The Church Is Essential for Discipleship

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JT English
Good morning, everybody. How you doing? Hey, this is gonna feel a little conversational because we’re gonna have a conversation and we hope you have a conversation with us that we want to briefly introduce ourselves. My name is JT English I have the honor of serving as the lead pastor of storyline church in Arvada, Colorado. This is my first gospel coalition conference, and it has just been so great, hasn’t it? Have you got that fun? Yeah, just that’s a good time worshiping the Lord getting to know him in deeper ways and make great connections. You are at a conversation around discipleship in the context of the local church and we want to help you in your contexts, whether you’re serving as a lead pastor or groups, Pastor, education, pastor of discipleship, or maybe you’re just a faithful member in the context of your local church. We want to help you think about discipleship in the local church, and hopefully some really, really practical ways and I’m joined by two of my best friends in ministry colleagues, who are gonna introduce themselves Kyle Worley, and Jen Wilkins. So Kyle, tell us about yourself. Yeah,

Kyle Worley
My name is Kyle Worley, I get the privilege of serving as a pastor at Mosaic church in Richardson, Texas. We’re a church plant that’s about to mark five years and so really grateful for what God’s done there, had the joy of working at the village and the Institute department with JT and Jen and get to lead a podcast with them. So we have a lot of fun. And

Jen Wilkin
I am Jen Wilkin. And I just recently stepped back from 12 years on staff at my church, the village church that I’ve been at for about 16 years. That’s where JT and Colin I first connected with each other, specifically around the issue that you’ll hear us talking about today. My main space of service has been in the women’s Bible study space, but my most recent role was to oversee our next gen family and care ministries. And so it’s been an interesting opportunity to take some of the principles we worked out for adults and work them all the way through next gen Ministries as well. Yeah. Well,

JT English
one of the things that we believe is true is a lot of what happens in our ministries or in theology or discipleship in the local church, a Agustin said that all theology is autobiography. And what he meant by that is, the things that we begin to care about, or write about or think about are shaped by our stories and the things that happened to us. I don’t want to share my whole story with you. But I want to share why this topic matters a lot to me and part of my story and why I think it should matter a lot to you. So I grew up about five minutes from the church that I currently Pastor, I actually play basketball as a non Christian in the gym that our church was planted in kind of a post Christian secular upbringing. Parents who loved me in a warm household, but I didn’t know the Lord and I didn’t understand the gospel. I went to Colorado State University as a freshman and was invited to a Campus Crusade for Christ Bible study as a freshman and they were hosting it in the dorm of the men’s, the men’s like laundry room, and I was like, I’m not going to Bible study in the dorm of amends laundry room, Evan Jellicle. ‘s are weird. That’s like, we should have that like somewhere else, like maybe in the cafeteria. But I ended up going once. And they and this is, this is an important moment for me. And it’s, I think, a reminder of where our people and the people we’re trying to reach actually are. They just said, open your Bible to the book of Jonah. I had a Bible, it was one of those extreme teen study Bibles. Remember, those were the skateboarders on it. And that was all I had. And I was like, Okay, I’ll try to find Jonah. And I couldn’t find it. Because I wished it would have been in Psalms because maybe I would have had a better chance at finding it. But and you can’t go to the table of contents. Because if you go to the table of contents, you’re out it like you’re the guy that they’re that they’re like, he’s the target, we’re gonna find him tomorrow on campus to share the gospel with him, but I just couldn’t find it. And I began thinking to myself, maybe I’m in a cult, or maybe they have books in the Bible that I don’t have. I don’t understand what’s going on right now. And a sophomore sitting next to me, they meet Miller, Nate, just a faithful guy. He now manages a discount tire. He’s not in ministry. He’s not a pastor. He just was a guy who he literally took his finger and opened my Bible to the book of Jonah, Jonah chapter two. And it was in that moment that I began to realize that God saves sinners. That God is gracious to somebody who was disobedient, explicitly disobedient to him. The next morning, Nate took me or the next day, Nate texted me and I think we had text back then maybe he called me maybe it was like a carrier pigeon. It was that long ago. And he said, Hey, let’s go to lunch today. And so we went to lunch in the Colorado State student union is a warrior Student Center, and he bought me a whopper. And he sat down with me and he said, I’m supposed to he handed me the four spiritual laws, which is a track that crew used to use. And he literally said this, this is not an exaggeration. He said, I’m supposed to read this to you. And in the most uncompelled presentation of the gospel in the history of the world, gosh.

Kyle Worley
I hope Nate’s not watching this.

Jen Wilkin
We love you, Nate. You’re the best.

JT English
He literally didn’t make eye contact with me. And I’m just like, eating a whopper. There’s a king of kings joke in here that I’m not gonna make you need to save it. Yeah, God saved me. Which I think is a good reminder for us. Just we share the gospel indiscriminately with ever with anybody Eddie, our Gospel presentations aren’t what saved people, God saves people. And God saved me. And I then spent the next three years just getting really involved with Campus Crusade and enjoying the ministry there and alerting I have the gift of evangelism or at least I had it, then, you know, post Christian was a little different. But I just love sharing the gospel of people, just the simple gospel that Jesus came to save sinners. And I then went to my minister, after three years, he was pastoring, a small little Southern Baptist Church in Fort Collins, Colorado. And this is one of the most important moments of my life where I went to him. And I said, I didn’t have all the language that we have, I wasn’t a part of kind of Evan Jellicle, you know, subculture, and I just said, I want to grow. What I was trying to say is, I would like to, to be a deeper disciple. I’d like to, to understand the Bible, like I just want to be able to find Jonah. And he said, You need to go to seminary for that. And I said, What seminary? Like that’s how far out of this world I was. And I went home and I Googled whole bible because I just wanted to know the Bible. I just Googled whole Bible seminary, and at the time, Dallas Theological Seminary popped up, I’m really glad Oh, Seminary in Provo, Utah didn’t pop up. Because I probably would have gone I had no idea what I was doing. No guides, I just was like, Yeah, I’ll go there. I met my wife we got are we then we got married, and we moved across the country. And here’s the thing, we love higher education. We love it. I’m a professor at Southern Right now, I’ve had a great experience at Dallas Seminary. And many of you either worked or have been discipled at other institutions. But here’s here’s the thing for me, and for us that we realized is you should never have to leave your local church in order to lead in the local church. You should not have to go to seminary to become a disciple of Jesus Christ, the primary place for discipleship is the context of the local church. And so that’s what we spent the last several years together just thinking about and, and applying some of these principles that we want to talk and have a conversation with you guys about. And so let me just that’s my story. Let me give you the some theological grounding for why I think this is true. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Habakkuk chapter two, verse 14, where the prophet says that one day, he’s talking to people who are in exile, he says, One day, the glory of the presence of God is going to cover the earth, the same way water covers the sea. Isn’t that good news? That one day, the presence of the glory of God is going to cover the earth, the way water covers the sea. Where should that start? In the context of the New Covenant? It should start with believers in in the context of the local church. But the reality is, is we are and I think the reason you’re here is we are struggling to see people who say, Yeah, I want that I want the presence of the glory of God, the knowledge of him the depths of his riches and beauties and perfections and goodness to be true of my life and true of my church. Now, what we’re seeing in the context of a local church now is that that is not happening. We’re having some significant challenges in the context of the local church of whether it’s Bible literacy or theological formation or spiritual formation, evangelism, and gospel centered centered preaching. And so not only was it a problem for me, 1520 years ago, when I said, I want to be a disciple, it’s continually a problem that we aren’t seeing the kind of discipleship happened in life, the local church. So one of the things that we’ve one of the tools that we’ve seen over and over again, that helps us understand where discipleship is, is the link in here in LifeWay Research around the state of theology, or the state of discipleship in the church. So, Jen, help us understand a little bit like where are things right now,

Jen Wilkin
I love that JT lets me give the bad news. Some of you may be familiar with this report. It’s done about every two years. And the most recent report that came out here are some of the findings that were in the report. The report actually looks at what sort of the general public knows about the ology. And then it also then takes a look at evangelicals, what they understand about theology. And so you know, that means that it’s not a nominal Christian that they’re talking about. This is talking about someone who is bought into saying, Yeah, I’m going to be a Christ follower. So let me just read you a few of the findings from the most recent survey that was done. So in response to the statement, God learns and adapts to different circumstances. 48% of Evangelicals responded, yes, that’s an accurate statement. So the doctrine of the immutability of God was lost on 48% of evangelicals. Then in response to the statement, everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. So the doctrine of original sin 65% of Evangelicals responded, yes, that is an accurate statement. In response to the statement God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. 56% of Evangelicals responded, yes. In response to the statement, Jesus was a great teacher, but not God. 43% of Evangelicals responded that as True statement. And in the two years that had passed since the previous survey was done, that had gone up by 13 points. So the problem is evident. And the problem is getting worse. Everything that I just read you as a statistic that has to deal not with even a second level or third level issue of theology. These are portions of the Nicene creed that people don’t understand. And as pervasive as Bible literacy is, and as much as I have tried to raise awareness around that, and we have together, the issue of theological illiteracy is equally alarming. And we would say that this is nothing less than a great commission issue. So you think about the Great Commission, we talk about it a lot. But we would say that there is a portion of the Great Commission that has perhaps been forgotten by a generation of church leaders. It’s the part after the part where it says to go and make disciples, where it says, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded. And I think that what we’re beginning to see and the work that we’re trying to address is that we have not taught others to observe all that has been commanded that in fact, one generation is not telling the next to the wonderful works of the Lord. And it’s possible as Dallas Willard has observed that we have placed an emphasis on making converts and forgotten to make disciples. His reflection is that it’s a good idea to make disciples and let converts happen in the process. So what we would like to see is an emphasis placed again, on a healthy discipleship in the local church so that one generation is able to confidently tell the next the basic beliefs of Christianity.

Kyle Worley
Right. And this is not just statistical, like, it’s not just the data that bears itself out, you are operating and you’re leading, you’re serving and local churches, you know, the real stories that are attached to those percentages and those numbers. You know, I know that a lot of conversation has been happening in recent years regarding deconstruction and detaching. And I know that for many of you, you’ve encountered those stories directly, or maybe you’ve dealt with those doubts in that dark night of the soul yourself. And I think that one of the crucial things that we’re discovering is that for many of those who are detaching or walking away from the faith, they’re not leaving a really substantive, deep expression of the faith. They’re, they’re disillusioned and discouraged with a very shallow one. And I do think that John Carroll, He’s a sociologist, out of Australia, he talks about the fading of Christianity in the West. And he says, it’s actually very easy to explain the church has comprehensively failed. And they’re one central task, which is to retell their foundation story in a way that speaks to their times. This is a sociologist saying, Hey, you can kind of table the statistics, you can table the data, Christianity is fading, because we have not persuasively retold our foundation story to the next generation and the next generation, the next generation, which is really a failure of discipleship.

JT English
One of the things that that you’ve heard probably heard Jen said before, if you heard her teaching, or others is you can’t love a god, you don’t you don’t know. But you also can’t live in a story you don’t know. And so if we don’t know our foundational story, if we have this biblical illiteracy issue and theological formation issue, one of the core tenets of discipleship in the context of the local church must be founded on the nature and character of God, but also the nature and character of the story that we find ourselves living in. And so here’s how we want to kind of frame this is we want to help the church by asking better questions, I think over the last 20 or 30 years, church leaders were called to ask specific questions about how they could have healthy local churches. And it’s not that they aren’t healthy, bad questions, we just think there are better questions. So here’s how we’re going to frame some of this. Like, for example, one of the questions would be, how do we how do we keep disciples instead of how do we grow disciples kind of really forged in this kind of capitalistic market driven? How do we keep our our market share? Or another question we might think about is, what do disciples want? Instead of asking the question, what do disciples need and how can we eventually grow them? But the most foundational that what Calvin speak to for a few minutes is, if we’re not just making converts, we’re making disciples, what is a disciple?

Kyle Worley
Yeah, and when we work with churches, and we’ve now worked with well over 100 churches across the country, throughout the world, church plants, traditional churches, large churches, I’m always surprised that this question is not more forefront, but I get it, even as I was reflecting sounds like almost overly simple it does when you when you start to think through what is a disciple? I think that just in the past is we’ve presumed, knowing what the gospel is, we’ve presumed a shared definition of disciple. And if you assume that, I’ll tell you, your ministry ecosystem, it’s going to get all sorts of stuff in it that are not essential for the work of disciple Making and being in a local church, you experience this because you know, the fatigue of having to carry so many other things and feeling like what are we really doing here? So one of the first questions that we asked churches when we work with them is, what is your definition of a disciple? So let me just give you a few things to consider. Maybe you’re here with your church team, maybe you’re gonna go back to a church leadership team, maybe a question asked would be this, I want you right now, if you’ve got something to write on, to just write out your definition of what a disciple is, like, just just write it out. And if you’re not going to do it now, and I can see a lot of you aren’t, because they can see you. Yeah, it’s the lights are up. And that’s okay. I understand that. I’ve sat there when a speaker told me to do something. If you don’t do it, now, you should, you should write down your definition of a disciple. And then you should ask your leadership team, I’m not talking about just like, you know, the person has come to your church once or twice, I’m talking like your leaders at your church, Hey, would you write down what you think a disciple is? And then I compare those definitions and see, do we have a shared definition of what a disciple is in the life of our church? I think that’s a really great place to start. Because if we don’t know what a disciple is, I don’t know how we’re going to meaningfully work to make disciples.

JT English
I think even Iran that specifically is in you know, this, you’ve heard this, but it’s so true that your people are being discipled. It’s not an option of whether they are being discipled or not. They’re either being discipled by social ideologies, or political ideologies, or some vision of the good life. The question is, is your church specifically giving them the vision of the good life that is found in one place alone, Jesus Christ and His gospel? So it’s not a question of whether or not your people are being discipled? They are. It’s are you discipling them in the way of the good life? Jen, how would you define discipleship?

Jen Wilkin
I like to just go to the root of the word. It’s someone who pursues a discipline. It’s, it’s a learner, a disciple is a learner now disciples more than a learner, but a disciple is at least a learner. And I think that, you know, we’ve had a tendency to define a disciple as many things, you know, someone who is a doer, or someone who is a goer. And those are all true things as well. But you’ve said before, I remember the first time you said to me, we’ve sent people on mission without first forming them. And we’re doing no one any favors when we say go and do this good work, but but they can’t even articulate whether Jesus was a good teacher, or was fully God. And so I do think that when we start talking about discipleship, it’s important for us to recognize that it is going to involve the mind. And it’s going to be a discipline, because I think when we think about discipleship, we think, Well, Jesus saved me, and he wants me to follow him. So therefore, all of the things I need to know should just be sort of easy for me to take in. Like, we’re going to hit the easy button on this. But when you think about all the other things that are required of us as Christ followers, we know that it’s going to be hard to give our time or hard to give our money, that taking up our cross and following Him is going to be something that requires something of us. And when it comes to learning about our historic faith, we should expect that that too will require sacrifice on our part. And so it’s, it’s to be a learner, but it’s to be a learner in a in a way that is costly.

JT English
It’s costly, and it requires development and growth. And so one thing that we would encourage you to do, whether you just did it now, or you’re going to do you go back home, maybe with your ministry team, is you need to get unbelievably clear about what a disciple is, of course, there’s biblical definitions that you should consult and use, but like what specifically, like what are we aiming at, if your ministry teams, whether it’s your kids team, or your preaching team or your student team are aiming at different versions of what discipleship look like, you’re going to create different kinds of disciples. So once you’ve asked and answered that question, what is the disciple? The next question that we would encourage you to ask is, the question we typically ask is, what do disciples want? How many lead pastors, priests and pastors we have in here? Yeah, some of us, I think, maybe kind of had can have the temptation or how many women’s like teachers, women’s Bible study teachers, group leaders in here. Yeah. So one of the temptations that we can have is I became a lead pastor of storyline church, three and a half years ago, and I know I didn’t think this was going to be a temptation, but it is, is, man, what, what next sermon series is going to kill? What Bible study? Do they do? They need to show up for what they show it for. And I can ask the question, in my own mind, what does my church want? What do they want? And I want to encourage you that that’s not a bad question. It’s not that all desires are are misshapen or bad. It’s okay to help help them. You know, what do you want what will be helpful, but the better question is, what do disciples need? What do you do? sciples need in your in ministry leadership positions are primed to help them ask and answer that question. When I got to the village church, gosh, eight years ago now or so, that was one of the first questions that we asked in our little department of the village church Institute where we said, what what do they need? Like what how can we best shape and form these people? And we came up with with three specific kind of categories in by the way, if you’re familiar with public education, or theological education, this is the question of scope, like what is the scope of what a disciple in our context needs? And we came up with three specific kind of categories or buckets. Let me tell you what they are not because we think they should be your answers. But just because they’re an example, we said, every single disciple in the context of the local church needs to have a basic fundamental understanding of first bucket Christian story, if they don’t know what their Bible is, if they don’t know how to read their Bible, if they don’t know how to like, open up Ephesians and kind of understand where am I in the ark of redemption? If they can’t open up Exodus, and say, like, here’s what God has done so far. Here’s who God is. And here’s who Israel is. And then we have fundamentally failed them. We haven’t given them the right thing. For example, my kiddos were already here in October, it’s almost October, which freaks me out a little bit. I’ve got two kiddos at Home, Eight and six years old, and we still have Halloween candy from last year.

And it’s not because they don’t eat tons of candy, cuz you’re a terrible it’s because it’s because I put it on the top shelf, Macy doesn’t even know I’m eating it myself. It’s not Halloween candy from last year, and we’re almost there, which they just ran around the neighborhood last year finding all this candy. And here’s, as a parent, if you’re if you’re a parent, maybe a grandparent, you know that if I were to go to my kids at dinner, and say, What do you want for dinner? You know what they would say? Halloween candy. I can’t even get my kids to eat Chick fil A and pepperoni pizza like let alone broccoli, they would want they would want the candy. But yet often churches are saying, hey, what do you guys want. And what we’ve been doing and of angelical ism is giving our churches candy for decades. And that’s how we’re still malnutrition and malnourished. You cannot make a healthy whole disciple of Jesus, if they are not first grounded in the story of the Bible, and how to read it. It can’t be that you’re the expert up on the stage that knows the story of the Bible, and kind of helping them get little snippets, you’ve got to give them the meal of scripture in every single environment, whether it’s groups, whether it’s kids, whether it’s students, whether it’s preaching from the pulpit, foundationalist Christian story, the second bucket that we created is we said, well, they need to be formed and in theology, they need to know the basics of their faith. This is what Jen was just highlighting in the Ligonier and Lifeway stats is you can’t be a whole disciple of Jesus. If you haven’t asked and answered the basic fundamental questions of like, who is God? What is God like? Who am I? What’s wrong with me? And what’s wrong with the world? These are the basic questions of theology proper, or the attributes of God, or anthropology or what’s going wrong in the world, the doctrine of sin or how’s God making things right, the doctrine of soteriology your people need to have the basic questions of the faith for front for them all the time.

And again, something that we often try to remind Christians in churches is what we’re talking about up here is not something that we have discovered or new, it’s actually ancient, and we’re just trying to retrieve it. All Christians and have this the third bucket just real quick is, is spiritual discipline, spiritual formation, every single this like, you can’t just have people who know the Bible, but are praying. And you can’t if people were praying, you don’t know the Bible. And so we want to make sure that our people our disciples are walking in regular spiritual disciplines, things like meditation, fasting, Sabbath, evangelism, just the basic habits of the Christian faith. So the three that I’ve highlighted just briefly are Christian story, Christian belief, and Christian formation or spiritual formation. And what we wanted to do in our spaces in our environments, is make sure that none of these were ever lost, like every single space had an element of one of them. So it wasn’t just one ministry is doing this. And another ministry is doing this, but rather, it was a braid. And I want to talk to in a second about the next question, How did disciples grow? But would you guys add anything to that about what disciples need?

Kyle Worley
No, the only thing that I might just kind of point out is that especially for a community, in a subculture that really values, the ministry of the pulpit, and preaching that you can hear these things, Christian story, Christian belief, Christian formation, and you can believe because you rightly have a strong view of preaching, you can believe well, the pulpit is really the answer to how to provide all of that instruction. And certainly none of us want to diminish the significance of pulpit ministry, in preaching ministry God has instituted is good for the church, and it is a blessing to God’s people. But you can not wage the discipleship war that you need. Only from the pulpit ministry. It’s got to be a little bit more expansive than that. There’s got to be broader. It’s got to be woven into other ministry environments in the life of your church that will complement and strengthen and bolster that pulpit ministry. as it is complemented, strengthened and bolstered by the Ministry of the pulpit as well.

Jen Wilkin
I think just basically the role of a leader is to discern this right. And I think that when we are too deferential to what our people are saying, we’re not leading the way that we’re supposed to it is our responsibility to know how a disciple is formed, even when the disciple themself doesn’t recognize that that is the way and I do just want to caution that when you move away from asking primarily the felt needs question to the oh, I’m responsible for making sure that this actually happens. Mindset, that when you start inviting people into these environments, it will not be probably an immediate rush of people to show up because they will be accustomed to looking for the felt need opportunity. And so as we continue to explore all of this, just bear in mind, we’re not offering you a quick fix, we’re saying this is a slow boil. But when you start to introduce these spaces, and the three, the three factors will play into any environment, but certain environments will emphasize one over the other. So like women’s Bible study, is going to emphasize Christian story. But we’re also going to bring in belief information and everything that we do. But when you start opening up these spaces, you will need time for them to gain traction. But as they gain traction, you stop having to be the person who evangelize this for them. Because the number one piece of feedback that we hear is, I’ve been in church my whole life. And no one has told me this, the number one piece of feedback that we hear. And that was that was in many ways my experience when I was first introduced to theological education. And so then they just come alive, but you’re gonna have to trust that you’re not doing a new thing. This is an old thing recently forgotten, and then let it do its work.

Kyle Worley
I think that high interest is for those who hear and are energized, do it like, Okay, I want to go teach these things, right. Like I’ve defined our scope. I know that I can remember the first sight, you notice, what am I saying? Okay, so I can remember the first Sunday that JT shows up, we’ve all we were really putting our best foot forward. Because we think like, Oh, we’ve heard the call to teach the deep things of God to our people and clear and predictable ways. And he shows up to the church. And we like, we’re so proud to show him a pamphlet of 35 classes that we’re offering at the most random times in the most random locations. And like, hey, take a look at this. We’re doing the work of deep discipleship. And I thought you would be encouraged by that. And it scared you. You were rarified? And you were like, This is not what we’re supposed to be doing, which is the question of sequence. So help help us understand. It’s not just like, let me just start throwing things up against the wall. It’s not just what we teach, but it’s how we teach it. How is how do you think through not just okay, we know what we want to teach. But what’s the order that we’re going to teach it in?

JT English
So you might not be familiar with the ministry, though, that we were all part of the village, but it’s a picture, which at the time was a very big church, several campuses, and they were offering 3539 classes or something like that. And there was this, you know, pamphlet, and I want you to just this is not this is not to diminish, there.

Jen Wilkin
I was not in charge of any of that time.

JT English
She was not just through that. And, and again, this is not a this is not to say we were learning on the job. So many of us were learning and anybody in ministry is still learning on the job. Like it’s like we had this all together, there was we were learning and we were trying to solve this problem. And I show up to him in his pamphlet. It’s 37 classes. And I’m asking him, I asked him, What What’s the registration for this? Like, are people signing up for this? And it again, Around 10 12,000 people at the time, give or take, and there was something like 250 people signed up for him. That means that’s like an average of like four people per class or something. I don’t know if that’s right. Math, I was a communications may not the right. Yeah, but but it wasn’t a lot. It wasn’t a lot of people. We weren’t getting the ratio of people signing up for these spaces as we were hoping. So the first thing that we did is we scrapped it. We just scrapped the whole thing which cost me some friends. But but like anybody, if you still do Sunday school and you go to your Sunday school teacher, like we’re not doing that anymore, they’re not your best friend anymore. But we decided we said we need to take a break and hit a reset button. And we need to and here’s what I’m trying to get to here. Before we go on to this question of growth is you have to use the question of scope. What does the disciple need as your decision making mechanism for what gets on your calendar at church? For example, if somebody comes to me and says, I’d like to host an underwater basket weaving class at your church, does it fit in the scope of story, belief information? The answer’s no. Ladies and gentlemen, I need some help here.

The answer is no. It’s either church pastors ask yes or no Questions or Jesus? That’s always the answer. Yes, no, or Jesus. So yeah, so this becomes a decision making mechanism for you. The second, or I guess the third question, what is the disciple? And then what do they need is how do they grow? We have been trained as ministers of the gospel, to ask the question, how do we how do we keep them? How do we keep disciples here? Is our membership staying? Or our people saying what was the attendance this Sunday versus what was the attendance last Sunday versus what our hope for attendance is this Sunday? We? And again, that’s not a bad question. I like to keep my children like, I hope I have two kids in 10 years, like I want them to still be my kids. So the question of keeping your disciples at your church is not a bad question. I just want to offer you the better question as a quote unquote, spiritual parent of your church, is I’m not just asking the question, how do I keep my kids? I’m asking, how do I grow them? How do I develop them? If there’s anything that you take away from this session? I hope it’s what we’re about to talk about right now is, is what we have been trained to do as evangelicals ministry leaders over the last several decades, is lowered the bar. It’s increasing accessibility, lowering the standard. And what we have found is every time you lower the standard, you actually diminish what you’re calling your people to the question isn’t how low can we put the bar? It’s actually how high can we raise the bar over the course of time and appropriate ways that they can meet? Your people want to do hard things? Because they want to do meaningful things. They will go to CrossFit. And they will drink kale smoothies, and do whole 30s. And when we say can you come? Some of them? Will? God bless him? And then we’re like, I’m so sorry. Can you please come to a four minute study on Ephesians?

Yeah, we anybody anybody’s done a study on Ephesians yet, I think we’ve all done 17 of them. And it’s because we are afraid to ask our people to do hard things. And what we have found is if you ask this question, how does it disciple grow, and you create ministry environments for them to grow, and you tell them, You must do this, this is going to be so important for your development as a disciple of Jesus, they will do it. So for example, again, we’re just kind of all we have is our ministry experience. We show up at Ashoka TVC. And they’re there and we kind of begin forming a ministry staff and developing the institute. And Jen is doing her Bible study thing. And, and Kyle was working at another campus. And really, to be honest with you, speaking of learning on the job, I didn’t know how this was going to go I really wanted to do kind of like a Navy SEALs elite training like Anna, Jen Jen’s, like rolling her eyes in the office next to me like this guy. And, and I wanted it to be hard. I mean, so I show up. And the first thing I wanted to institute was what we ended up calling the training program or like an institute. At the time, it was a 36 week, every Wednesday night, two and a half hours reading Herman bavinck. And John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and Martin Luther and memorizing huge portions of Scripture and writing doctrinal statements. And I mean, it was intense. And in my mind, I’m thinking to myself, this is on my way, my wife and I had just bought a house because we just moved there. And we were building a back patio. And I’m thinking, this is six of us. 10 of us, 12 of us on the back porch, like going deep. Because I had believed if I go deep, if I’m if I’m encouraging people to go deep, they’re not going to want to do it. They’re gonna, they’re going to self select out. We had 429 applications the first year. And it wasn’t because we taught anything, I actually did not have the curriculum developed yet. And I had an enormous Oh, no moment, because I wasn’t ready.

And we had to figure out how to build Wait, yeah, we were running week to week I was writing the curriculum, but I share that number with you not to say that’s the number you should have, that we had, we were serving in a large church at the time. But it is to say there was this enormous hunger and thirst in the life of the local church that says I want the next step I want to develop I want to grow. What is going on in most of angelical churches is an atrophying of discipleship muscles, because they’re not growing, when you begin to ask the question, how do they grow, they want to maybe an example that we could use is, is like a running example. It’s not appropriate to ask somebody who’s on the couch to go run a marathon, that’s too much of a jump. But it is appropriate to ask them to maybe if they want to be runner, start to do a 5k and then maybe do a half marathon and then do a marathon. So my question for you is, is do you have ministry spaces in the life of your local church that allows people to sequence moving from a men’s and women’s Bible study, or moving to the next environment like a training program or a residency program, and allowing them to move from the 5k to the half marathon to the marathon, or perhaps even even to something bigger?

Because public education institutions have this this is this is like, my like I said, I’ve got an eight and six year old at home, and they have the scope developed. Our kids are supposed to be learning math and science and language arts and physical education, and they’re not out Asking a fifth grader to do what they’re asking your second grader to do. But they are preparing the second grader to do what the fifth grader is doing. And that’s what I would encourage you to think about in your local church. Not only have you defined the question of what do disciples need that scope? But have you thought about sequence? How do I grow these disciples over the course of time? Any thoughts?

Kyle Worley
Well, no, other than to just ask, like, what’s the first step in that? So it’s like you’re a church, and you’ve got small groups, and God’s doing great and beautiful things and your small groups, your home groups, or whatever you call your groups, and they’re going okay, well, it sounds like you’re talking a lot about classes and programs. And that kind of language, just as maybe that’s not comfortable for us right now.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, that is actually what we’re talking about, just in case you were missing. Where were we headed with this. And so when you think about what’s happened in the church over the last 30 years or so we basically have cashed in our chips on community, and community matters a whole lot. I don’t want to go to a church that doesn’t have a way for people to connect to one another in community. But how many of you in here in a church where your primary space for discipleship is a Can we all just shout out the name of whatever our Church calls it all at once? Like, it’s a HomeGroup. A community group? What is yours? Call it say it. Okay, so everybody’s got their own name for it. Sunday school. Yeah, though. Oh, hush your mouth. Yeah. So So and really Sunday School fell by the wayside, right? It was like, well, that’s not working. And so we cashed in all our chips. And in many cases, we went to a simple church model, where basically you have your your small group, your community group experience, and you have weekend services. And that’s the plan. That’s the model.

And what I think most of us can recognize now down the road is I would actually link that decision to what we’re seeing in the Ligonier Lifeway survey. Because while a while like community group is really good for building community, it’s straight terrible for teaching. And I think we all know it, like unless you have a community group leader, who is a gifted teacher. And so just because of the the number of groups you’re going to have in your church, your ability to actually see what’s going on in those spaces dictate what’s going to happen, is low. And in these groups, what we typically have is a feelings level discussion around application questions that may or may not be tied to a sermon series. Now I’m painting a rather bleak picture of it. I know that there are very positive experiences in these groups. But when these are the only mechanism that you have for discipleship, a couple of things happen. I want to mention one that falls along gender lines. First of all, as someone who has led women’s Bible study spaces for years, can I tell you, what you don’t have to worry is hard for women to do. It’s build community that is intuitive for us. Do you know it’s really hard for men, that and so when your primary model for discipleship is a community group model, you’re pressing men on the thing that’s hard for them, and you’re not pressing women on the thing that’s hard for them. Not only that, but depending on how theologically conservative your church is around the roles of men and women, you may have just eliminated all spaces for women to have some sort of church mother role with other women by saying, you know, well, they’re all going to be led, these, these groups are all going to be led by men. And so that’s in women tend to be responsible for hospitality elements and planning the calendar. And then men are responsible for leading the discussion of the time that you have. And so women are going to run out of the room to take care of kids. And so their experience of the group is not going to be as normative as it might be. And so you can see how all of these factors are going to mean that these spaces are not particularly suited for teaching people these basic tenets of the faith or Bible literacy.

And so the the community aspect matters. But if every space that we gather in our highest stated goal is building community, it means that learning has probably not taken place the way that we would hope. We need spaces in the church that the highest stated goal is learning community is important in these spaces, but it’s not the highest stated goal. One of the most fascinating things that we’ve seen at our church when we implemented a men’s Bible study alongside the women’s Bible study was that the men couldn’t wait to show up for something where they weren’t going to be asked to be vulnerable at every point. Like you’re in a HomeGroup they’re like great a thought level discussion around the text Sign me up. And and so whereas in women’s spaces, we’re monitoring, hey, you need to stop chatty time and start having, you know, the learning portion in the men space. It’s the opposite. We’re pushing them toward the opposite thing. So what a learning environment does is it gives you the opportunity to focus in on these things that that that really matter. And what’s fascinating is our people will have picked up where they stand on secondary issues. They can tell you whether you should baptize infants or believers they can tell you what they think. about the end times, but they couldn’t tell you a thing about the Trinity. And that’s a more important thing for people to know. And so when we start guarding these spaces, what these spaces are doing is they’re diminishing what JT has already mentioned, which is the expert amateur divide. Our people are conditioned to think that an expert stands on a platform and gives them information.

And they’re the amateur who then takes it in and tries to absorb it as best that they can. But what we’re suggesting is that we begin to diminish that space, by not simply telling what people what to think. But by giving them tools so that they can become better at reading their Bibles on their own or better at thinking about theology on their own and discussing it with other believers, which is the way that it’s meant to be done in the first place. And so JT is often used the term is the democratization of, of, of education, it’s inviting them into something instead of simply giving them a passive space to receive. That means that what we’re talking about when we talk about classroom spaces, is these are active, dedicated learning environments, dedicated because learning is the highest stated goal and active because we are asking students to partner in the learning process. And so one of the best principles that I’ve ever heard in relation to this was never do for your student, what your student can do for themselves. But what we have said is, hey, I’m going to make this as easy as possible for you. I’m going to tell you what the comprehension questions are, I’m going to tell you what the interpretation is. And then you can hit the application piece with these questions that I have given to you. And as soon as we do that, we essentially continue to infantilize our people who are perfectly capable of taking on the work of doing things themselves. When we don’t have spaces where they have to feel the dissonance of what they don’t know, and what they want to know. Then they just continue on thinking, Oh, I’m learning and growing. And then we find them in the space of saying, I’ve been in the church my whole life. And no one has told me.

JT English
That’s right. I mean, so maybe just to even like if you if maybe you serve in the context of a local church or campus ministry, something like that, if your metric for whether things are going well or not, is this are people in community, you have the wrong metric. Because community is indispensable to discipleship, but it is not synonymous with discipleship. If your metric for whether or not discipleship is happening, is community, you cannot know whether or not and to get community is indispensable. We are not up here trying to say community is not it’s absolutely essential to the Christian life. But if we’re all biblically and theologically ignorant, and we’re just getting together, all we’re doing is pooling ignorance, amen. And we need to grow, you’d have these spaces of active learning environments. So we’ve used that term a few times, Jen, I want you to help us define what is an act like what are the what’s the four legged table of active learning environment bad,

Jen Wilkin
I think it has three legs, and it keeps adding a fourth leg, it’s fine, we’ll talk about the leg you add, He’s not wrong. So the three legged stool of active learning environments, our personal study time, small group discussion time, and then teaching time, and I will throw in the fourth leg for free in just a minute. But let me cover the most important ones. First, I’m just getting. So your your personal study time is where we’re asking you, the student to do work in preparation for the gathering time. And so in many cases, with the lowering the bar syndrome, we’ve said don’t do anything before you come because anything that’s not a community group, threatens a community group. That’s the way that that’s what we’ve all been told our people will only choose one thing, we find that is profoundly not true, they will absolutely do more than one thing, if they understand the value of it. And so the personal study time is going to ask something of them before they come. And then they’re going to so that when they do come, you’re going to have a much sharper conversation around what you’re talking about. They’re going to come with dissonance raised in that personal study time, and they’re going to be ready to hear an answer.

And so they get into small group time. And we’ve jokingly said, this is a place for them to pool their ignorance, but it’s not it’s actually a place for them to share what partial light they have gotten to in their personal study time. Start saying I got really hung up on this. What did you think? I think it means this, well, maybe it means this. But by the end of their small group time, they’re probably still going to have we hope they will still have some dissonance, which then the teaching time is going to be targeted at resolving. So one of the main disconnects more people start thinking about building these learning environments is that the teaching time, because we’re so heavily used to the idea of preaching, it’s not seen how that time should connect to the work that they’ve done in their personal study time and their small group discussion time. Those first two legs are priming them for this and so if this time He doesn’t talk to the dissonance that we know has been raised in the first two times, then what will it communicate to these people about the work that they’ve done on the first two legs didn’t really matter. It was just busy work, we didn’t really want you to do it, we actually had stuff we wanted to say that wasn’t even related to it. And so in an active, dedicated learning environment, the teaching element is talking directly to what happened in those first two environments. Not only that, but it matters that the second leg the small group, time is happening before the teaching time. Have you ever been in a group where the small group time happened after the teaching time?

What happens when this small group team time happens after the teaching time? What do you talk about what you’re all thinking and learning? Now you talk about what you heard in the teaching time. And so in order to keep that a space where people are taking the risk, and it is a huge risk, when people are new to these spaces of saying, Here’s what I think it means, you want to put that before the teaching time. Otherwise, they’ll just repeat what they heard and don’t miss the risk that is involved here. Because what people do think these spaces should be like is I show up, and I’ve done personal work, which I, if I got hung up on a question, all I had to do was read down a little further and it would give me the answer, confirming that you do actually think I’m too dumb to come up with it on my own. And not only that, but then it’s going to be a place where when we get into the discussion, I have to show up with the right answer. And the right answer is either what I should have found in my study time, or it’s what I think the teacher wants me to say. And so we’re inviting them into No, no, you actually are going to speculate, you’re going to do some work of feeling like oh, I don’t know what the answer is. Because anything that you’ve ever learned that stuck with you that was a value started with that feeling we have we have thought that dissonance is something to do away with. This has to do with being in an instant gratification culture. But dissonance is actually in learning theory where learning begins. And so if it’s never introduced into the learning process, then what they do here is not going to stick in the long term. So that’s the active element of it. Would you like me to tell them about the fourth leg?

I think it was a stool before you got a hold of you. I mean, this is all part of just common knowledge about learning theory is that if you can turn and tell someone what you’ve learned, then it’s going to stick with you a lot longer. So the fourth leg and I can see it it’s a good one is that you need to be able to tell someone else and I mean, this falls right in line with a great commission unsurprisingly, right, you need to be able to tell someone else what you’re learning, because it will show that you actually have mastery of the content.

JT English
So, in contrast with a passive learning environment. Like right now we’re in a passive learning environment. You haven’t you didn’t know what we were gonna talk about beforehand.

I almost tried to ignore Kyle’s question, but I do regularly. So right now you’re sitting there. So just some real basic stats. In this is preaching, I spend most of my time preparing sermons and preaching and that’s a passive learning environmental, so. But if people just hear what you preach this week, or if you teach a women’s Bible study or men’s Bible study, it week, from now, they’re gonna remember five to 10% of it, give or take anybody else a little depressed? What was last week’s sermon on, that you prayed over important. And again, we should do that we should absolutely do that. But if we can find ways to make it active, that’s really where it happens. If if they hear it and write it down, like many of you are writing this down, you’ll remember about 15 to 20%, of what you hear. But if you hear it, write it down. And if you go to lunch, right after this and talk about what you’re hearing from us, or talk about what you heard in the sermon, you’ll remember up to 80% of it. That’s an enormous jump. And so if you can create spaces in the life of your church, where there’s some pre work that they’re doing, they’re reading, they’re they’re thinking, or they’re getting a little dissonant about me, and what does this actually mean? They talked about it with a group of people, they hear you or somebody from your church teach on it, and then you create a way for them to go talk about it. And that can be evangelism. It can be go share this with a non believer, but it can also be Go tell your kids what you’ve learned about Matthew, tonight, go, go tell your husband or your wife, what you’re learning in your study of Matthew, that just really, really ramps up the learning abilities.

Kyle Worley
And we want to tell some stories just about how we’ve seen this play out in the life of our churches, and then some of the churches we’ve worked with. But before that, I do want to just maybe say something, maybe spoil this session for you a little bit. We’re not saying anything new here. This is not a novel approach to ministry. This isn’t a new philosophy. I remember when we were building this out together as a team at the same church before we began to migrate it to other churches. I called my dad one day is almost 30 years in First Baptist Church of groves, Texas, and I was so excited to talk to him about this new philosophy of ministry that we were building out. So I called them and I said, Yeah, Add we’re gonna have classes. It’s not just gonna be groups, it’s gonna be classes, and we’re gonna, people are going to discuss and then they’re going to hear from a teacher. And he listened very kindly. And at the end, he said, Son, I’m so proud of you. You’ve discovered Sunday school. Yeah. I thought, oh, yeah, that is what we’ve done. We aren’t saying something new. And it didn’t start with Sunday school, it began much further back with the discipleship model of the New Testament. And then beyond that, in the life of the early church with catechism, this is not a new fresh philosophy of ministry. It is a very old, ancient thing that is timely once again, because we forgot it in the first place. And I think it would be helpful to just hear some stories about how we’ve seen this play out. You want to start Jen?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, well, I do think that as we have this conversation, one of the things that you can think is great. So I just need good content to give to my people, like I build these spaces out with good content. But there is actually more to it than that. Because before JT came on staff at our church, we actually had an initial run at doing something like this, or doing something like a training program, where they were teaching theology to, to lay leaders. And it was planned for Tuesday and Wednesday mornings at 6am. And I had a conversation with the person who was working on it. No, it was actually with a woman who was who was doing it. And I said, Man, that’s so great. Like, how’s the attendance? She said, Oh, they’ve got about, well, they started with about 80 people, it’s kind of starting to taper off. And I said, really well, how many women are doing it? And she said, Well, there’s two of us to single women. And I was like, Yeah, because how is any woman going to be able to get there, you know, our primary times of providing family support fall right into that space. And so without meaning to the person who was responsible for setting up the space had chosen a time that was a barrier, it was a, an inappropriate bar to put in place. And so a big part of this conversation is looking for ways to remove all of the reasonable barriers to attendance. So hey, we’re going to watch your kids, hey, we’re going to put it at a time that makes sense for people to be able to attend, it’s going to function according to a schedule that’s predictable for you. So you can anticipate when it’s going to happen, that’s not going to be a moving target for you, it’s going to be the same 32 weeks every year, or in the case of Bible study.

11 weeks in the fall 11 weeks in the spring, you give them all of the measures of predictability and ways to opt in, that everyone else is doing. So their child’s travel sports team gives them a schedule, a clear expectation of what’s going to happen. They plan things for times that people can opt into, they charge them $1 billion. And people are like we’re doing it. Because again, they want to be called to hard things. But in this case, people had been called to hard things, but it had been made unnecessarily hard for them to be able to say yes to it. And so while we thoroughly believe the Christian story, belief information, that that content matters, that it’d be good, you can sabotage the effectiveness of it happening for people if your delivery system is wrong, which is why the joke about Sunday School hits hard because there really is no school like the old school, Sunday school was removing all of those barriers that can come up, the more organic your ministry structure is. Sunday school was not necessarily delivering the content that it needed to. But if you still have a Sunday school model church, God bless you start dropping some of this in. And you’ll be off to the races. If you have a more organic ministry model, what we are suggesting is that it needs to be more structured and predictable for people. And it needs to be accessible in the right ways. And it needs to raise the bar in the right ways.

As JT pointed out earlier, discipline is not dead. It just follows the most compelling message. We have not compelled people as we could. And so the environment did take off once it got scheduled at the right time, and people knew exactly what they were getting into. Same thing is true of women’s Bible study. We bounce back and forth between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And it has just been so fun to see that. Well. It JTS church, everybody would be like what Janet, just because you’re teaching and I’m like banks actually care more about what we’re doing and that it all hinges on someone being a fantastic Bible teacher. And I love that we’ve seen this now take root and other churches, and how many how many women do you have? How many men and women do you have come in?

JT English
We have just under 500 women coming to our women’s Bible study and around 200 men come into our men’s Bible study. And so that’s something that I was honestly concerned about. Here I am at the at the village church kind of a well known established we’re going to teach the gospel preach scripture, and it was hard to build what we built but it was also kind of like obvious, and then I moved to storyline church in Arvada, Colorado, again, a place that I grew up and was wondering in kind of a you can either call it pre Christian or post Christian environment I was like, Is this gonna work? To be honest? Like, I just had written my book deep discipleship. And I’m like, I’m all in. But am I all in? Is this going to work? And? And what felt like a little bit more of a missional space? Like, are people going to sign up for this? Is this does this work in the Bible Belt? Or does this work on the mission field? And well, that’s one of the criticisms of, I think this this environment is you’re just going to develop a holy huddle, you’re going to gather the people. And so one story that I love to tell us is about week. So we moved in, and we had some neighbors, a few doors down, and they were watching the show Breaking Bad. I don’t know what it is, I’m sure you don’t either. And they would like clothes there.

As soon as I moved in, they just start closing their blinds, because they’re like, the pastor knows what we’re watching, you know, and they were kind of, I didn’t know where they were on their spiritual journey. I’m not sure if they knew where they were on their spiritual journey. They were just kind of, at best nominal Christians, but just not all that committed to any local church. They would go like kind of Christmas and Easter kind of thing. We develop a relationship with them. And one in the wife got the courage one day to come up to my wife Macy, and say, so like you, do you? Do you read your Bible. It means he was like, Yeah, I read my Bible. And she said, Can you help me? read my Bible? And he was like, Sure, I’d love to go help you read your Bible. And so we have a Bible study or church that you should think about coming to? And she said, but before that, why don’t we read women of the word. And so that’s a book that Jen wrote, and has been so helpful, it should just be people with the word, but it is another word. For the word, it’s a great book on just how the basic study of the Bible how it can be meaningful in your life. And, and she said, Great, do you mind if I invite some of my friends and all of a sudden, two weeks later, 11 women in our in our basement before women’s Bible study, read the Bible.

And what I need you to hear is, is it wasn’t just the women that have thinking about going to seminary, it was kind of post Christian, secular, Catholic Lutheran mean, like, just across the spiritual smorgasbord of women saying, finally, an environment where I can begin growing, they then started doing the women’s bible study at our church, it’s led by my friend, Lindsay, who’s here, and in, they are now in their second year of a full table. So what I want you to hear is, it’s not, it’s not that we need to create disciples and be missional. Discipleship is missional. Discipleship is missional, when churches begin believing that we actually believe in saying, and we want to invite you to believe these things, also, people are going to come running to your church. So that’s what we’ve experienced is, is this in this little kind of post Christian secular town? People actually want to know what Christians believe in that’s found in the Bible.

Kyle Worley
I want us to wrap up by by you hearing me say this, you can do this, you can do this, you don’t need a special kind of teacher at your church. You don’t need a special kind of program. What you need is you need a vision. And you need some resources to help you along that journey. We’ve seen this migrate not only to three different churches that we’re all leading at, but we’ve seen this migrate now to well over 100 churches. And so I do just want to point out if you’re listening to this, and you’re thinking, okay, so So I need some help here, like I’m bought in, but I need some help. I do want to just give you a few things to consider just as practical steps. And I know that the team is going to put up a slide that gives a little bit this information as well. The first thing and I can plug this book because I didn’t write it, you can grab a copy of deep discipleship, if you haven’t read it. It’s a fantastic book, it gets into this in great detail. And I would encourage you to pick it up. I will tell you, it’s hard for me to say how good a book it is with JT standing or sitting right here next to me, but it’s great. It’s a great deal with a little piece of yourself. It does, it really hurts. It stings, you can grab that you can also grab a copy of you are a theologian to try to just get your people thinking through.

Okay, is theological development crucial for discipleship? The answer is yes.

JT English
We also want to just thank you for coming. Thank you for being passionate about discipleship in the life of the local church, church planting discipleship, teaching the Bible. These are things that you can strategize around. But ultimately we’re all dependent upon the Holy Spirit doing the work, amen. And so what I would do is just for a moment, I’d like to just pray for you and ask the Lord to build deep disciples in the life of your local church in your ministry context. Father, we’re so grateful that we could be at a conference like this with men and women who are so passionate about scripture, thanks for the gospel coalition. And all they’ve meant in my life and life agenda and QA we’ve benefited from the work and the good work that they’ve done. Thank you specifically, though, for these men and women who are who are laboring tirelessly. Whether it’s creating a women’s Bible study or men’s Bible study, or leading groups or preparing to preach your word every single week, Father, we know that we labor but you must do the work. And so as we sow the seed of the gospel and our local ministry contexts, whether it’s here in the continental US, they’re all across the globe, Father, we are totally dependent. And Jesus, we’re dependent upon your spirit being in our churches, would your spirit, just reap a harvest of disciples in the life of your church with these stats that we’ve read and what we’re feeling in this current cultural moment not be true? A year from now, five years from now 10 years from now, but might we experience genuine renewal and a deep love of Jesus in our churches and ministry contexts? And it’s in your match list in glorious name that we pray Jesus, amen.