discipleship

The 5 Small Shifts

September 5, 2017 By Daniel Im

Are you happy with your existing vision, strategy, and values? Are you producing disciple-makers, disciples, or consumers? Are you worried that what you’re currently doing isn’t sustainable or scalable? Do you need to overhaul your church, but aren’t sure how?

I want to invite you to consider what God might do through you, if you were to implement five small shifts.

In my book, No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry, you’ll discover five micro-shifts that have the potential to produce macro-change in your church. Here’s a quick overview.

Shift #1: From Destination to Direction

This first shift is about viewing discipleship from a systems perspective. In this shift, you’ll uncover the various ways churches approach discipleship from a fifty-thousand-foot level. We’ll do this by looking at the two spectrums that influence your approach, and then by examining how they intersect.

Shift #2: From Output to Input

In this second shift, you’ll zoom into discipleship at the individual level. We’ll go from looking at the systematic discipleship of the many to the personal discipleship of the one. We’ll do this by unpacking the results of one of the largest research projects on discipleship to date, in order to determine the right metrics for maturity.

Shift #3: From Sage to Guide

Technology has forever changed the way individuals learn. Moreover, adults learn differently than children. We simply can’t teach the way we were taught. In this shift, we’ll unpack these issues and you’ll explore what it looks like to move from being a sage on the stage to a guide on the side when it comes to discipleship and leadership development.

[Read more…] about The 5 Small Shifts

The Myth of the Silver Bullet

August 29, 2017 By Daniel Im

Have you ever noticed the deep longing inside of you for the silver bullet? For that one quick, magical solution that will solve all of your problems?

I know I have. I remember thinking to myself that this one sermon I was getting ready to preach was going to be so powerful that the chains of apathy in my church would finally be broken. The consumeristic tendencies hidden in everyone’s hearts were going to be rooted out once and for all. Everyone in the church would befriend those far from God, share the gospel with them, see them experience new life in Christ, and then disciple them to do the same.

People were going to move from being merely disciples to being disciple-makers.

Instead of the church being a place to get their needs met, the church was going to see itself as a house of prayer for all nations, a hospital for sinners and not a hotel for saints, a disciple-making institute, and a tangible sign, instrument, and foretaste of the kingdom of God. This was going to be the day, the sermon, and the moment that would go down in history.

When it didn’t quite happen the way I had envisioned it, I realized my mistake.

Oh, how naïve I was. I thought the sermon was the silver bullet, when it was actually the discipleship model that the church down the road was using! I mean, just look at how successful they were.

Well, when that didn’t work either, I turned to secular management books. And then to church consultants. And then to . . .

Does any of this sound familiar?

The myth of the silver bullet is alive and well…

…and it’s not because of old reruns of The Lone Ranger, or teenage novels about werewolves. It’s alive and well because we want the quick fix. We have been conditioned for the instant. It’s our hidden addiction.

We have been conditioned for the instant. It’s our hidden addiction.

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If our computers take longer than a minute to start, we think something’s wrong. If we want to read a book, we can download it instantly. If we want to listen to one, we can literally press play the moment after we purchase it. If we want toothpaste, laundry detergent, or a few bananas, we can order it on Prime Now and get it within two hours. And now, with the launch of Amazon Go, we don’t even need to line up and pay the cashier at the grocery store!

Sure, this is convenient, but the unfortunate side effect is that we’ve been conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to salivate at the sound of a bell.

The availability of goods and resources—and our consumption of them—have conditioned us to need instant gratification. Regrettably, this has seeped into our spiritual lives and the way we lead our churches.

If you’ve been around ministry long enough, you’ll know that there are no perfect models, no one right way of doing ministry or leading a church (I’m talking about church practice, not theology).

There are no silver bullets—one-decision solutions that will solve all your woes and unleash your church into a new season of fruitfulness.

The only way change happens— significant, long-lasting, macro-level change—is through a series of small decisions, steps, or micro-shifts, that are put into action and completed one at a time.

The only way change happens is through a series of small decisions, steps, or micro-shifts…

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Isn’t that why the late great preacher of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, Charles Spurgeon, said, “By perseverance the snail reached the ark”?

The snail had no silver bullet. It got to the ark one small step at a time.

Let me ask you a few questions:

Input vs Output Goals for Discipleship

August 15, 2017 By Daniel Im

Have you ever judged the effectiveness of your ministry by the size of attendance?

On Easter Sunday, after setting up extra chairs, perhaps you had to pull out even more to accommodate the influx of people. It may have felt good to preach to a full room. Lives were changed and there was a tangible buzz in the air.

By all accounts, that service felt like a win.

But then what happened in the following weeks? Where did all the people go? Did they stick with their faith? Or did everything go back to “normal?”

And if that happened, did you end up feeling like a failure?

The fact is, we can’t help having responses like this.

From report cards and standardized testing scores to gas mileage in our cars and the square footage of our homes, we measure everything—especially what “success” looks like in ministry.

How many people were baptized last year?
What is your average weekend attendance?
How many campuses do you have?
How many do you have on staff?
What about your budget?

Those can be great indicators of health. But they don’t measure matters of the heart. And they don’t tell us whether someone in our church is a disciple and whether people are maturing in their faith.

I want to introduce a different way to measure success in discipleship—one that is based on one of the largest studies done to date on discipleship in North America. So let’s dig in.

Measuring discipleship can be a little like measuring other kinds of human endeavors aimed at changing your life—like losing weight or saving money.

There are two factors to keep in mind: input goals and output goals.

Input goals are the behaviors or habits you adopt when trying to make a change.

In weight loss, input goals would be things like counting calories, exercising, or cutting back on fast food. For saving money, they’d be things like bringing your lunch to work or setting a family budget.

We adopt those input goals in order to see some kind of output in the future.

Output goals equal feeling better physically, losing a certain number of pounds, or having a certain amount of money in the bank.

The two are linked; certain kinds of inputs lead to certain kinds of outputs.

Churches often measure success in ministry and whether someone is a mature disciple by using output goals, such as attendance, giving, and serving. But we need to think about input goals as well.

Taking Credit for Others Work

August 8, 2017 By Daniel Im

Have you ever taken credit for others work? For something you didn’t do? For something that wasn’t yours?

I know I have…

In fact, I’ve never admitted the following story to anyone…ever. So here we go.

That shoe wasn’t mine. Yet I took it home and pretended that it was mine. I took credit for it. My teacher and my parents thought it was gorgeous. But the stark truth is that it wasn’t actually my work.

I’m talking about a clay model of a shoe…

Now to my defense, when I grabbed that shoe, I honestly thought it was mine. After all, it had the Nike swoosh on it and it was a high top. And while those two characteristics of a clay shoe didn’t necessarily thin the pack or narrow the options, when I grabbed that shoe, I was convinced it was mine.

Okay…I wasn’t fully convinced, since there was another shoe on the table that had the same characteristics. But surely, that ugly thing wasn’t my creation. I was definitely more talented than that. After all, doesn’t baking clay get rid of all the imperfections?

It wasn’t until another student went to the teacher, and I overheard him describe what his shoe looked like, that I realized I had taken the wrong one. But at that point, it was too late. I had already committed. And I didn’t want to say anything.

So I just kept the shoe, took credit for it, and brought it home.

While that might seem like a silly story, it revealed something about my heart, and the condition of the human heart.

5 Myths That Block Disciple Making

August 1, 2017 By Daniel Im

“I want to make my life count. I want to do big things for the kingdom. I only want to do things that have an eternal significance.”

Have you ever prayed such prayers? I know I definitely have.

In fact, when I was getting serious about my relationship with Christ, this is what I regularly prayed for because I wanted my life to count. I wanted to make a difference in this world. I didn’t want to live for what was temporal—my fame and my glory—but for what was eternal.

And the only way that I knew how to judge whether or not something was a “big thing” for the kingdom was by its size. This is what I thought:

Small churches = small impact
Small conferences = not significant
Small platform = lack of the right gifting

Years later, after God broke me and stripped away everything I had, I realized my ambitions weren’t as pure as I made them out to be.

Sure, I said that I wanted to make a big impact for the kingdom, but that was contingent upon me making the big impact for God. Yes, I obviously wanted to do things that had an eternal significance, but only if I could share that eternal significance with God…