Page 1/5 of Discipleship Groups at Oakwood
Page 1 – Page 2 – Page 3 – Page 4 – Page 5 / Audio / Resources
Audio for session 1
“The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters fill the sea.” Habbakuk 2:14
That’s the vision. That’s the endgame. And notice this is a prophecy in Scripture so it’s not just a vision, it’s a PROMISE. Hear that, brothers and sisters – “The earth WILL BE FILLED with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord Jesus.” It will be. Nothing can stop the fulfillment of this promise.
It is happening all day every day as normal Christians faithfully share the good news of His death and resurrection with their family, friends and neighbors. Jesus promised to build His church and “the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” That is what He is doing – gathering in the remaining lost sheep of His flock, calling them in – one by one – through the faithful, simple proclamation of the gospel.
Once the last person who needs to hear the gospel has heard it, history will be over!
“This gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed in all nations as a testimony to them, and then the end will come.” Matthew 24:14
That’s what Jesus is waiting for. Believers must be gathered in from “every tongue and tribe and nation.” When will our task be finished? When can we look at the Great Commission – to make disciples of all nations – and check that box on our task list?
How can we reach 3 billion unreached people? How will the gospel penetrate thousands of remaining unreached people groups? It starts with ONE. One prayer. One person. One conversation.
How will the Lord Jesus gather in people from those impossible to reach parts of Afghanistan and Libya, of northeast India and communist China, of Saudi Arabia and Iran? How will the Minguadano people of the south Philippines hear the gospel?
The same way your next door neighbor will. The same way your brother or sister, your cousin or nephew will. The same way your co-worker or high school buddy will. One conversation at a time. One meeting at a time. One relationship at a time.
Yes, events and programs will be a part of it. Big evangelistic rallies, small evangelism efforts. But the one thing that RIGHT NOW is changing lives and bringing the gospel into new territory is the same one thing that started it 2,000 years ago: DISCIPLEMAKING.
Jesus created the original VIRAL MOVEMENT. He developed the system and invested in the small group of people that turned the Roman Empire upside down, from the inside out, and literally changed the world. His way was not with big fancy programs or a large, expensive organization.
How did Jesus change the world? He changed the hearts and lives of 12 young men.
How is Jesus changing the world now? He is changing the hearts and lives of people like you. Me. Us. Little gatherings like this one where the faithful few say, “Let’s do this, TOGETHER.”
All God needs is a few humble, available workers who say like Isaiah, “Here am I. Send me.” Our only qualification is that we were sinful enough to be saved. We are weak enough to be humble. We are crazy enough to try something impossible – because we know it’s not about us.
This is what Ying and Grace Kai did. They set out to reach an urban area near China with 5 million farmers and 16 million factory workers. Their initial goal was to plant 200 churches in 3 years. They started with a group of 30 Christian farmers – and introduced a simple training program. First, you articulate your testimony in 2-3 minutes. Then you express the gospel in 2-3 minutes. You practice those two presentations until you get comfortable sharing your story and God’s story. Then you make a list of all the people you know who don’t know Jesus – as many as you can think of. From that list, you pray and ask God to show you which five to start with. For the next week, you pray for them and look for opportunities to meet with them to share your story and God’s story.
Of that group of 30 farmers, 11 embraced the assignment and went out to share the gospel. And since they were in an area that had almost no exposure to the gospel, it met with some resistance but also with a lot of surprising and energetic response. One older man went and shared the gospel with his entire village that first week, and 11 people said “Yes” to Jesus! Suddenly that farmer was a church planter!
God changed a group of simple Christian farmers into fruitful gospel workers. Those 30 workers simply shared their story and God’s story and the Lord worked through them to reach 200 people and start 27 groups in the first 3 months. By the end of the first year the ministry had multiplied so powerfully that those 27 groups had become over 900 groups and the mobilized disciples had led over 10,000 people to saving faith in Jesus!
Ying and Grace Kai set out with an audacious vision to plant 200 churches in 3 years. They saw God achieve that goal in 3 months and by the end of 10 years disciples of Jesus were making disciples who were making disciples to the 18th generation! In 10 years that movement planted almost 160,000 house churches and led 1.7 MILLION people to saving faith in the Lord Jesus! (T4T p. 21)
That is one of the more dramatic disciplemaking movement stories in the world. But there are hundreds and hundreds like it, all over the world. Ordinary Christians simply reaching out to the people around them with the gospel.
This is the MISSION OF GOD. We know it’s the work God is doing because it’s nothing other than the Great Commission. God promised that one day the whole world will be filled with the knowledge of King Jesus. The world seems pretty dark right now, but the light always shines brightest against a dark backdrop. The darker the enemy stronghold, the bigger the demons in charge – the more glorious the victory of King Jesus will be.
All authority is his. No weapon formed against us will prosper. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.
We cling to the old rugged cross. We preach Christ and Him crucified and that’s all. We don’t need wise and persuasive words, we just need to share how Jesus changed our lives – which is how He can change the lives of others. We are simply a small group of beggars who have found in Jesus the BREAD OF LIFE. And now we are stepping out into a world filled with beggars to tell them about the bread we found.
So what’s the point? What’s the calling?
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Matthew 28:18-20
That’s it. That’s the mission. That’s the plan. One person at a time. One conversation at a time. One meeting at a time. God is using that simple strategy to reach, mobilize and multiply disciplemakers all over the world – very dramatically in places like Asia and Africa, as it was for a long time in Cuba; and less dramatically in other places.
But it’s the same vision for the glory of Jesus and it’s the same plan to make disciples who make disciples.
In the next 5 years we want to saturate Tampa Bay with the gospel so that every man, woman and child has repeated opportunities to see, hear and respond to the good news. 4.1 million people in Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties. Probably one quarter of those claim to be Bible-believing “Christians.” So let’s say we got 10% of those 1 million believers. Imagine if we were able to actually mobilize 100,000 believers as DISCIPLEMAKERS. Think of how that would transform our city!
If 100,000 gospel workers were suddenly deployed and each of us shared the gospel just one time each week, we would reach every man, woman and child in our entire region in one year! 100,000 workers times 50 gospel presentations is 5 MILLION gospel presentations in the course of a year.
So that is our FAITH GOAL – 100,000 gospel workers – 100,000 reproducing disciplemakers changing Tampa Bay one conversation at a time.
A movement like this will require coordinated partnership with gospel-centered churches throughout the region as we not only mobilize and multiply DISCIPLEMAKERS but also multiply CHURCHES. This means engaging with as many pastors and churches as we can to share the vision of the gospel saturation of our city. It means working together to train, mobilize and multiply disciples within our churches. It means revitalizing small, struggling churches and planting new, missional churches. Imagine a coalition of 1,000 churches – churches of all sizes, many denominations, various ministry approaches – all over Tampa Bay, working together to reach our city!
That kind of movement would spill beyond Tampa to fill central Florida with the glory of Jesus’ name. And it would spread beyond Florida as God calls workers to relocate – short term or long term – to those hard to reach places like Saudi Arabia and northern India.
The vision is compelling. The numbers are inspiring. You are too polite to visibly shake your head, but we all know that it won’t work. Not here. Not now. Why do we know that? Because it hasn’t yet. And it’s not a new idea. It’s not a new plan. If “discipleship” had the power to saturate a city and a region it would have happened by now.
That’s true. And the fact is that discipleship has always had that power – it’s the only thing that has that power – and it continues to be the means by which thousands upon thousands come to Jesus every day. But it hasn’t happened in America since the second great awakening ended around the time of the Civil War. So we are conditioned by 8 generations of failure to believe it can’t be done. And we are conditioned by 2 generations of church growth and marketing that has given us a passive, consumer Christianity that gums up the disciplemaking engine.
We need to ask ourselves – what is “the Oakwood experience” producing?
When someone has been at our church for a year, five years or twenty years, what have they become? Are we making disciples or just consumers? Are we training followers of Jesus or just gathering fans of Jesus?
It is a fact that our church is perfectly designed for the results we are getting. The truth is that like most American churches we see very little conversion growth. Since Tampa is growing and our church is healthy in many ways we are on a growing trajectory. But we only baptize a handful of people each year – mostly kids and teenagers. So we need to evaluate our systems and practices to honestly assess our disciplemaking process. We want to be a transformational church. We want to see lives changed, our community changed and our city filled with the love and grace of Jesus.
So we have to forget what we think we know and start from scratch. We have to come humbly to the Bible and let the Lord Jesus commission us again and train us again to make disciples as HE made disciples. One at a time. Modeling. Teaching. Training. Watch me. Then you do it. Fix the mistakes and try again. Fail. Repent. Pray. Go back out. Go to the next house, the next person, the next village.
That’s why we’re here: to learn the new way that is the old way. We need to tear down the engine of disicplemaking to remove all the confusion and gunk that is gumming up the works. The engine of disciplemaking is a 12 cylinder monster. It has the explosive power of the rocket boosters that send astronauts into space. Discipleship harnesses the power of the GOSPEL and applies it to the heart of a person in cooperation with the Holy Spirit of God. Where the gospel meets faith, transformation occurs – and as people are transformed they become ambassadors for the life-changing power of Jesus. Disciplemaking is the gospel-fueled engine for the advance of the church!
Like the apostle Paul we are “not ashamed of the gospel because IT IS THE POWER OF GOD for the salvation of everyone who believes.” The gospel gives us power to change. It is what moves a person from being lost and dead in sin to begin seeking the truth. It is the good news that gives hope to the seeker and opens their eyes to believe in the finished work of Jesus. The gospel is the power that sets the believer free from past addictions and sins as he learns to follow Jesus and walk in the Spirit. And it is the same gospel that makes a follower of Jesus into a leader who makes disciples.
Our transformational process involves four movements: from lost to seeking truth, then believing in Jesus, then following Jesus and finally becoming a disciplemaker. Oakwood’s longstanding commitment to Community Groups and our new promotion of Discipleship Groups makes us pretty effective at the middle two movements.
The Engel Scale is a helpful tool to show the progress necessary for a person to move from -8 (no awareness of God) to -1 (repentance and faith in Jesus). Most Americans live in that little word “rejection,” having heard some version of the gospel and refused to submit for whatever reason.
This hardening of the heart makes many of our friends and neighbors resistant to the gospel because they think they understand what Jesus offers them and have convinced themselves they don’t need or want it. What is necessary to walk someone from -8 to -1 is a committed relationship, with a lot of prayer, and the time, love and service to break through those barriers and help the person really grasp the gospel and prepare to respond. But the commitment of faith is not the end of this process, but just the turning point by which the sinner is forgiven and given a new heart. Then, empowered by the Holy Spirit, they can begin moving from +1 toward +8 in the gospel-fueled process called sanctification.
Where we need to concentrate now is on the first and fourth movement. As we improve in training leaders who actually become disciple-makers we will see that fruit grow into the other three movement areas. Our leaders will help launch new missional groups; others will lead Community Groups with fresh disciplemaking vision; most will become part of D-Groups, passing on their passion for Jesus and the life-changing experience of believing the gospel and growing in the Lord through Spirit-led habits. How will the Great Commission be accomplished? By making disciples who make disciples! We simply believe the gospel and are changed by it. We share the gospel with others and they are transformed by the Lord Jesus. We train believers to become disciplemakers and the process of multiplication begins to gain momentum. One person at a time. One meeting at a time: making, mobilizing and multiplying disciplemakers. That is how “the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters fill the sea!”
Page 1/5 of Discipleship Groups at Oakwood – Click here for page 2 – Discipleship Groups Strategy
Page 1 – Page 2 – Page 3 – Page 4 – Page 5 / Audio / Resources