The Disciple-Making Pathway: How to Help People in Your Church Make Disciples

Building a clear disciple-making pathway has become somewhat of a hot topic among church leaders in the last few years.

Sometimes, leaders believe they have a disciple-making pathway, but it’s not something that’s clear or clearly known among attenders or even key leaders. 

A disciple-making pathway is the organizing structure in your church. It clarifies what the disciple-making actions are and makes it easy for people to take them.

This is typically an eye-opening exercise. Staff members tend to have different answers to the same question, which reveals the gaps and/or lack of clarity in the disciple-making process. If the process is cloudy for the staff, you can be sure it’s also cloudy for the congregants.

“If it’s a mist in the pulpit, it’s a fog in the pew.” – Anonymous

What Happens if You Don’t Have a Pathway?

Consider the impacts on your church when there is no clear pathway (and see how much of this sounds familiar).

• Without a primary pathway, every ministry tries to become an assimilation funnel. The funnel becomes bloated and people new to your church can get overwhelmed or confused. 
• Programming starts to take precedence. The more programs you have to manage, the more resources get allocated to them. Leaders end up running programs instead of developing people. 
• Staff get pulled in multiple directions, which leads to stress. Their time gets bogged down with event planning and administrative work.

Start with a Disciple-Making Culture

To create a disciple-making pathway, we advise first looking at the disciple-making culture in your church. A culture is the shared attitudes, beliefs, perspectives, paradigms, and language that together create the norms of what people do and expect. 

In other words, culture is what makes disciple-making standard practice in your church. It creates an environment for a disciple-making pathway to thrive. 

Think of a garden; the pathway to growing new plants is to sow seeds and propagate, but the culture—the environment of healthy soil and adequate water and sunlight—is what gives the pathway to creating new plants its ability to work. 

In church terms, a disciple-making pathway is a critical part of a larger culture. A culture that’s welcoming and ready to intake new disciples will give people an environment that turns their outreach into genuine church growth.

“A disciple is someone learning to live with Jesus and for Jesus in all of life—and helping others do the same.”

Build a Pathway Connected to Calling

While crafting a pathway does give people in your church clear steps they can understand and follow, this doesn’t mean simply giving people in your church a to-do list or a menu of ministry programs to choose from. 

We’ve worked with well-meaning pastors who have expended a lot of energy and focus on mission discipleship. They saw results from their efforts in early years, or with the first and second generation of the church. But then things started to stagnate. 

In crafting a disciple-making pathway, it’s important to connect actions to each person’s individual calling. If people feel they are parroting someone else’s talking points or just running a program, rather than embodying and sharing what God has specifically called them to do and be, disciple-making can only go so far. 

In the Bible, we see examples of Jesus speaking to people’s hearts, igniting their intrinsic motivation to spread the good news. Following these examples, a disciple-making pathway shines a light on each unique calling and stays connected to a larger God-given dream for the church and community as a whole.

Remember the Method—Not Just the Message

As church leaders, we’ve devoted our lives to the saving message and movement of Jesus. To invite people into that movement Jesus had a method—a method of multiplication. 

The disciple-making pathway of your church creates a strategic map to multiplying the kind of disciples of Jesus that your church is designed to create, which your community desperately needs more of. Therefore, the ideal pathway has clearly defined disciples in the context of your church, thrives in a disciple-making culture, and empowers people to live out their individual calling based on who God has specifically created them to be.

Questions for Application and Discussion

• Do you have a clear disciple-making pathway that functions more like a map than a menu? A clear pathway enables people to understand where they currently are in the process – and what their next step is to grow in their faith.
• Have you invested time in articulating what a disciple should look like in your church? Check out our free ebook on defining your Dream Disciple to learn more. 
• What percentage of time each week do your staff and key leaders spend running programs? 
• What percentage of time each week do your staff and key leaders spend developing people?
• What are some immediate steps you can take to encourage and expect your staff to increase the percentage of time they spend directly investing in people rather than running programs?

This is the first part of a multi-article series about how empowering people in your congregation to articulate and live out their personal calling is critical to a healthy and thriving spiritual growth pathway. 

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We’d love to have a conversation to define what a disciple-making pathway looks like for your church. We meet church leaders where they are and choose the best starting point from there, whether it’s discerning personal calling or diving into church missional work. Feel free to reach out to us to have a conversation with our team.