Practical How-To of Disciple-Making
Your Goal
Simply put, your goal is to invite 2 people to meet with you for 1 1/2 hours a week for a year (if you are in a college town or are discipling students, you may want to set this up to be “for a school year”) and then multiply by encouraging them to do the same. In that time, you will mutually encourage each other to be more like Jesus Christ.
How do I begin?
- Pray about who God has for you to disciple.
- Ask yourself, “Is this person faithful and teachable?”
- Approach him/her and say, “I have been praying about spending time each week in a discipleship relationship with someone. The Lord has laid you on my heart. I’d like to know if you’d like to meet with me (and possibly another person if you have a triad) once a week to study the Word, pray and challenge each other to become more like Christ. Pray about it this week and let’s get together sometime so I can tell you more about it. You can commit to it after that if you choose.”
The first Get-together: The Commitment Meeting
- Get to know each other. Share your testimonies, about your family, you ministry involvements, your future aspirations, etc.
- Discuss the commitment, both time commitment and spiritual commitment. Be specific in your expectations about meetings, materials, teachability and openness.
- Discuss curriculum or material and what kind of assignments you’ll be giving.
- Give him/her a discipleship covenant and “Plan for personal growth” sheet to fill out and bring back to the next meeting as an indication of readiness to begin (both to come later).
- Set your next meeting time.
The second get-together
- Share about what God has been doing in your week.
- Talk over the the personal growth sheet. Ask for clarification. Make notes about topics you’d like to cover and needs that jumping out based upon what he/she wrote down.
- Read Luke 9:1-6, 23-27, Luke 1425-35 together and answer the following questions:
- What is a disciple?
- What does it cost to be a disciple?
- Am I willing to count the cost and follow Christ?
- What does it mean for me in a specific, tangible way on a daily basis?
- Give him/her your first assignment.
- Ask for prayer needs and pray together.
What now?
Every week plan to spend about 30 minutes share about your week and asking accountability questions, 45 minutes on the material you have chosen and 15 minutes praying together.
Every so often, evaluate the discipleship process. If it seems to hit a valley, you may want to try and change things up a bit. Or sadly, if things are not working, you may need to end the relationship.
