When you think about helping others to deepen their faith and more faithfully follow Jesus, what questions, concerns, or fears come to mind?
Summary: Collaborative Discipleship gives you five primary tools for encouraging the believers you disciple to become mature followers of Jesus Christ. With access to Collaborative Discipleship on cru.org, walk through each of these tools and discuss how to use each part.
This lesson can help a servant leader make many decisions for a group of disciples, or it can help a group of disciples determine what they will do together. We believe disciples need to be genuinely empowered to make decisions together. This collaborative approach to discipleship is the default paradigm used in this resource. However, you can use Collaborative Discipleship any way you view is best.
A pathway is the order in which lessons are taught. We recommend each group choose from one of the pathways which are already provided.
If the group wants to create a custom pathway or just modify a pathway that has been provided, here are a few steps to help your group discover where it needs to grow the most. View the custom pathway page or PDF.
What you will see is that Collaborative Discipleship’s lessons are organized into five areas of growth and four ways to grow. Discuss as a group the following questions:
You can also ask four specific questions for each area of growth:
With a sense of where the group needs to grow and how to grow in each area you can create your pathway.
Discuss:
Use the Collaborative Discipleship lessons to motivate, teach and train disciples in all five areas of growth. Each lesson covers everything a disciple needs to do when facilitating a group discipleship time. A typical lesson should take 60 to 90 minutes to complete.
Discuss:
Roleplay: If you haven’t gone through a lesson before, choose a lesson, then have someone from your group lead everyone else through a few of the sections.
One of the most significant things any leader can do is to get disciples immersed in as many growth-enhancing experiences as possible. In these experiences disciples take steps of faith, minister to others, and benefit from Christian communities. Retreats, conferences, sharing your faith together, prayer meetings, church involvement and many more immersive experiences will greatly encourage growth.
Discuss: What questions do you have about this section?
Brainstorm a list of all the immersive experiences you can think of for the year. These can come from your group, the Cru® movement, your community, or your church. Have someone write these down.
In-Depth Resources will help your group learn more through books, articles, videos and audio recordings. These resources go into much greater detail than the lessons, and they help disciples learn in ways that complement the lessons and the immersive experiences. Choose at least a few each semester.
Discuss:
In order to make the process of making disciples less intimidating and easier to reproduce, we’ve created a practical spiritual multiplication strategy. This collaborative strategy encourages servant leaders to take responsibility to serve a group of disciples and grow alongside them as peers and fellow disciples. Someone who wants to initiate a group, invites others to join a new discipleship group, coordinates communication, makes sure the group is staying faithful to its purpose and does anything needed to help the group work together and grow.
Those in your discipleship group can collaborate together to facilitate lessons, organize outreaches, and significantly contribute to the group rather than simply consume what the group offers. With all the group members exercising faith and engaging in ministry, each one can soon start a new group of disciples.
Here’s how the strategy works:
Just imagine how many people could become involved in actively making disciples of all nations. With this strategy you could see several generations of student disciples engaged within just one school year!
Discuss: What questions do you have about this section?
Brainstorm: Have each person brainstorm a list of believers they could invite to join them in discipleship.
Pray: In light of what we’ve discussed, how can we pray for each other right now?
Since we last met, what happened as a result of expressing Christ’s love to others?
How can you, or we, express Christ’s love to others this week?
Here are a few ideas:
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