Our journey as a church continues. Our purpose is to answer the question, “What is missing?” What did the New Testament Church have that is absent in the American Church (and in our hearts) today. How can we recapture the focus and character of the Church in the New Testament?

First we need to find those missing priorities. The first focus we explored was a focus on whole-hearted commitment to Jesus Christ. The kind of commitment that results in repentance and life change.

As we moved forward into our second missing priority, we looked at the last words Jesus spoke to His disciples before He returned to His Father. At the end of the book of Matthew, Jesus gives one instruction. He tells his disciples to make more disciples (Matthew 28:19). The instructions surrounding that central commission (going, teaching, baptizing) were ways that disciples could be made. One of the great missing elements in the Americanized Church is that we have lost our focus on making disciples.

One of my old bosses, Charles Crabtree, described our current situation as a “Crisis of Discipleship”. We are pretty good at getting people into the pews of the church. We’re not bad at getting them to make some sort of commitment to Jesus. But we’re lousy at fulfilling Jesus’ instructions to make disciples. We lose somewhere in the area of 95% of the people who make commitments to Christ in our churches.

There are several complex reasons we find ourselves in this crisis, but the solution is simple. We need to return to the New Testament focus on building true disciples. As a church, in order to recapture the New Testament focus on discipleship, we committed to the following:

·        We will present the good news of Jesus Christ to those who are not yet believers.

·        We will care for our new believers so that they can grow and mature in their faith.

·        We will provide multiple opportunities for believers to study and apply the Word of God to their lives.

·        We will encourage and facilitate the building of strong relationships between believers that will help us to encourage discipleship in each other.

One of the greatest tools we have as a church to fulfill that commitment is the ministry of Sunday school. To some, Sunday school seems old fashioned. But there is no other ministry that provides small group discipleship for all age groups the way Sunday school does. When done properly, Sunday school there are very few ministries that can help to fulfill the Great Commission of Jesus the way Sunday school does. I will continue to be a cheerleader for Sunday school and the heroic men and women who lead classes of men, women, boys and girls.

Over the next two Sundays we had leaders of our various discipleship ministries (men’s, women’s, youth, Sunday school, children’s church, Wednesday Bible studies) share what takes place in their ministries and how they are working to build disciples. We encouraged believers to add a discipleship ministry to their faith journey in order to accelerate their growth as followers of Jesus.

We did have an increase in some of our discipleship ministries, but not nearly what I had hoped for. But we are continuing to encourage people to go through the doors of discipleship that are available to them and we will continue to open new doors of discipleship so that we might regain the New Testament focus on true discipleship.