If you are going to start a home church, it is important that discipleship is a big priority in the effort and vision. Otherwise, you end up repeating many of the issues of the traditional model on a smaller scale.
Here are six reasons why home churches start with discipleship.
- Jesus said go and make disciples not go start home churches. That doesn’t make home churches unimportant. It just means that the goal wasn’t just a gathering. God wanted people to follow Jesus as disciples. When you become a disciple of Jesus you will gather and that will become church. You can just try to have church without discipleship but it won’t sustain well.
- When discipleship is at the core of the home church you have stability. It isn’t anything goes. It is everyone trying to follow Jesus and hold each other lovingly accountable to following Jesus together.
- When discipleship is at the core, people will learn their gifts and use their gifts for the building up of the body. This is because following Jesus’ example will drive you to serve rather than trying to be “top dog” or get all the authority for yourself.
- Discipleship recognizes Jesus as the leader and the example to follow. That means you will have far healthier church leadership when the leaders are disciples/Christ-followers.
- Discipleship creates a standard and expectation to hold yourself to that helps the body stay healthy. You know if a given activity helps you follow Jesus better or hinders you from following Jesus better.
- Discipleship gives you a better idea of what healthy movement toward maturity looks like. It isn’t the old numbers game of counting heads and dollars. You can get more and more heads and dollars without making a disciple and that means you can get more heads and dollars without anyone maturing in their walk with Christ! Churches have allowed this for years. Let’s not allow that into the home churches!
Assuming you agree, why else would it be true that home churches start with discipleship?
If you would like to learn more about the discipleship problem in traditional churches, you can learn more about that in this video.
