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Good day, I'm Scott Sanders, and welcome to the Rich Australia podcast. In this podcast series, we want to help your church to become healthy, evangelistic, and multiplying. In the last episode, we talked about some of the key principles in Pastoring with Purpose. Uh we talked firstly about clarifying your high-level outcome. In this episode, I really want to push into your discipleship pathway, and I want to use an active verb, reworking your discipleship pathway. Now, it's really good to have Greg here with us. As you think into the

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discipleship pathway, what's sort of the the sort of regular mistake you're seeing as you're coaching people? Um the mistake is to not recognize that there is a pathway that people are walking to join our church. It's just that we're not aware of it. We're not making them aware of it. We're not thinking about it necessarily or improving it. We're just kind of letting it happen. Kind of like a pathway through the bush. It just happens. Now, you've pressed play on our second episode, reworking your discipleship pathway.

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Okay, so uh Greg, I think it'd be really helpful just to sort of start this conversation off by clarifying what what is a discipleship pathway? It's something that exists in every church, but isn't often acknowledged. And that is, there is a way that people join our church and then live and belong in our church and get involved in the church's life. Um it's often not very intentional. It's often not worked on, but it exists. Um and so, we might as well have a good one.

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Why not have a good one? So, why why is it that you think uh it it's not clarified for for people? Why why do we sort of push back to this sort of systems thinking um or actually really working hard as pastors to our you know, to identify this sort of you know, process? Well, partly the reason we we want to work hard at identifying it is because it exists. And it can either be really loving for people or really unloving. So, just thinking about one part of the pathway, which is um connecting people in. Um

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people will connect in with your church, but it'll either be loving to them or unloving. Uh a loving connection will look like uh people will meet other people. They'll hear about what the church is on about. Um They'll be individually cared for. They'll be shown how to join well. Uh an unloving one is just going to let all of those things take care of themselves. Um it's happening regardless. Um but it can be unloving or loving. So, I think it'd be really helpful. Can you sort of take us through the discipleship pathway at HBC? Or is this one you go, "That's not

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my area. My job is just to speak." Uh this is a this is a test for you. I want to see if if it is has been communicated, but Yeah, no. This is This is my area, and it's something that I spend uh a lot of my life thinking about how the different parts are working well. So, there's that first point of contact. How do people hear about us, and how do they decide to come along? Um which then means their first uh sort of interaction with us, their first connection with us, uh which is going to be often of a Sunday. Um

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But if they're not a Christian, their first interaction with us is often going to be with something like life. And so, the pathway does actually have two streams. There's the stream for the person who's not a Christian yet and the person who is a Christian yet. Let's start in the Christian person. There's that point of contact where they hear about us and decide to come along. There's that first interaction with us, and then there's the really the joining part where for us they come along to our program that where we tell them what we're on about, what we're passionate about, what what we believe, what we

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want for them. And then they move into the life of the church, which is uh belonging in the community, being part of a growth group, um and beginning to do ministry um and to do evangelism with us. That's the the pathway for the Christian. For the non-Christian, we're going to come into contact with them. Often for us, because we've got this long-term established life program, they're going to come in at life, not even at church yet. Um and they'll be involved in life the the

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first one. Uh they'll hear the gospel. They'll often move a fair way towards making a decision. But what we've discovered is people are staying so far back, that usually involves a second program, a second dose, and there are people sort of loving them all the way through. As they become Christians, they'll they'll go into the joining process. We want them to know what they're joining as a church, and then they'll move into the life of church. Now, I I just want to come back. You said uh you know, this is what I'm you know, all about as a as as the lead pastor. Yeah. You've got you

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know, lead pastors have so there's so much going on. But the discipleship pathway is a key thing that you do. Yeah. It really is describing the skeleton of our church. You know, there's there's the flesh, which is all the issues that are going on, but this is the skeleton or the scaffolding of what is our church on about. As the senior pastor, I want to know that the pathway, each individual element is working well. Each individual individual element knows its job, that it's helping people to move in, and that

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people are moving between them really well. So, the connect the connector part of the pathway, I want to know that it's doing a good job of connecting people, but I also want to know that it's moving people onto the next part well, and the people aren't falling through the gaps. Now, that doesn't mean that you're doing everything in that, though, does it? Yeah, no. I'm not employed in any one part of the program. I'll on part of the um the pathway. I drop in to all of them. Um but my job is to to sit over all of it,

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with keep an eye over all of it to make sure the whole thing is humming. One of the illustrations I've sometimes used is uh imagine this is a parade, and we've got all the different floats, and they're working together. I'm in the chopper above it, uh talking to the guys driving the floats, saying, "Hey, look. I think you're veering off course here. I think we've we've stopped being uh in line. Um I want to work on the whole pathway, not get buried in one bit of it." That's really helpful. So, uh your job is to have the high-level big picture view, make sure that it's working. Mhm. Um and and but but that doesn't mean

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you're sitting and distracting yourself from it. You're actually inserting yourself in it, because there's a real importance of having the the lead pastor or the senior minister involved. Uh we we know we talk about the poetry and plumbing piece. Yeah. Uh there is there are certain aspects of the pathway that you you know, need to be involved in. So, that that member moment for the Christian coming in, really important that people see you. That's really important as you you know, move past a certain size. For the church plant, you know, you are it and in it, and you and your wife are kind of the you know, key parts of the pathway. Yeah. Um but you but you also

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need to be uh extracting yourself regularly from it and assessing it. What What does it look like in your schedule, you know, to to regularly be reflecting on that? You know, is it a weekly thing? Is it a monthly thing? Is it a annual thing? How often do you sort of insert yourself into the thinking about the whole thing? Um it's a continuous thing. So, every week I would be spending some of my time thinking about either the whole pathway and what do we need to change um or elements of the pathway. I'm every week I'm meeting with some of the staff who lead part of the pathway

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as well. And so, there's actually no week that goes by in our church where I'm not really involved in either the whole pathway or a part of it. Um often our staff will drag me in for key moments for their bit of the pathway. Um so, our connect series, which helps people join well, um I'll get dragged into preach at it. Um I I never run it. I never lead a table discussion at it, but I'm I'm there. I meet people. Um For the um the kind of living in church, our growth

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group uh part of the pathway, um our pastor who runs that will drag me in for training nights, and I might do a talk, and I'll set culture, and say, "Here's where growth groups fit into the big thing." And so, there's no one week There's no week ever when I'm not either thinking about the whole thing or involved in part of it or training the staff for part of it. Um my mind is always on how are we moving people to the right? So, uh I want you to sort of think about the the church, the new church sort of starting off. It doesn't have a pathway.

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So, this is the opportunity for them to actually, you know, create it and design it uh and develop it. Uh what what's that going to look like? What are the the key pieces that you want to be working on from the start? Um as in, what are the key elements that we think need to be in a pathway? We need to know how people are going to get in contact with us um or find out about us. Uh and in a new church, it it might be that you're going to do some advertising, but fundamentally it's through connections that people already have. It's through invitation. Then the next part is, from the first

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time they interact with us to joining, what experience do we want them to have? What do we want them to know about us? What decisions do we want them to make about us, so that they join us really intentionally? Then the next part of the pathway is, how do we want them to live in a live with us as part of the family? What should that look like? So, for instance, it'll mean being in a growth group. Um it'll mean joining a ministry team. It'll mean um serving the people in their growth group in their normal daily

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life. Um it'll mean evangelizing their friends. Recognizing that there's a journey that people will go on from first contact to being in ministry with us, and how do we help people along the way? Um One helpful thing that we've used uh here is um we've got these purposes. We want to put a person in charge of each bit of the pathway, and they're going to run a program that makes it work well. So, as we as you

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draw our pathway, we'd say, "This guy runs this bit. This guy runs this bit, this guy runs this bit, and they run these kind of programs, and they're always talking to each other about how do we move people from my part of the pathway to yours, my program to yours. And so, for the new church, what it's going to look like is not a staff member. Uh it'll it'll be uh your launch team. Yeah, it'll be a volunteer. And key, you know, key team leaders, key key volunteers in the church life. So, even now, we have people running bits of the pathway. They're they're not theologically trained. They're not

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They're not staff. They do it part-time, cuz that's the great thing. We're not talking about pastoring a whole congregation here. We're talking about helping people along one small part of the pathway. Every single one of our congregations has non-paid, non-trained, non-staff people heading up a big part of the pathway. And I think I think it's really important uh as you mentioned sort of from the start that you're involved in actually assessing it, evaluating it, regularly you know, pushing into it with your team. Mhm. Um that's something you got you need to I guess cultivate from

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the start of a new church. And just having your ongoing regular cycle of leading as well. Now, it it sounds like it's it's linear. Now, it sounds like, you know, you've just sort of painted this beautiful picture. Someone come They they hear about us on the website. Yeah. They've been invited to church. Uh you know, then they they go to the the membership course, and they turn The food's great. Then they join Bible study group. They start serving. They start giving. They start maturing and growing up. I'm just trying to work out which I'm just trying to work out which church Yeah, you know, is this Is this a unicorn church you're painting? Um

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Well, the No, in that the pathway is always threatening to fall apart. Yes. You're always having to train up new leaders in each part of the pathway. You're always At any given point, there is part of our pathway that we'd say is not doing as well as it could be. It's broken. It needs work. Communication between this guy and this guy is not as good as it could be. This program's not working as well as it should. We need to rethink. I don't think that there's ever been a point in our church's life where we've sat back and thought, you know, we've nailed the pathway.

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Everything is We can all go on holidays. We're always thinking um Say say 75% of the people who do the connect series, how do we turn it will join church? How do we turn it into 80? Yeah. Um 80% of people somewhere between 80 and 90% of people who who are part of our church are in a growth group, how do we turn it into 95? What's not working here? So, this is where data and understanding in each person and where they where they're at and and where they move through is

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really important. So, you can start doing that gap analysis and identify where the problems are, where the blockages are Yeah. in the process. Now, Simple Church, a book by Eric Geiger and Tom Rainer, you know, years ago kind of had the idea of you want to have a clarity, you want to have movement, you want to have alignment, and then you want to have focus. So, clarity, you want to be able to communicate it really clearly. Mhm. Uh movement, you want to see people move through the the process. Alignment in in in terms of thinking through our overall purpose is to Colossians 1:28, sort of

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make mature disciples and see people mature. And then focus, which is actually you want to keep pruning the pathway, cutting out things that don't work, keep keep reassessing. Yeah. So, I just think that's a really helpful framework, and it sounds like you just do that intuitively. You know, or is this is this sort of the the hard lessons of actually, you know, you can recall people who you know came into church life and then were lost or, you know, didn't come back, and you you feel that you know, deeply as a pastor. Yeah, I

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think the great thing about those four things is they show you where your pathway is going to fall apart. Yeah. Um we've lost clarity on this. We've lost alignment. We've lost a sense of focus. Um so, what you've got there is your great troubleshooters. Yeah. Um So, clarity, um the idea of a newcomer's course, it's not really naturally embedded in your average Christian's mind. You've got to be able to really clearly explain why we want you to do this course, cuz they just want to jump straight from that

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straight into a growth group. Yeah. Um uh and in terms of alignment, recognizing that a course maybe a part of it maybe great in itself, but people are falling out before they get to the next thing. We're not transitioning people well. I think those four things are brilliant for troubleshooting. So, just I just want to push into the sort of communicating this thing. Mhm. Uh you know, how do you do that well? Um I think you do it well by just communicating the next step. So,

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from our point of view, we're we're in the helicopter above the whole thing, and we see the complexity. We see, you know, the all the different bits and where they're not working. From the point of view of the person who's joining church, they experience it relationally. Um and so, you just say, "The next step for you is we'd love you to come along to this." And then um once you've done that, the next step is someone's going to get in contact with you, and they're going to invite you along to this. And so, communicating it is actually much easier than building it, because

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you don't need to communicate the whole thing. You just need to communicate where people go next. That's really helpful. So, the idea of having a next step, and that could be your contact events, your connection events. That's at the Sunday gathering as well. So, thinking through sort of purposely about every event that there's a next step for someone. And we we're going to at some stage need to communicate that. So, that could be really simply you know, on the on the gathering just saying, "We'd love you to come back next week." Yeah. Um but I'd probably want to insert, "Now, if you're if you If you're following Jesus already, we'd love you to come to our Yeah, yeah.

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member course. And if you're not a Christian, we'd love you to find out more about Jesus, and we've got a great course or a great mission moment where you can actually find out more about Jesus." For us, it's always someone's going to contact you about coming along to the connect series. Someone's going to contact you about joining a growth group. Someone's going to contact you now about that. So that um people don't need to find their own way through it. We walk with them. I think that's just part of loving them. Yeah. Now, final question for you. One of the things I sort of see regularly in churches is there's not

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someone accountable for it. So, there's there's people all the way through the system accountable for their their patch, you know. So, this the discipleship pathway, I think, gives you the opportunity to silo. We're going to talk about that in another episode, but what does it look like to have someone accountable for the pathway? Yeah, so in in our context, I'm accountable for making sure that the whole pathway is functioning really well. The way I do that, though, isn't just by going to each of the individual guys and saying, "Are you doing your bit?" It's by convincing each

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of the people to care about the whole pathway. And so, we have loads of conversations where this guy will talk about talk to this guy about how to make his bit better. Because the whole thing is actually interdependent. And so, what accountability looks like is yes, someone driving from the top, but it's also getting all the people to care about the whole thing, not just their thing. So, can you clarify that for us? What Give us an example of where of a recent blockage at Hunter Bible Churches' discipleship pathway. Uh one of the things that we've struggled with

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in the past is how do we help the person who's become a Christian um to go to the connect course. The joining course. Yeah, the membership course. Because they'd been pastored really well there, and they actually felt um because they're so new, such new Christians, they feel anxious about joining this thing where everyone else has been a Christian for years, and they're all so much more mature than us than I am. And so, we started to send some of the people from our life

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course, the table leaders, we they go with them to the joining series. And so, there'll be a whole table of people there with their familiar leader who they know and love, and they take them through it. There's an example of how we had to overcome a blockage. Great. That's That's really helpful. Now, if you've enjoyed what you've heard today, we'd love you to share this episode with one one of your mates. If you're part of a church and you've you can see issues with the discipleship pathway, I'd encourage you

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to gently maybe, you know, raise this episode with your with your church leader as well. Hopefully, there's been lots of stuff to reflect upon and think about. And so, I think one next step for you that I'd encourage you to take is actually just to write down your discipleship pathway. So, just spend some time thinking through what are all the the moments, what are all the courses or areas in our church life where someone moves into the life of the church. And that'll just be the sort of first starting point that you can take in terms of understanding your discipleship

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pathway. Well, I'm Scott Sanders. Chat soon. Reach Australia provides comprehensive church consults that include a thorough analysis of your church, give you a picture of your current health, and help identify pathways for growth into the future. We come to your church, visit your services, meet with you and your leadership team, and at the end give you a comprehensive report, most of which

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outlines specific recommendations for the future of your church, and it's followed up with one-to-one coaching to help you implement. For more information or to express your interest in a Reach Australia church health consultation, go to reachaustralia.com.au.