregious cases that I recall, was an employee who was still making excuses for not meeting expectations, as I led him out the front door. As we stood at the door, I expressed as plainly as I could, “I don’t know where you think you are, but you are not there.” He thought he had found the place where he could hang out and do nothing all night. But he was not actually in that place at all. The place where he thought he was, didn’t exist.

One of our responsibilities as church leadership is to intentionally create a structured church culture where everyone knows what the expectations are and how we are going to achieve those expectations. Moreover, when someone in the church steps outside of those expectations, it is our job to lovingly correct them back into the culture. We are creating a structure on which disciple making grows, and then pruning and further supporting that structure, as it grows.

After I moved from one plant to another, I was replaced by a new supervisor who failed to properly manage the production and failed to create a culture conducive to success. I was confident the new supervisor was capable of doing the job – I had even been the one who had trained him to do the job. He did not lack the intelligence to do the job – quite the opposite, but he did lack the intentionality to do the job well. Ultimately the lack of intentionality cost that person their job. The stakes were too high to allow him to continue to mismanage the production of the plant, night after night.

As church leaders we should take our positions more seriously than any supervisor or manager running a multi-million-dollar company’s production. We should be as intentional in creating a disciple-making culture as a businessman who is attempting to multiply his investment. Serious questions need to be asked of us if we are not taking our leadership role with a great deal of soberness and solemnity.

Need some help with being intentional and creating a disciple-making culture in your church? I would encourage you to check out Brandon Guindon’s Intentional: Living Out the Eight Principles of Disciple Making, and Disciple-Making Culture: Cultivate Thriving Disciple-Makers Throughout Your Church. These are two of the best books on intentionally creating a culture of disciple making.

It is when you finally reach this point in the process, that you can begin to think about announcing the revolution.

For King Jesus,

Curt Erskine for The Discipleship.org Team