Did you know?
That the color red does NOT make bulls angry. Bats aren’t blind. If you shave your hair, it doesn’t come back thicker. Dogs can see more than black and white. If you touch a baby bird with your bare hands, its mother won’t reject it. And cracking your knuckles won’t give you arthritis.
Each of these commonly held beliefs are myths that have been accepted as truth. Discerning what is truth and what is a myth can be exceptionally hard. We come to believe myths to be true for many reasons: an expert told us so, everyone else around us believed it, that’s how we always thought about it, we thought our personal experience validated it, the myth seemed logical or the truth seemed absurd.
What if there are myths in ministry that we have accepted as truth for the exact same reason?
A myth gets accepted as truth for one reason: Assumption. Many of us have accepted myths as truth because we assumed too much. Similarly, the church has made assumptions about church and leadership. Over the last 2,000 years, the church has drifted from making Christ’s final words its first work. Instead of leading an all-play, everyday disciple-making movement, it has settled for something far less. The result has left us saying, “There has to be more…”
For churches to activate the unique disciple-making movement that Christ intended for the church, it must have organizational clarity and disciple-making conviction. Organizational clarity is about having a clear, known, and effective vision, strategy, and tactics. Disciple-making conviction is about fostering a shared disciple-making paradigm, principles, and practices amongst your people. If you don’t have organizational clarity, your church will never fulfill its potential. If you don’t have disciple-making conviction, your church will never fulfill its purpose.
Below are the five myths that the North American Church has been most inclined to accept as truth. Each myth comes with a fatal assumption that churches and their leaders have come to believe. These five myths are the core beliefs that churches have embraced that are preventing the leadership from fostering a disciple-making conviction amongst their people.
Over the next five weeks, we will go in-depth on each of these myths and how they can stall a church’s disciple-making movement. If you want to go ahead and read each of them in-depth, we provide a FREE church assessment that will help you evaluate your church and see which myths may be influencing your church.
Ready to bust these myths? We are offering a FREE month of our Replicate Collective for July. Try it today to receive a coach and a huddle of church leaders who will help you problem-solve, vision cast, and set goals that help you activate your disciple-making movement. Join at ReplicateCollective.com/FREE
This post originally appeared at: How Did We Get Here? The 5 Ministry Myths That Are Stalling Your Disciple-Making Movement – Replicate Ministries