Now we’re here. Remember how I told you about the disciple making decision ahead? About the disciple making fork in the road that was coming up? Now we stand at that fork. Before you choose which path you’ll walk, let’s look down each one as far as we can. To the right is a well-worn path called Standardized Discipling, to the left is a path called Tool-Based Discipling. Today let’s look at Standardized Discipling.
Standardized Discipling is a method of discipling others that emphasizes simplicity, ease of use, and broad accessibility (scale). It revolves around some thing (such as a book, Bible study, or curriculum) to direct the attention and momentum of the disciple making relationship. The thing is always in addition to the Bible and combined with relationship between the disciple maker and the person or persons being discipled. The goal of standardized discipling is to help the disciple develop grow to maturity and to disciple others by using the thing.
The process of standardized disciple making goes like this. Individuals are places in same-gendered groups of three to six. The setting feels similar to small groups, so it’s comfortable. As a result, participants are able to absorb the information quickly and personally. Once they’ve moved through the thing, they are asked to lead others through the thing. Standardized disciple making results in fast-formed disciples and disciple makers who quickly multiply.
This path is so popular that most aren’t even aware that there’s another option. It’s easy to see why.
Standardized discipling quickly empowers disciples who lack vision, confidence, balanced equipping, to get started making disciples. In fact, one of the major values of standardized discipling is to make the disciple making process “so easy that anyone can do it.” The thing helps accomplish this goal as disciple makers are able to lean on it for structure and content. It allows new disciple makers to focus their energy on getting used to the disciple making environment.
The overwhelming majority of pastors and churches prefer standardized discipling. From a leader’s perspective, there are very clear strengths. Standardized discipling has an easy entry point, an explicit and sequenced structure of lessons, a clear ask of participants, and a clear path to draw in the crowds. It enables leaders to launch some thing that will help the crowds grow without having to make a major change in their own life, schedule, or ministry commitments. Not only does it help the crowds, it also connects them to more mature individuals. The advantages of this approach are clear.
Unfortunately, the price of traveling the standardized disciple making path is significant and not clear at all. Since this approach aligns so well with the predominant cultural values (easy over arduous, systematized over customized, and predictable over varied) that most miss the costs altogether. When it comes to how to make a disciple the standardized discipling approach offers results now with payment deferred until later.
The Price of Standardized Disciple Making
There are at least four costs to the standardized discipling approach. Each of these weaknesses is the result of separating what should not be separated in order to cater to consumers.
1. The Cost of Separating Learning from Becoming
The Bible warns us of the dangers of knowledge. Without application, exposure to the Scriptures (or the right information) can be downright dangerous, leading to deception and a false understanding of truth (James 1:22, John 8:31-32).
Jesus-style disciple making prizes application over information. The practice of discipleship in the first century had the goal of becoming baked-in. A disciple’s knowledge wasn’t enough for the rabbi or the disciple. Becoming just like the Rabbi was the target and the priority. Standardized disciple making isn’t optimized for this. It doesn’t prevent it, but the form it relies on puts the thing on center stage. The engagement revolves around getting the right information which pushes becoming to the side—or often out of view altogether.
2. The Cost of Separating the Disciple (& the Disciple Maker) from Their Design
God has designed each person differently. Our unique design, experiences, and gifting impacts how we experience the world—and how we can impact it. Standardized discipling is attractive because it engages everyone as if they are the same. The sameness allows people to fit into one of two familiar and comfortable roles, the consumer or the expert.
Despite clear and consistent communication to the contrary (“this is not a small group or a Bible study or an accountability group or a program”), the environment feels like those familiar forms that participants revert to old ways of engaging. It looks and feels systematic and transactional instead of relational. For participants, something that looks like a duck, acts like a duck, and sounds like a duck, is a duck. In this case, the duck is consumerism.
Combine that reality with a structure that revolves around a thing with a commitment to do that thing as a learner/consumer and then again as the expert and people engage as they have in the past. Even those who embrace the form and system of standardized discipling have little room to bring their own gifting and personhood to the process. Why? Because their expertise is rooted in the context of the thing rather than in the context of a relationship with Jesus that’s been lived out in everyday life.
3. The Cost of Separating Teaching from Training.
There’s a big difference between teaching and training. Teaching is focused on communicating concepts and information. The desired outcome of pure teaching is retained knowledge that can be recalled and applied to real-world situations. It’s typically structured and somewhat rigid. The material drives the scope and the conversation. Teaching is good, right, Biblical, and should be a part of all Jesus-style disciple making.
Training is practical and hands-on. It’s focused on helping the learner develop a new skill, ability, and/or identity. It’s flexible and adaptable. It adapts to the learner’s individual design, experience, and skill level. Training helps someone learn to do something, not just know something.
Since the context of standardized discipling is understanding and then doing the thing (book, curriculum, program, etc), the focus is teaching, not training. When untrained disciples try to disciple they experience failure and quickly quit. Or worse yet, they feel so ill-equipped that they never start. Bottom line is when disciples aren’t trained, they don’t make it as disciple makers.
4. The Cost of Separating the Expert from the Example.
Standardized disciple making is designed so that “anyone can do it.” It’s able to make such a claim because the approach depends so heavily on the author or creator of the thing. Writing and technology allow the expert to be disembodied. Sometimes the group is learning from someone who isn’t living out what they are teaching. This is possible because in standardized discipling, being known isn’t as important as knowing. If the content creator can effectively communicate then the question of his/her own application doesn’t even occur to the learners. It may seem like a minor thing, but it really matters. Here’s why…
The message underneath the message from disembodied experts is “no one here has what they need to make disciples.” This message is caught not taught. There’s irony here because Jesus-style disciple making is designed so that more is to be caught than taught, but it’s supposed to be caught in the context of in-the-flesh relationship. Just as a child learns from a parent, disciples are meant learn from a disciple maker as they observe their way of life. When there’s no example to learn from in real life then disciples are robbed of the opportunity to observe a way of life and to envision themselves doing the same with another. The cost of separating the expert from the example doesn’t stop there. It also undermines the sufficiency of Scripture (2 Pt. 1:3-4), the call of every disciple to grow to maturity(Luke 6:40), to make disciples (Mt 28:18-20).
Conclusion
Standardized disciple making has some absolutely amazing strengths. For leaders, standardized discipling is compelling because it scales quickly, has a clear entry and end points, an accessible structure, built-in reproduction, and makes fast-formed disciples. There’s a lot to like here, so it’s easy to understand why so many have chosen this path of disciple making.
Unfortunately, its weaknesses are just as significant. It separates important aspects of disciple making that should be unified. It separates learning from becoming, the disciple from his design, teaching from training, and the expert from the example. It also relies on an approach that is very different from the example of Jesus, Paul, and generations of others who have discipled out of their lived experience with God. It also comes with major costs that appear late on in the process.
The other option comes with significant weaknesses, too. Our goal is careful consideration so that we can make the best choice possible for our context. Next time we’ll consider the other path: tool-based discipling.
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Find this helpful? Want to grow as a disciple or disciple maker? Check out my books: The Bicycle Illustration and The Foundation of a Disciple Making Culture. Too much to read? Check out my Podcast, “The Practitioners’ Podcast” for short, hyper focused disciple making episodes wherever you get podcasts!