Developing a Discipleship Strategy

Would you rather have a bad strategy or no strategy at all? There is no perfect strategy to discipleship and any strategy needs to be tailored to a specific church, it's needs, and the people who are in need of discipleship. Too often I see churches that would like to see people become more like Christ but they won't take the time or effort to sit down and ask, "What does that look like in our context?" Here is a simple discipleship strategy ( not original ). What do you think? Will it work? Do you have a strategy?


1 Establish the pastor as the primary discipleship leader
2 Organize a discipleship leadership team.
3 Know the purpose of discipleship and use that purpose to create a
vision statement for discipleship in your church.
4 Determine the specific spiritual disciplines that will form the
foundation for the discipleship strategy.
5 Determine the people groups in your church and community in need
of discipleship.
6 Discover the discipleship/ministry needs of the identified people
groups.
7 Establish discipleship study approaches relevant to the needs of the
identified people groups.
8 Assimilate new church members into the life of the church.
9 Provide opportunities for disciples to develop leadership and ministry
skills.
10 Choose resources for disciples to study in a closed group setting.
11 Provide personal enrichment and devotional resources.
12 Guide all disciples to develop an annual spiritual growth plan and
create a process to track and evaluate the plan annually.
13 Communicate the vision and complete strategy to the church. Set a
date to launch the study element of the strategy and begin promotion.
14 Enlist and train leaders for your small group studies.
15 Launch the strategy.
16 Evaluate the plan regularly and make necessary adjustments to
improve effectiveness.