In the words of that great philosopher Jimmy Buffet…the first step in making discipleship happen at Compass Point started with “changes in latitudes…changes in attitudes”. In a sense we had to rethink what discipleship looked like for us in the 21st Century. We knew that the “lets-get-everybody-to-be-friends” strategy we’d heard about at conferences wasn’t working for us. We were not seeing assimilation come through our small groups…but through the areas in which they served. That in itself was a very freeing thing in making the necessary changes in order to help create a more robust discipleship program. However, it also took many changes in our mindset…things like:
1. Discipleship doesn’t happen in large settings. Jesus spoke to the multitudes but only discipled twelve. I don’t care where you look in the Bible…discipleship didn’t happen in a large group setting. That doesn’t mean that Sunday sermons can’t get into deep subject matter…it just means that it can’t be the only source for people’s spiritual growing. Too many lazy people wanna show up only on Sunday expecting to be fed. They suck…and just don’t get it. It’s only through small groups of people that true…do-life-together…discipleship takes place.
2. You can’t reach people far from God without putting a BUNCH of effort into discipleship. I once heard Vince Antonucci say that he wanted a church full of lost people and missionaries….I dug that. However, you can’t have either without a focused and spiritually growing discipleship process. Some lost people will come to church because of marketing…but the majority come because of a personal invite. At Compass Point we believe that the Holy Spirit shows us the people in our personal lives that He wants us to reach. In order to hear from the Holy Spirit and be relational missionaries for Him…we gotta be Kingdom-focused and doctrinally grounded disciples. I’ll go into more detail about this concept later in the series.
3. Assimilation is not discipleship. The Great Commission didn’t command us to go make friendships…it commanded us to go make disciples. For us the idea of our small groups being some kind of supper time social club was eerily unBiblical…and a total waste of resources. We were discovering that people were building friendships with folks they served with at Compass Point…not through the small groups. The driving force behind people coming to our small groups was to learn more about God’s Word and take the next steps in their spiritual life. Once we stopped trying to make our small groups a hand-holding, Tony Robbins self-esteem experience and start letting them be a place of higher education…cool stuff began to happen.
4. Screw the percentages. I used to get intimidated when I’d be at conference listening to the speaker tell me that they had 80% of their people in small groups. Just because I can herd 100 horses around a lake doesn’t mean I can get them all to slurp up the H2o. The reality is that everyone wants to make friends…very few actually want to be disciples. Discipleship has to be about quality…not quantity. Don’t get me wrong…we love that our small group attenders do life together…but our single goal with our small groups is to teach people about God’s Word. If they make a few friends in the process…that’s a bonus…not a priority.
5. The Oprah method was a load of crap. At Compass Point we are a bunch of seriously messed up people trying desperately to live for Christ. Our self-esteem is pretty much already shot to Hell…and we already hang out with homeless people and criminals. Self-help lessons and studies about digging a water well in Africa was a complete toilet flush for us…been there…done that…still doing it…don’t need to be taught it. We began to realize that our folks were hungry for a book-by-book study of the Bible. As amazing as it was to comprehend…we had to come grips with the fact that the folks in our small groups wanted to know what God’s Word said…and not take their marching orders from the latest Christianese Dr. Phil.
6. Flexible demographics…not flexible doctrine. A small group at Compass Point can come together for pretty much any reason under the sun. In all honesty…we could care less about the demographical makeup of the group. What we do care about is who is leading it…and what materials they are using. We have set in place some pretty rigid parameters for small group leadership at Compass Point…as well as what resources they can use. Again…more on this later in the series.
More to come….
