Short Term Discipleship Plan

 Do you have a plan to disciple new believers?  How about a plan to continue to disciple mature believers?

• Have you trained everyone in your fellowship how to make disciples?  
• Who should make disciples?
• And for that matter, what is discipleship?

Do you have a discipleship plan?  In the great commission (Matthew 28:18-20), Jesus told us to go and make disciples.  It was the last thing he commanded his followers to do.

In order to be able to obey Jesus, it would be helpful to have a plan for making disciples.  With this short article, I want to introduce some principles for beginning discipleship.  

But lets start by learning from the word of God.

Discovery Bible Study
Read Matthew 28:18-20 two times to yourself and then answer these questions.

• What is discipleship? 
• Who should make disciples?
• Which parts of this passage should be obeyed by followers of Jesus?
• Who has discipled you? Who are you discipling?

How did you answer the questions above?

Who should make disciples?  As I read the passage, it seems pretty clear that everyone who is a disciple should be making disciples.
  
If I am going to teach someone to obey everything that Jesus commanded, then this command is one of those commands.

Jesus gives us a command to make disciples.  Making disciples is Jesus' plan for kingdom growth.  It's that simple.

Here are a few ideas to help us begin to make a plan for discipleship that we can use and that we can train everyone to use.

Discipleship Lessons
Short Term Discipleship - getting started for new believers
Long Term Discipleship - keeping moving for maturing believers

Short Term Discipleship
Short Term Discipleship should lay the foundation on which the new believer will build his or her life in Christ.  It's sort of like boot camp for a soldier.  They learn the basics but more importantly learn what it means to be a soldier.

Here are a few guidelines for thinking about creating or finding a discipleship plan for new believers.

• Typically it should include 6-10 lessons.
• These lessons should focus on training over teaching.
• They should involve practice, practice, practice.
• They should be highly reproducible (my 14 year old son should be able to use them to disciple his friend).
• They should be obedience based and focus on forming a lifestyle of obedience.
• There should be high levels of accountability.
• They should be discovery based.  The discipler should focus on helping the new disciple discover the truth in God's word, not just give them all the answers.

What a disciple does in the first three months of faith, shapes the DNA of the faith they will live out the rest of their lives. If the disciple is asked to passively observe the work of the church, passivity will likely be the DNA. 

Some examples of Short term discipleship plans can be found below.

The main thing is to find or create a simple plan that you can use to help new believers in Jesus to begin a life obeying Jesus and growing in maturity. 

We have to be intentional to make disciples.  We have to train our new disciples how to make disciples. 

When we do this, by the grace of God and with the help of the Holy Spirit, we begin to see multiplication.

Long Term Discipleship
A long term discipleship plan must move new disciples from milk to meat, giving them the tools to move into a lifetime of discipleship through dependence on the word of God and the working of the Holy Spirit.

We'll talk more about long term discipleship in a future post.
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Learn it.  Apply it.  Share it.  Today.

*The ideas in this article come from pages 59 - 71 in Four Fields of Kingdom Growth. (read it for free here)


Short Term Discipleship Plans

• Commands of Christ (click here)
• Five Habits of a Fruitful Life (click here)
• Learn to Follow Jesus (click here)