Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

No Silver Bullets

Building a Discipleship Culture That Will Grow Your Church

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Are you happy with your existing vision, strategy, and values, or do you need to revisit them?

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 what to do differently?

The fact is, we often lead the way we’ve been led, disciple the way we’ve been discipled, and teach the way we’ve been taught…unless we consciously decide to do otherwise.

We often lead the way we’ve been led and disciple the way we’ve been discipled!

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And with the accelerated pace of life, the unceasing demands of ministry, and the relentless fact that Sunday is always around the corner, who has the luxury of time to stop, audit, and make systemic changes to the way we lead, disciple, and teach?

As a result, the two things that we often (unintentionally) end up neglecting is self-development and team-development.

In a previous article, I address the issue of self-development and provide you with a list of questions from my book, No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry. So be sure to go back and answer those questions before moving on.

Let’s now talk about staff or team development.

The fact is, as a pastor and church leader, you are both a boss and a disciple-maker—and this applies whether or not you’re the senior leader.

(Now I understand that you may not like the word boss because it sounds domineering, but I’m simply trying to emphasize the fact that you’re the leader and that you have responsibilities that directly affect others.)

So take a moment and think about everyone on your team—whether it’s your staff team as the senior leader, or your volunteer team as a staff member.

On the one hand, you are responsible for the ministry that God has entrusted you with.

So in order to get things done in a scalable manner, you can’t do it yourself. You need to work with and through your team—just think about Exodus 18 and the account between Moses and Jethro. This makes you the boss, the leader, or depending on your culture, the chief cheerleader or number one servant.

On the other hand, you are also responsible to equip those under and around you for the work of ministry (Eph 4:12-13).

And I’m not talking about equipping others to make coffee, clean the toilets, and carry your purse, or murse…I’m talking about “equipping the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness” (Eph 4:12-13).

While making coffee and cleaning toilets can definitely be a character shaping exercise and be a part of moving you to maturity, that’s not what I’m talking about…

I’m talking about building a culture that allows your team to develop both professionally and spiritually.

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What Kind of Church Leader Are You?

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In order to grow and multiply your church, you have to start with yourself.

I’m not talking about picking up a self-help book to learn how to get your best life now. I’m talking about figuring out why it is that you lead the way that you do.

But Daniel, that means I need to slow down and reflect…I don’t have time for that! Sunday’s coming, and I need to…

Yes I understand that Sunday is coming and that you have things to do! But here’s the thing…

If you don’t take the necessary time to learn why you lead the way you lead, disciple the way you disciple, and teach the way you teach, you will never be able to grow and multiply your church.

In order to grow and multiply your church, you have to start with yourself.

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In my book, No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry, I start the first chapter with a self-assessment to help you discover why it is that you lead the way you do.

Here’s a portion of it. I hope you’ll slow down and take a moment to work through each of these questions:

1. Who do you look up to as a pastor and church leader?

Who has shaped your view of church practice and practical theology? Is it Eugene Peterson? J. I. Packer? Tim Keller? It could be someone you know personally, or someone you’ve admired from a distance.

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The Obscure Link Between Instant Gratification and Change

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Do you remember when it would take so long for your computer to start up, that you’d have time to brew a cup of coffee or make yourself a sandwich?

Oh how times have changed…

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 to need, want, and long for change.

We’re addicted to change…and secretly we love it.

Now change isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but change for the sake of change must be avoided. It demoralizes your team, causes unnecessary stress, and is simply unproductive. However, if you have decided that change needs to take place in your life and in your ministry, following this eight-step process that I wrote about in a previous article, is critical.

Change for the sake of change must be avoided at all costs.

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Now while the likelihood of succeeding in leading change without the eight-step process—or some variation of it—is pretty low, how you view and approach change matters even more.

When burdened with a new idea, or a desire to change something specifically in your life or your church, definitely start with prayer. But don’t move straight to implementation after you say “Amen.”

We need to slow down and take a different approach.

Now I understand that this is hard to do because of our on-demand, stream-anytime, find-an-answer-to-anything, go-anywhere, and swipe-now-pay-later instant gratification culture.

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Systems and an Encyclopedia

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As a child, I remember flipping through the human anatomy section in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

As a curious child with an insatiable love for learning—I remember times when I would just open up the encyclopedia and read. My favorite section was the human anatomy, since I wanted to be a doctor. In fact, I vividly remember looking through and being amazed by the layers of complexity that the human body presented.

This section was always several pages long.

In fact, it always stuck out from the other pages in the encyclopedia, since each system in the human body was printed on its own plastic, transparent page.

If you had one of these old-school encyclopedias in front of you, the first system you’d see would be the integumentary system—the body’s outer covering. In other words, you’d see a naked human body with skin, hair, and nails. If you flipped that transparent page over to the next—I apologize for the graphic nature of this next phrase—it would almost be like you were peeling the skin off of a human. You’d be left with the muscular system. If you flipped that page over again, you would see the circulatory system.

With every progressive page turn, you would uncover another system that makes up the human body. The nervous system, the lymphatic system, the skeletal system, and so on.

Just like there are different layers of systems in the human body, so it is with the church.

The systems in your church are designed to work together, like they do in the human body, to help your church function as God intends it to. After all, “God has arranged each one of the parts in the body just as he wanted” (1 Cor. 12:18).

So what exactly are those systems for your church?

While there are many more than just these two, your discipleship pathway and leadership pipeline are what makes up the two core systems that drive everything in your church.

Your discipleship pathway & leadership pipeline are the two core systems that drive everything.

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The 5 Small Shifts

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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.

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