Creating a Disciple-Making Culture: A Perspective Shift for Churches Part 3

In the previous two blogs, we introduced a podcast with Bobby Harrington, Bart Shaw, and Renee Sproles on creating a disciple-making culture in a church. In the podcast, Bobby, Bart, and Renee discussed that culture eats strategy for breakfast. However, you have to have some sort of strategy to create a culture in a church. Bobby stated that the reality is that you will create a culture, it is inevitable. What you must be intentional about is using a strategy to create a specific culture that produces disciples who make disciples. You can listen to the full Podcast along with other resources on our Disciple Making Culture Resource Page!

Bobby continued: “I believe that North Americans have been trained by our culture to be consumers. Here’s what I mean we are trained by our media, by television, by radio, by the internet, to think of ourselves as we are the customers, and the customers should get what the customers want. If I’m a customer and I don’t like a product, I’m not going to buy it. I want to get good products and that’s my almost responsibility. In a culture like ours, we have been so groomed to be consumers that I’ve concluded that, it is not the fault of the church as much as oftentimes the church is trying to respond to the customer. Like the customer gets what the customer wants and it’s like, we gotta meet their needs.”

“Let me give an example. I have some friends who are most of my friends growing up. We’re not Christians. I was not a Christian. I became a Christian as an adult, young adult, and my non-Christian friends were very curious about it. And I noticed that their questions were always the same as what even mature Christians do, and that they wanted to know how many people were coming. So, my non-Christian friends have the same attitude that many Christians have. And it’s this consumer thing. Now, I’m not advocating bad sermons. I’m not advocating bad praise and worship. And I’m not saying there are no programs. I do think we need to have a limited number of programs so that people can be in discipling relationships.”

Bart responded, “That’s the challenge we’re facing, how do we give more ministry away? I think as a church, that is something we’re challenged with doing in our ministry circles, is how do we empower and enable the people around us to take the mantle of ministry? That is the challenge that we’re up against, and it’s changing expectations. We’re always evaluating things; I’m thinking through even how we welcome people and how we do first steps and things like that. A lot of it is still very consumer. What do you need? What do you want? And maybe we begin to flip that script a little bit of this is who we are. This is what we’re about. Would you like to be a part of it? Yeah, it’s trying to help them understand that we believe there’s something better for them and we don’t have all the answers, but maybe we have a pathway for them. That’s clear enough that they can decide to jump on or not. but we are always fighting that consumer mindset, all the time.”

Renee added, “Yeah, we’re fighting against not just consumer culture, but an expert culture. So, we love our experts in the culture at large. Instead, we should be helping people realize like if you are a first grader, you can go teach a kindergartner. If you are a fifth grader, you can help a fourth or a third grader. just in some of this, the simplest ways. We have a huge Sunday school program at our church. Hundreds and hundreds of people come to that and we’re not going to just throw that out the window because we maybe want to push discipleship. But what my husband and I have found as we teach Sunday morning is to turn on its head what traditional Sunday school teaching is in order to create this culture of discipleship. So, we will, a lot of times, do teaching for about 10 minutes, and then have the class come up, turn to their neighbor and come up with good questions.”

“We circle them up, a handful of people in the middle of the room, and then they discuss the topic with our guidance if we need to kind of, if I need to, like, correct a heresy or something, I’m there, I can, like, redirect. but they were very taken aback at first when we started doing this with them because they were expecting, well, aren’t you the experts? You just tell us. You just tell us what to think. I want you to think and I want you to wrestle with this. and I keep telling them pretend you’re explaining this to your 2nd grader and you’re trying to explain to them how to understand this and pushing it to them and expecting them to come back next week from the teaching they’ve received and give testimony about what they did. So just something as simple as changing how you do Sunday school If you’re not gonna stop doing Sunday school. Then that’s just a way you can start to create a disciple-making culture Now they come into class, and they go are we gonna circle up and at first that’s your culture. At first there was terror, now there’s excitement.”

Renee continued, “When I was thinking about culture, who has got it going on with culture? Yes, Chick-fil-A. It’s God’s chicken. Right? When you walk into Chick-fil-A, they have their people trained. They have these four things that are, I went and looked them up on the internet. They value eye contact. a smile, a friendly tone, and saying my pleasure. You’re going to get that everywhere you go. they train them to do it. They expect them to go out and do it. And, and they celebrate it, and they reward their people for behaving in those ways. That’s it. Find your head, heart, and hands. Go be Chick-fil-A.”

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