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It’s hard to believe, but we’re approaching four years since the world shut down due to COVID-19! In March 2020, most, if not all of the commentary from leading thinkers seemed to reflect the same sentiment: We have to figure out a new normal. The world is going to change forever.

Nearly four years later, does this seem like it’s come to fruition? Are we living in a completely new world as compared to the pre-covid era?

I am not a sociologist, but anecdotally, it seems like life at a societal level has returned to something that resembles pre-covid “normal.” We’re back to vacationing, shopping, working, chasing kids to activities, eating out, going to sporting events and concerts and worshiping in-person at church. Referring to the New Years Eve crowd in Times Square, President Biden even declared that “America is back!”

Sure, there are lingering undertones of the pain of COVID with the unstable economy, cultural division and political unrest, but what’s new? These just feel like the milieu of life in a broken world.

As I’ve been reflecting on this, I often wonder if and how the Church has changed. When COVID hit and churches had to shut down, many church leaders faced a sober reckoning with the fact that their primary investment had been in developing strong “programmatic capacity” (think Sunday experience and events), but the unintended consequence was there was weak “discipleship capacity” – the ability to relationally grow and multiply followers of Jesus (Mark Sayers introduced me to these terms on this Rebuilders episode).

The result was that many people struggled spiritually (among other struggles) because they didn’t possess spiritual scaffolding that would hold them up apart from the foundation of corporate worship experiences and church facilitated events.

I remember being in the same position as a pastor. Like many churches, our first move was to beef up our technological infrastructure to try to reach our congregation where they were at. It was certainly helpful, but we quickly realized it was incredibly difficult for people to meaningfully engage in that way, and our numbers dropped off. 

What began to surface in our church and in most churches in our country was that people were far less connected to authentic spiritual community than we’d realized. Churches across the board were reporting significant drops in numbers when things opened back up.  And culturally, people are continuing to distance themselves from organized religion. 

So the question is, what does it look like moving forward for churches to thrive and effectively engage in the mission of God in the world?

My theory is that thriving churches in the very near future possess this shared trait: the laity is activated.

I believe we’re moving into a new season for the Church where this will be the norm. As I’ve been sensing this, I’ve also connected with other leaders who are interacting with churches all over the country and around the world who are observing similar things. 

Churches that are thriving in this new era have congregations that are being equipped and released to use their unique gifts and influence to make disciples.

Disclaimer: The following reflections aren’t an indictment on the church or meant to discourage church leaders. My heart is for the Church - the people of Jesus. I long to see the Church vibrantly reflect Jesus to the world, and so much amazing ministry is being carried out in every model of church. I want to celebrate that! 

Simultaneously, I think we need to be asking hard questions so we don’t drift from what Jesus called us to and so we are able to regularly adjust how we do things to be able to effectively reach the culture we find ourselves in. So, that’s what my heart and aim is here…

Activating Laity

I think it’s helpful to define the terms here before going further. 

When I’m talking about the laity, these are the people who attend your church but are not in any vocational, paid position. They are stay-at-home parents, engineers, teachers, restaurant workers, hair stylists, lawyers, politicians, trash collectors, medical professionals, construction workers, small business owners – they are everywhere. This is by far the majority of Jesus followers in the world and the group with the most untapped Kingdom potential.

Activating, then, has to do with releasing the latent potential that’s bottled up so congregations can live as Kingdom people – ambassadors of Christ in the world. If the laity truly becomes activated – equipped, empowered and released to make disciples in the world, I believe the Kingdom of God will begin to break out in ways we’ve never seen. 

So, when I talk about activating the laity, practically, what does this look like that may be different than how many churches are approaching discipleship today? 

I thought you’d never ask! 

I believe these three ingredients need to be present for this to be realized in the church:

Priesthood of All Believers

A pastor I know regularly says to his congregation something to the effect of, “You will always be a better minister than me, because you are able to reach way more people who are not believers than I’ll ever be able to.” 

Reality is that most of what happens on Sundays is with people who already believe or have some sort of faith foundation in their life. There are countless people out there who will never darken the doorways of a church but are spiritually curious and have relationships with the people in your church. They won’t enter the doors of a church, but they will enter the homes of their friends! 

Is the goal for churches to lead these people to your church or to lead them to Jesus? I think we all would agree that it’s to lead them to Jesus, and I have been wondering if the way to lead them to Jesus necessarily requires separation from organized religion in favor of life-on-life relationships with Jesus’ people.

The priesthood of all believers (1 Pet. 2:5) means that every person who chooses Jesus is called to engage in ministry. It’s not a professional vocation; it’s a personal compulsion born out of an encounter with Jesus. And it is the framework that mobilizes believers to introduce Jesus to people in their relational networks.

My experience is that many churches are primarily (and understandably) focused on staffing Sunday morning volunteer positions as the way to activate lay leaders.  My concern with this approach is that we miss a huge opportunity to help people discover how God has uniquely gifted them to reach people far from God in their everyday life.

Every person has a unique ministry calling on their life. It’s most likely not at a pulpit or on a church staff, and it’s more likely in the classroom, at the construction site, at the PTO or at the little league field.

So, how are you helping your people discover what their individual ministry calling is so they can make disciples as they go through their lives (Matt. 28:18-20)?

Outward Focus

In the opening of this article, I mentioned a couple phrases: Programmatic Capacity and Discipleship Capacity. The way I interpret the essential differences between these two capacities is that Programmatic Capacity primarily produces internally focused outcomes where consumption is the invitation, whereas Discipleship Capacity primarily produces externally focused outcomes and the invitation is active participation.

When you consider where the majority of time, energy and resources in the church go, where are they focused? Is it around the Sunday experience or around Monday through Saturday? I would guess the majority of churches with a more contemporary model skew heavily toward Sunday, and I wonder if that may need to change to reach the rapidly growing segment of society that will likely never go to a church service on their own.

I believe if churches shifted their vision to be primarily focused on helping people follow Jesus Monday-Saturday, it would change everything. This is absolutely what every church wants and is striving for in principle, but in action, I think this may be a blind-spot to pay attention to. 

What if Sunday became second tier to spiritual and community life away from Sunday?

What are the next steps you regularly ask people to take? Where are you asking people to serve? How is your discipleship system structured? How are you asking people to give and where are your budgets primarily focused? What are the ways these are helping people become independently growing to serve and make disciples among their neighbors, coworkers, family and friends? In what ways do these reinforce dependency on churches to provide their spiritual well-being?

The truth is, if you shift from Sunday being tier-one, you may never see the fruit on Sunday, but the harvest will happen in somebody’s workplace, in the family, in a neighborhood, at a coffee shop or on an airplane. It’s going to create ripples that a local congregation may never know about until eternity, but that’s just the point, none of this has ever been about growing church congregations, it’s about building the Kingdom of God!

What could it look like to begin to put more emphasis on Monday-Saturday rather than making Sunday the main event?

Multiplying Discipleship

Have you ever wondered why Jesus only chose twelve guys to invest in? He surely had the capacity to pour into more people than that … he is God after all! But why did he primarily stick with these twelve?

Jesus set up a model for us to follow that, I believe, provides the secret to “growth” that is sustainable, reproducible and most effectively leads to transformation in people’s lives. Discipleship in the way of Jesus is deeply relational and from the beginning, focuses on making disciple-making disciples. 

I think I grew up thinking that evangelism and discipleship were two sides of the same coin. For a long time, I sensed the focus has been about leading people to salvation. Yes, we want people to be saved, then the next and very significant goal is to lead people to discipleship – to live as Jesus did. This is an expanded outcome because it requires that a person is then reproducing other disciple-making disciples.

You see it all throughout Scripture. Peter is denying Jesus in Jesus’ greatest time of need, then all throughout the book of Acts, we see Peter leading people to Jesus. Paul was persecuting Christians and had an encounter with Jesus that led him to give his life away for the sake of the Gospel, and along the way, he discipled Timothy, Barnabas and many others who would go on to do the same for others.

Our culture likes data and stats that we can point to that affirm that we’re being effective, but I wonder if Jesus’ way isn’t about that. Maybe it’s about life-on-life discipleship where the invitation is to simply obey Jesus’ teachings and invite others to do the same. 

My hunch about this approach is that it’s always going to go at a slower pace than we would like it to. It’s less leader-centric than we’re used to and it’s more sacrificial than we’re comfortable with. 

But, my hunch is also that it’s deeply transformative – for both disciple-makers and the ones being discipled. It might reach people that the corporate church has never been able to reach, and that it could be the secret to a vibrant faith no matter the circumstances the world throws at us. I think it was in the context of this type of discipleship that the revival of the early church happened – maybe it’s for our time as well!

What does it look like to make disciple-making disciples starting with those in your congregation?

What Now?

As I see it, the challenge is that the structure of church (in recent generations in America) that has been passed down is not typically built on relational discipleship but rather charismatic leadership, attendance and tithes. 

This has led to consumerism, but we are called to equip and activate the laity to make disciple-making disciples. So, what do we practically do with this? Here are four steps you could try.

Pray
Where might God want you to pause and take sober inventory of the spiritual fruit being produced in your church? Be open to listen and pivot based on where He would lead you.

Evaluate
Where do your vision, teaching, programming and resources point to? What are your primary invitations or next steps (CTAs in communications terms)? What’s the spiritual fruit that is being produced in the lives of your congregation? How much time is spent encouraging people to build genuine relationships with others to grow in their personal walk with Jesus? And how much time is spent equipping people to go outside the walls of your church to connect and impact others for Christ?

Stop, Pivot, Start
After you spend time evaluating, run your ministry activities through the stop/pivot/start filters. 

If things come to the surface in the evaluation process that don’t really have anything to do with disciple-making, maybe it’s time to stop them.

Are there things that have discipleship intentions but aren’t very effective in the current state? How might you need to pivot to be more effective?

What do you need to start doing that you’ve never done before? How can you activate the laity at your church in ways you never have before? Start something!

Communicate
Communicate. Cast vision constantly. As you have clarity around where God is leading you, cast vision – communicate in compelling ways and invite people to pursue this with you. 

Closing

Ministry Leader, your work is really hard. The world is changing rapidly, people have so many options thrown at them and it’s really hard to know how to help people take steps toward Jesus. We are praying with you and for you in all of this using these words from Colossians 1:9-12:

We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light.

We love having conversations about your mission/vision/values, ministry priorities and communications strategy and would love to connect with you about it!