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thinking about the process

Have enjoyed reading Randy Pope's new book, Insourcing: Bringing Discipleship Back to the Local Church (Zondervan, 2013), part of their Leadership Network Innovation Series. This book, along with Rainer and Geiger's Simple Church, is calling the church back to the process of actually making disciples, rather than merely running programs, maintaining growth, and producing worship services.  Both books are reminiscent of Robert Coleman's classic, The Master Plan of Evangelism

Randy Pope interviewed Ken Blanchard, who shared the diagram below.  In business it is important to follow this process in training new leaders: first, you tell them what to do (directives), then you coach them on how to do these (coaching), then back off a bit and be available for advice and encouragement (support), and finally to release them to do it on their own (delegation).  Blanchard said, never, never, never try to go from directives to delegation.  This produces disillusioned leaders and/or significant failure.


The author realized that many American evangelical churches do precisely this.  They tell Christians what to do and then release them too quickly to attempt to reach their goals on their own.  The result is disillusionment and discouragement, as well as immature and ill-equipped church leaders.  Perimeter Church has for the past few years been attempting to build disciples along the lines of the following model, summarized by the acronym TEAMS:

           

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