In 1967 I was led to Christ by the pastor of a Baptist church in St. Louis. One of the first things I noticed about the church was what it measured: 600 members, 400 average attendance in worship, 350 average Sunday school attendance and 225 people in Training Union each week.
Training Union? For those who aren't Baptists or are less than 40 years old, Training Union may be an unfamiliar term. Others will remember it was a Sunday evening, age-graded discipleship program.
Classes used dated curriculum, provided a great opportunity for fellowship (especially for couples with small children), and -- because everyone was encouraged to have a part in each lesson -- served as a training ground for leadership.
Unfortunately, Training Union as a program began to decline in the 1970s as busy families
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What's Important Outcome-based spiritual development focuses on characteristics that identify a believer as a follower of Christ. Discipline-based spiritual development focuses on programs to ensure growth. |
The four measurements my first church used were instructive in two ways:
They illustrated the old adage that "what gets measured gets done." Churches have a tendency to measure those things that matter to them.
Discipleship training -- more likely to be called spiritual development today -- was seen as one of several programs in the church. And that continues to be a major problem.
Most congregations in the evangelical tradition refer to themselves as Great Commission churches. They see their mission as fulfilling Jesus' teachings to "…go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you…." (Matt. 28:19-20, NIV)
The Great Commission states plainly that the mission of the church is to make disciples -- to win people to Christ and then to lead them to spiritual growth. Spiritual development is not merely one program among many. It is the focal point of everything a church does.
It is easy to calculate attendance, giving, people involved in ministry, staff members, etc. But how can a church quantify the making of disciples?
Outcome Based
There are two approaches among those that disciple-making churches use. The first is outcome-based. This approach begins by asking the question, "What does a fully-devoted follower of Christ look like? What are the characteristics a person displays that makes him identifiable as a disciple of Christ?"
A common answer to the question is that a disciple displays the fruit of the Spirit as spelled out by Paul in Gal. 5:22-23: "…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."
A church using this approach might use much of its worship and small group teaching time to expound on the meaning of each of the fruit. A member might be asked to sign a covenant to seek to grow in each of these nine areas, be given an instrument to measure the progress of his growth, and be assigned to an accountability partner or asked to join a small group to keep him moving in the right direction.
Discipline Based
But there is another approach which I will label discipline based. Instead of asking what characteristics a fully devoted follower of Christ displays, this approach asks the question, "What are the disciplines that a disciple of Christ practices?"
Some churches using this approach focus on five disciplines that can also double as expectations for members:
- Regular participation in a weekly worship service.
- Regular participation in a Sunday School class or other open-enrollment small group.
- Tithing via that local congregation.
- Discovering of spiritual gifts.
- Completing training to use those gifts that are discovered through the ministries of that congregation.
The assumption behind this approach is that a person who practices these five disciplines is certain to grow in his relationship with Christ. It is an approach that lends itself easily to measurement. The church simply needs to calculate how many people in the church are practicing these five disciplines.
What to Watch Out For
There are three warnings for any church thinking about using either of these approaches.
First, the pastor must be whole-heartedly behind whichever system the church adopts. He must continually cast a vision of what the church can become if members are truly seeking to grow in Christ.
And again, he must not view spiritual development as just one ministry of the church. It must be seen as what the church is all about.
Second, using either approach can move the church to a high-expectation mode. If the church has been a low-expectation congregation (many Baptist churches, for example, require only that members be baptized by immersion or claim that they have previously been immersed), those members brought in under the old dispensation may complain that the rules have been changed. They may adopt a hard-line that what was good enough for them should be good enough for new members.
Similarly, low-expectation churches have a high membership-to-attendance ratio. Many of them have four times as many members as attendees.
High-expectation churches, on the other hand, often have significantly fewer members than attendees because membership is more difficult to achieve. This can be a problem for those churches that have traditionally measured themselves by the number of members they have.
Third, neither the outcome-based or discipline-based systems are foolproof. Members using the first approach can be less than honest in their self-evaluation. And the discipline-based approach doesn't always produce the hoped-for results. A lot of worldly Christians never miss a Sunday school class or worship service.
But the beauty of either system is that Christians are taught never to stop growing. No one can ever fully display the fruit of the Spirit. And those practicing a set of disciplines on a continuing basis are likely to continue to mature in their fruit bearing.
And best of all, churches that major on spiritual development embody the essence of church health. In so doing, they truly fulfill the Great Commission
Mark Brasler is a church consultant and minister for spiritual development at Westwood Baptist Church in Springfield, Va.
