Discipleship Path: Guiding Congregations to Connect People with Jesus

The church’s mission is to make disciples and teach them to obey everything Jesus taught. The Bible commands us to make disciples but does not give us a cookie cutter approach on how to do it. Discipleship Path is designed the help churches to discern, dream, and dream next step practices for discipleship. For purposes of this work, a disciple is a person who gives attention to God’s presence through participating in corporate worship, serves inside and outside the church walls, grows through prayer by investing their time, talents, and financial gifts to demonstrate a faithful witness to others of what it means to follow Jesus. As a District Superintendent, Dr. Brown has worked with many churches to help them address the challenges of discipleship, church decline, and attendance plateau. In Discipleship Path, he addresses five common questions from local congregations:

Isn’t discipleship and membership the same thing?

What is a disciple culture, and how do we create one?

Are there classes involved, and how long does it take?

What do we have to change?

Will the process fit our church’s context and culture?

Dr. Brown has collapsed these five questions into one overarching question that guides in helping churches with discipleship: What are the next steps to get churches to move from program to pathways that help people to practice the marks of discipleship: Presence, Service, Prayers, Gifts, and Witness? For a church to change its trajectory from plateauing and declining, it must have a discipleship strategy that moves away from multiple programs to a pathway of next steps for people to become disciples. The first-century Jewish world of Jesus influences this shift of emphasis from program to path.