Category: Small Groups

Yesterday I promised that I would explore further the issue of questions and their power.  As I was investigating this some time ago, I somehow ran into the discipline of Coaching.  I confess that I had heard the terms Life Coach or Executive Coach, but I didn’t really know what it meant.  I assumed it meant a mentor, but as I was reading on the issue I discovered that is not at all what a coach is.  Coaching is a fairly new discipline that has some similarities to counseling, but is focused not on problems, but on healthy people who want to move forward.  Sometimes healthy people just get stuck, and don’t know how to move forward toward greater productivity or effectiveness.  This is what coaches specialize in, and there is a growing number of Christian coaches who apply this discipline to the Christian life and ministry.  Tony Stolzfus is one of the best in that category, and I’ll be quoting extensively from one of his books in this article.  When I read his book Leadership Coaching: The Disciplines, Skills, and Heart of a Christian Coach, at many points I felt like I was reading a textbook on discipleship.  He used the language of Coach / Client because he does this for a living and charges a fee much as a counselor does, but what he is really doing is discipleship.

The secular coaching community often has a very “new age” feel to it, with the presupposition that you have everything within you to be a success, you just need to draw it out.  And the way the coach draws it out is through asking questions.  Christian coaches recognized the kernel of truth in that and endeavored to separate the kernel from the husk.  Christian coaches start with the presupposition that as a believer, you have the Holy Spirit living in you, and He is there to speak to you, and lead you and guide you into a life of greater holiness and spiritual effectiveness.  He is always speaking, but we are often not listening.  The Christian life or ministry coach asks you questions to help you discover what the Holy Spirit is saying to you, and then asks you to decide what you will do about it (does that sound familiar?).  At the center of this is this basic truth:

Change is more a function of motivation than information.

That is a paradigm shift.  Our Christian Discipleship programs have historically been heavy on education, with a curriculum or using a book to study together.  Christian education is an obvious necessity, but the problem I see in the American Church (I currently live in a foreign country but attend an American Church) is that we have far more information than obedience.  What we need is life change, not more theological knowledge.  Our American Church system has pretended that if we just preach good expository sermons and teach solid doctrine, it will lead to spiritual maturity.  But that is clearly not true.  Some may indeed assimilate that information into life changing action, but many (most?) do not.  So the question for discipleship is how to bring about life change in accordance with Biblical truth.  The discipline of Coaching has something to teach us about discipleship.

A mentor gives advice, but the person receiving the advice may not be motivated to do what they mentor is telling them.  They may even know the mentor is right, but if they are not motivated to make the change, it won’t happen.   Tony says,

“Most of the time we have a pretty clear idea of what God is asking of us.  God initiates change in our lives — He has a personalized change agenda for us and is always speaking and arranging circumstances to bring it to our attention…. when we believe the most important factor in change is motivation, we ask questions and encourage people to come up with their own solutions, because we know that buy-in and motivation are highest for steps that we develop and choose on our own…. Coaching prioritizes buy-in and motivation over giving people the right solution.”

“And as for you, the anointing which you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you; but as his anointing teaches you about all things…. abide in him.”  I John 2:27

“The gulf between God’s holiness and yours is larger than the universe.  If we saw a true picture of God’s holiness alongside our own depravity, it would literally kill us (See Exodus 33:18-23).  Yet of all our infinite number of shortcomings, how many is God explicitly prompting you to work on right now?  My experience is that I can count that number on the fingers of one hand.  Of all that God sees in me that needs to change, He only chooses to reveal a few things at once.  Applied to coaching, I call this the See/Say principle: Just because I see something doesn’t mean I’m supposed to say it.  Seeing a problem in a client’s life doesn’t make me responsible to address it.  At any moment, God sees many things wrong, but asks for change on only a few.  Therefore, I need to figure out what things God is speaking to the client about and limit my agenda to match His.”

“People are most motivated to act on their own plans and ideas.  Therefore, if you want to maximize growth, you’ll allow people to set their own agenda, because that’s where the motivation is the highest.  Letting the client lead is also an expression of faith in God’s work in the person’s life.  God initiates change.  That means God was at work in this person’s life before a coach ever came on the scene, and He is actively leveraging every circumstance in the person’s life to bring him or her to maturity…. When you believe that God is already at work in a person’s life, it follows that the one who has the best handle on God’s change agenda is that person.  Therefore, the most dependable way to get in line with what God is doing is to let the client set the agenda.”

“The purpose in a man’s mind is like deep waters, but a man of understanding will draw it out.”  Proverbs 20:5

“People only do what they want to do anyway.  Push people where they don’t want to be pushed and you’ll only get resistance.  So it doesn’t matter at all what you see, or what great insights you have – the only thing that matters is what the client sees…..Once the client sets the agenda, the coach takes responsibility to focus the conversation and push it toward action.  The coach’s job is to help you think more clearly, to push you to go deeper and reach higher, to provide the structure you need to stay focused on the agenda you’ve chosen.“

I need to pause here and emphasize that in discipleship there is a place for education and confronting the person with the truth.  There are certainly times when they need more information and they need the discipler to point out a scripture passage that applies to their life.  But if the individual has agreed to be in a discipleship relationship in the first place, it is fair to say that they are desiring to do what God wants them to do.  The discipler has the role of coming along side of them and helping them take the necessary steps, but should not become the authority in their lives.  The authority must remain with the scripture and the Holy Spirit.  The amount of time or attention given to education versus asking questions and letting them set the agenda will likely be proportional to the amount of Biblical knowledge this individual has.  A new believer will need more teaching, and a Bible College graduate will need more coaching type of questions.

Tony’s book then goes on to detail how this is done, what kind of questions to ask, how to recognize areas that need to be probed deeper, and how to help the client set appropriate goals that will move him or her toward the ultimate goal of Christ likeness.  It is not a book about discipleship per se, but has much that applies to the discipleship relationship.  I highly recommend it.

Now for a quick quiz. How many questions did Jesus ask as reported in the gospels (excluding those in the parables)?   See the answer to this question HERE.

Yesterday I started discussing three simple questions for effective discipleship, and got through the first two.  If you haven’t read that post yet, either scroll down to do so or access it here.  I won’t waste your time reviewing what was said there.

After my exposure to Mike Breen’s approach I came across a book on discipleship by Ralph Moore titled Making Disciples: Developing Lifelong Followers of Jesus.  Ralph started a church in Hermosa Beach California that grew into a mega church.  He always had a strong emphasis on personal discipleship through small groups and the system he uses was developed there.  He left Hermosa Beach to move to Hawaii and start a second church in a park that grew into another mega church.  But the important thing is that both of those churches gave birth to many daughter churches that gave birth to other daughter churches.  Here is how Ralph tells it:

Now, many miles down the road, I’ve still only personally started one youth group, planted two churches and had a direct hand in multiplying just over 70 church plants from the congregations that I pastored.  Somewhere along the way, the multiplication process got out of control.  Those few churches have become a movement that keeps generating new congregations.  To date we can identify more than 700 church plants.

The interesting thing about this movement is that Ralph does not go to Bible Colleges and seminaries to find pastors and church planters to do this.  Every one of those pastors and church planters has come out of the churches started by the movement, most of them getting saved and baptized and discipled in his church and starting a new church without formal Bible education.  Hmmm…. that kind of sounds like the book of Acts.  What kind of a discipleship program produces that?

He describes their Small group system in the book, and the description is so simple it only takes up only one page of the book.  Each small group (they call them mini-church) does this every week:

1. Eats a meal together.
2. Then each person speaks a word or two (yes, 1 or 2 words) that characterizes the previous Sunday sermon.
3. Then they go around the circle and each person answers this question, “What did the Holy Spirit say to you while the pastor was talking?”
4. Then they discuss what they will DO because of what the Holy Spirit said.
5. Then they close by dividing up into 2’s and 3’s and praying for each other.  But they do NOT take prayer requests.  Instead they restrict the prayer time to praying for help to do what they felt the Holy Spirit was telling them to do.  Along with the prayer comes the promise, “If I pray aloud for you in this meeting I am committing to pray for you for the next 7 days.”
6. The following week, while they are sharing food, they find themselves asking, “What happened to you since we prayed for you?“

After describing this system, Ralph makes this statement:

“This simple process is at the center of all our organized disciplemaking efforts.  It has birthed more than 700 congregations in four decades.” 

By now you have noticed that this process includes the first two questions that are at the heart of Mike Breen’s especially effective discipleship process in Britain, but Ralph adds one more that is asked the following week.  So here are the three simple steps (questions) that highly effective discipleship revolves around:

• What is the Holy Spirit saying to you?
• What are you going to do about it?
• The next time you meet you start with the question, “You said you were going to do x.  How did it go?”  (or “What has happened since we prayed for you?”)

I see a lot of similarity between Mike Breen’s and Ralph Moore’s approach.  They were developed on different continents without any knowledge of what the other was doing.  But in both cases, they have resulted in exponential growth of churches and movements.  And an impressive part of that is that in both movements, all of the leadership is developed from within, with common lay people getting saved, growing up in their faith, and going on to preach the gospel and make disciples resulting in new churches being planted.

Tomorrow in part 3 I’m going to explore the whole issue of questions, why they are so powerful, and why these questions in particular are so popular.

Does that promise sound too good to be true?  I am not interested in oversimplification or catchy sound-bite titles, but I’ve gradually come to believe that discipleship is simpler than most of us make it.  It requires no curriculum other than the Bible and a disciple maker armed with 3 simple questions.

 
A couple years ago I was reading everything I could get my hands on by Neil Cole.  I continue to highly recommend his books.  He wrote Search & Rescue: Becoming a Disciple Who Makes a Difference on a discipleship idea he developed called Life Transformation Groups or LTG’s.  An LTG is 2 or 3 people that meet together and do three things:

1. They read 30 chapters of scripture together each week.  If one of them fails to read all 30 chapters, the group reads the same 30 chapters the next week and each week until everyone completes the 30 chapters in that week.  Repetition is good.
2. They each pray daily for the salvation of 5 people they know by name who do not know Christ.
3. They ask each other a list of accountability questions.  Neil has a list of those questions in his books, but different users of LTG’s have added here and subtracted there and come up with different lists, which Neil has no problem with.  Neil emphasizes that the purpose of the questions is not accountability as much as an opportunity to confess sin.

 I like the system all except for the 3rd part, the accountability questions.  The concept of an accountability partner of the same sex has been around a long time in Christian circles.  Some believers report that they have benefited greatly from the practice, but others complain that it doesn’t work for them.  I’ve always been uncomfortable with it.  Why?

•  Unless the person really wants to be accountable, it doesn’t work.  People will lie about hidden behavior if they aren’t motivated to change in that area.
• No matter what list of questions you come up with, it may not be the right questions for a particular person.  There is always a question about viewing pornography on the guy’s list, but some guy’s real temptation may be anger or cheating on his expense form.  No prepared list of questions will nail each person exactly where they are on their spiritual journey.
• It smacks of legalism.  I’m not saying it is legalism, because encouraging victory over sin is not legalism.  But legalism is whenever we take outward actions in response to spiritual truth and apply the same outward behavior to all believers regardless of what they feel God wants them to do with that truth.  In other words, the focus of these questions is more on the outward behavior than the disposition of the heart.

 
Some time later I was studying Mike Breen’s approach to discipleship in Building a Discipling Culture.  Mike grew an old dead Anglican Church in a worldly and secular town in Great Britain into a dynamic church exploding with growth through his discipleship methods.  I had to know what he was doing, because whatever he was doing it was working amazingly well in a place that is famous for dying churches.  Not only did it work while Mike was there, but it continues to grow at an exponential rate under younger leadership that Mike discipled prior to moving to America over ten years ago.  But honestly, as I studied it I couldn’t understand it.  Mike has this tool called “Life Shapes” which is a series of simple shapes that represent certain areas of life we need to give attention to in order to grow.  But it didn’t make sense to me.  The shapes were supposed to make it simple and memorable, but they only seemed to confuse me.  But I knew he was on to something because what he did worked, and it continues to work long after he left that church to move to another continent.  Then I heard one of his disciples teaching on the subject of the “huddle”, which is the term they use for a small group discipleship method for developing future leaders.  This guy said, “All discipleship comes down to two simple questions.”  My ears perked up.  This sounded simple.  Maybe I would finally get the heart of this thing.  He went on to explain that the two questions that all of discipleship hinges on are:

a) “What is the Holy Spirit saying to you?” and

b) “What are you going to do about it?“

Suddenly a light went on for me.  I have seen how the spirit of God works in my life by zeroing in on different things at different seasons of life.  A prepared list of accountability questions may not hit the areas the Holy Spirit is trying to work on in my life.  And if you ask the average Christian that first question, many if not most of them would not know how to answer.  But in the huddle they ask this question weekly, and the huddle members learn to look at the circumstances of their lives and the scriptures they are digesting and begin to expect the Holy Spirit’s voice, and begin to recognize more and more how he is speaking to their particular sins and life issues.   Eventually they have no trouble identifying at any given time what the Holy Spirit is saying to them.  The second question takes it from the realm of theory and moves it to where the rubber meets the road.  The answer to the second question should be an action step that is specific and measurable.  If the answer to question #1 is, “The Lord has been convicting me of my meager prayer life”, then the answer to question #2 is not “I need to pray more”.  The answer to question #2 might be “I need to set the alarm x minutes earlier to allow more time for prayer every morning” or something equally measurable and specific.  But the key here is that each person sets their own action step based on what is realistic to them and what they believe the real answer is.

I realize that some people are going to be uncomfortable with the subjectivity of asking “What is the Holy Spirit saying to you?”  Some of us (myself included) come from such a strict cessationist background that if we can’t cite a verse of scripture for something then it can’t be God speaking.  But if the Holy Spirit indwells our very bodies, then what is he there for?  Yes, everything has to be evaluated in the light of God’s Word.  The Holy Spirit uses the Word, so the voice of the Holy Spirit may be heard in a sermon, or He may be heard as we dig into God’s Word in our daily time with the Lord.  But He may also be heard through the circumstances of daily life.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks through your spouse.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks through the death of a friend or loved one or some kind of major emotional event in your life.  Recently the Holy Spirit spoke to me quite clearly when I became aware of an area of my life where I had been less than honest.  I was deeply convicted of my sin and had to take some specific action steps that were very costly to me.  That didn’t happen as a result of reading my Bible or hearing a sermon (although my knowledge of Biblical teaching on the subject certainly played a part).  It happened because of a life circumstance that brought something to light in a way I couldn’t ignore.  I have no doubt I was hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit.  If you still find yourself uncomfortable with this concept, consider the fact that this takes place in a small group where input from other members can bring balance and a scriptural perspective that others may need.

OK, so now you know two of the steps (questions) in this successful discipleship system.  What is the third?  Sorry, I’m out of time today.  I promise an extended discussion of the third step and the rational behind it tomorrow in part 2.