Discipleship Groups

Discipleship groups are a core component of my ministry and spiritual life. In this post, I overview what they’re about and how they work.

Transformation at the Grassroots

When my family returned from Peru in order for me to pursue doctoral studies, we faced the difficulties common to long-term cross-cultural missionaries who return to their cultures of origin: reverse culture shock, guilt and doubt, disappointment with the church, and spiritual malaise. For me, a primary consequence of this transition was the feeling that, while I thought I knew how to make disciples in Peru, I was unsure how to do so in the US. The doctoral program was my primary work, but I remained compelled to make disciples, so I sought equipping to that end. This led me to Mission Alive, through which I participated in a remote discipleship cohort.

The result of this training was the formation of a discipleship group (DGroup) composed of members of our local congregation who were looking for deeper relational and spiritual engagement. A year-and-a-half-long experiment in missional community ensued. The experience convinced me of the need for such grassroots endeavors to lead life-long church members into a mode of missional life together that, I believe, constitutes authentic discipleship. This community became the most life-giving aspect of our time in southern California.

After our move to middle Tennessee, we eventually repeated the experiment. Our initial Murfreesboro DGroup has recently multiplied into three new groups. I am more hopeful than ever that the DGroup process can transform local churches from the inside out.

I think of DGroups, at least as we have implemented them, as guerrilla actions within traditional church structures. We have never asked for permission to form DGroups, and given the opportunity to institute a discipleship program in a local church, I would refuse. Discipleship is not a program but a way of life, which requires a high degree of voluntary commitment. The attempt to impose a discipleship agenda structurally would inevitably fail.

In other words, the transformation of church members into disciples happens at the grassroots level. The phrasing of this claim risks offending those who would identify themselves as disciples of Jesus by virtue of their conversion, church membership, and private devotion. It is a necessary risk, and I am prepared to defend the implication (see my post “Discipleship in the Gospels: Following Jesus”). Discipleship entails an intentionality that the DGroup process facilitates. By intentionality, I refer to two ideas: an intentional pursuit of discipleship to Jesus in community and a life together aimed at God’s intentions.

The latter idea qualifies the DGroup process as missional in my understanding. The former might also, depending on one’s understanding of Jesus’s direction. But it is impossible to begin a process of intentional discipleship by reconfiguring participants’ collective understandings of Jesus (that happens . . . on the way), so the most practical way to convey the missional intent of the process to a new DGroup is to emphasize that our undertaking is not to be confused with a “small group.” Granting that the term small group can refer to a huge variety of experiences, it has nonetheless come to connote spiritual self-centeredness: community for community’s sake, intimacy for intimacy’s sake, spiritual growth for spiritual growth’s sake, and so on. A DGroup, by contrast, commits from day one to align its intent with God’s purposes beyond us and, therefore, to break our shared life open in order to include others in it. Discipleship is about forming missional communities.

The DGroup Process

I will not attempt to summarize the entire course of the DGroup process as we have implemented it. Instead, I share some key dimensions of the process using the essential model I learned from Mission Alive: the invitation-challenge matrix. This model originates from Mike Breen’s Building a Discipling Culture (I have the second edition):

The idea is simple but profound: discipleship requires both high invitation and high challenge. My own representation of the paradigm follows.

The two axes:

High challenge entails responsibility, scrutiny, correction, and exhortation. Low challenge entails irresponsibility, indifference, permissiveness, and silence.

High invitation entails welcome, acceptance, accommodation, and encouragement. Low invitation entails exclusivity, judgment, intolerance, and denunciation.

The four quadrants:

High invitation/Low challenge (toxic invitation) gives rise to passivity, apathy, grace without truth, religious consumerism, and relativism.

High challenge/Low invitation (toxic challenge) gives rise to aggression, fanaticism, truth without grace, works righteousness, and legalism.

Low invitation/Low challenge (nominal membership) gives rise to indifference, irresponsibility, spirituality without community, autonomy, and radical individualism.

High invitation/High challenge (discipleship) gives rise to responsible participation, gentle accountability, grace and truth, mutual submission, and sincere dialogue.

Probably, most readers can place their church experiences in either the High invitation/Low challenge or the High challenge/Low invitation quadrants. Congregations tend to fall in these categories. The legalism of my tradition has usually reflected Low invitation/High challenge tendencies and has reactively produced High invitation/Low challenge congregations. The pendulum swing is understandable. And the combination of high invitation and high challenge has proven elusive, but this is exceedingly common. Discipleship in community calls for something unusual.

Again, the combination of high invitation and high challenge is what we’re after in the DGroup process. The structure of our meetings reflects this pursuit. About half of our time is given to “checking in” with each other. We use various prompts to generate sincere openness about our lives. The aim of these conversations is to foster vulnerability, authenticity, and trust across time. In this space, there is no judgment. We seek to hear each other’s stories with gracious understanding and encouragement. The other half of our time is devoted to a “curriculum” of discipleship concepts. I hesitate to use the word curriculum since it conveys an academic mode of discourse, which is inaccurate. But there is a set of concepts that we talk through together. These concepts are undoubtedly challenging. They call us to self-reflection, honesty, and commitment.

Discipleship is inherently a process of both learning and discipline. But high invitation constitutes the environment in which these challenging pursuits are possible and sustainable. Without relationships characterized by sincerity and trust, there is no reason to expect the spiritual growth that follows from mutual submission and genuine accountability.

It is important to note that the DGroup process requires an open-ended gathering. The time commitment involved is significant. A high degree of challenge, therefore, characterizes our invitation to prospective participants. We do not put limits on our check-ins; they take however long they take. If someone (or more than one person) is dealing with a significant personal issue, the conversation and prayer that ensue are not truncated for the sake of our schedules. Yet, in such instances, we do not forego a discussion of the concepts that challenge us to deeper discipleship. In my experience, three hours is the average duration of a DGroup meeting. Accordingly, the demands of the process require a limited number of participants; we have not formed a group of more than twelve people. We readily accept that those who cannot make space for so much time together refuse the invitation to participate.

The DGroup process makes the cultivation of both dimensions of Christian life together —invitation and challenge—intentional. This is, in my experience, impossible in large-group settings. Sermons, classes, worship, and fellowship are indispensable aspects of larger church life. I participate in all of these each week, and advocacy of intentional discipleship in no way disqualifies them. But I’m convinced the gathering of groups of six to twelve followers of Jesus into voluntary communities committed to high invitation and high challenge is irreplaceable in the transformation of both individual believers and traditional churches.