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National Disciple Making Forum 2024

Disciple Making Culture: Where Everyone Is On Mission With Jesus

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

The Harvard Business Review describes it this way: “The values, beliefs and behaviors practiced in an organization formed over time because they are rewarded or punished (i.e. by formal or informal rules, rituals, and behaviors.”

The McKinsey Institute put it more simply: “Culture is how we do things around here …”

That statement is often attributed to the most influential management guru of our time, Peter Drucker. What Drucker meant by “culture eats strategy for breakfast” was that lasting change in an organization comes only when the culture of an organization changes. Applying this to church, if you do not change the culture of a church, the church will not change.

Many leaders fail to account for this reality.

This gets at the root of why our disciple making plans can so easily fail. We try great strategies — preaching on disciple making, small groups, D-Groups, etc. But our churches will not change — indeed cannot change — because “culture” easily defeats the strategies we adopt.

We believe that we will not see truly revolutionary disciple making movements within churches in North America until we create disciple making cultures. So, we are excited to pursue help from those with national and international experience.

It is helpful to understand a culture by looking through the lens of three elements: values, behaviors, and narrative.

• Values and Beliefs — the things that are truly important to us. They are what we really value and really believe about disciple making. They define our identity and motives.
• Behaviors — These are specific practices that embed the beliefs and values. The discipline of specific practices then leads to habits. These habits, applied time and time again, become lifestyles.
• Narrative — the stories we tell and the language we use. These are the sayings that we repeat which explain and give meaning to our behaviors and disciplines.

Shodankeh Johnson has some interesting things to teach us about disciple making cultures in a church (you can learn about his movement and others by reading the free eBook The Kingdom Unleashed).

Shodankeh challenges the conventional wisdom on how a disciple making culture is created. He is a big advocate that we embrace discipline as the heart of disciple making. What he means by discipline is the explicit practice of specific things like fasting and prayer rhythms, Discovery Bible Study, starting with persons of peace, etc., be adopted upfront.

He believes that disciplined practice is more important than talking or casting vision for disciple making. He believes we place too much emphasis on Narrative (our stories and words) without first putting disciplines into place.

Join Shodankeh, Jason Shepperd, Jim Putman and others as we dive into this vital conversation at the Discipleship.org 2024 National Disciple Making Forum.