Fostering Discipling Communities
Eph 4:12 tells us that we need to be engaged in works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up. Like gym trainers, pastors and teachers are to teach and coach the body of Christ, but if there is no actual exercise involved, the body will not be developed and toned up and all the teachings can seem rather irrelevant. Members can be attending church and cell meetings for years without any substantial growth when there is often no compelling need to put what is learnt into practice.

Bill Donahue and Russ Robinson explain it this way in their book Walking the Small Group Tightrope, “This is Ephesians 4:11-13 in action: ‘It was he [Jesus] who gave some to be.. pastors and teachers, to prepare God’s people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.’… The Bible describes tasks as fundamental to spiritual progress. Sadly, many churches divorce task from growth, thinking that real discipleship takes place only through Bible study or sermons.” Re-engineering current community and task groups to learn as well as serve together is a practical way to address this incongruence so that the church can be internally strong while being externally focused. The authors further elaborated, “Every group has opportunities to build community and serve together. When this tension is managed right, groups begin serving together. The task group must rediscover the community component; community groups must help people recognize that true community is revived in service to others.. That’s how churches become filled with increasing numbers of loving communities that serve together and serving communities that love one another.”

Pastor Larry Osborne mentioned in his book the Sticky Church that there are 3 basic approaches to discipleship and leadership training. The first is the Mentoring model that is focused on one-on-one relationships that is relatively inefficient. The second is the Education model which takes a long time and assumes that spiritual growth is linear, so people will be considered discipled and ready to lead once they have graduated from the process. The Apprenticeship model is the third approach that tends to throw people into a task and then come alongside to help as needed. It accomodates the meandering path to spiritual growth that most people take and is often the only way to produce enough leaders to get into the game quickly. Turning Small Groups into Discipling Communities is essentially an Apprenticeship model which we termed as Community Discipleship.

Community Outreach
In Community Discipleship, Community Outreach is the practical application of Community Learning and the outflow of God's love so that Community Learning extends meaningfully to bless other communities. It seeks to meet community’s needs with the resources that God has given us. Much peer coaching, peer mentoring and even peer teaching that are life transforming take place as a result of the collaboration involved to engage in Community Outreach.

Community Outreach is not meant only for those who are mission-minded. The ministry of Christ consistently involved acts of compassion (Luke 4:18-19) as Jesus came not to ‘be served but to serve’ (Matt 20:28) and Jesus said His disciples will be identifiable by their care for the hungry, the poor, the sick and the imprisoned because of their love for Him (Matt 25:34-36). Rick Rusaw and Eric Swanson wrote in Living a Life on Loan “When we serve we have the opportunity to extend grace in many small ways. We are living out the eternal truths found in the Bible. You never know how an act of service might touch another person, how you might help someone else find grace at the intersections… No matter what plan you have to get into God’s Word, it’s not about how much you know, but how you live as a result of what you are learning. It’s better to be ankle-deep in application than neck-deep in knowledge.”

However, Community Outreach should not be a standalone ministry. We need a community to nurture the love for Christ within our midst as we serve one another so that this love can eventually flow to the communities we serve. Service rightly motivated by the love of God not only blesses people tremendously and draws them to God; it also strengthens the faith of those who serve as they learn to tap on the reservoir of God’s grace. Without a true community to support the process of learning and serving, any teaching and outreach will eventually become another church program that would be hardly life transforming. For Discipling Communities to reach out to their target communities fruitfully, they need to be sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit to pray with as well as pray for those whom they are serving, and to always pray for divine opportunities to share the good news.

Discipling Communities
Discipling Communities are the organic cells and tissues that enable the disciples of Christ to learn, grow and serve together like the early church so that discipleship could be a lifelong learning process of following Christ in His community and growing in His likeness. They are the communities of practice where members shared their experience of applying biblical principles in the context of family and vocation and model for one another what it means to follow Christ in their daily lives as they support one another in their journeys of faith.

Each Discipling Community is characterized by the bond members share with one another in terms of calling, passions or a burden to reach out to a particular community. Hence each community is also a missional community with an outward focus. While most Small Groups are formed initially for Bible study, serving is the key to life application that provides great opportunities to grow people up, opportunities that are seldom provided by finishing another curriculum series. When a Small Group is engaged in serving the community, even those who have just come to know Jesus Christ can immediately be involved in serving others. Following Christ will no longer be an isolated experience but a life lived in community and service, and the group grow because its people loved and served.

Many believers find their Christian lives unfulfilling despite being consistent in various spiritual disciplines and serving in church as engaging in good works is not part of their regular experience in following Christ. They are restless and plagued by a sense that they are not fulfilling their destinies. They often end up climbing career ladders like everyone else or pursue other passions that could lead them down a path of destruction or insignificance. This is because like the Israelites who were called to take possession of their promised land, each disciple of Christ is called to reach out and serve a particular community of people. 2 Peter 1:10 urges God’s people to “make their calling and election sure so that they will never fall and will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

To learn how you can help your Small Group to function as a Discipling Community, please download our whitepaper that explains the implementation of Community Discipleship in greater details.