WHY STAGES?

1. GETTING STARTED: HOW DO I DISCIPLE SOMEONE?

It’s helpful to think about discipleship as a pathway. Our job is to know where the person we are working with is on this pathway, if they want to move forward and what their next step looks like.  Stages helps us see what a pathway can look like. You can ask the person you are working with to fill out an online assessment here.

After seeing their results you should have “The Talk” with them. Choose from the following versions:

• The Talk For the Curious
• The Talk For New Believers
• The Talk For New Discipleship Relationships In General

For an overview of all 3 click here.

2. HOW TO USE SELF ASSESSMENTS

Self assessments are powerful in a culture where people want to tell you where they are instead of letting you tell them where they are. The information we can get from assessments are a great starting point in a discipleship relationship. We’ll show you in the video how to use the online assessment and how to unpack the followup email.

3.  WHAT ARE GROWTH RHYTHMS?

4. WHAT IS A MEET-UP AND HOW DO I LEAD ONE?

A Meet-Up is the time we spend together intentionally focusing on our spiritual growth. Not all discipleship happens in our Meet-Up’s but when we do focus on growth, it’s important to have a structure that keeps us balanced between head (thinking), hand (doing) and heart (feeling). We also want to provide an easy and visible model for the person we are working with so that they will know how to lead a discipleship relationship themselves in the future.

You can download our Meet-Up guide here.

To read more about Meet-Up’s click here.

5.  SHOULD YOU JUST USE THE BIBLE IN DISCIPLESHIP?

To many people it seems the obvious answer would be “YES”! The Bible is God’s Word and foundational for all we believe as Christians. Studies show that Biblical engagement is one of the strongest predictors of spiritual health. The importance and the power of the Word of God are not in question here.
Maybe the better question is “how should we use the Bible in discipleship?” Should we just open to a particular book, read through it and ask good questions no matter where our disciple is spiritually? Or…should we select certain texts that directly speak to where they are and what they need to grow? Is it helpful to use tools, lessons or studies that point to the Bible but are not the Bible themselves? These are the questions we’ll explore together. But let’s agree first that the phrase “just use the Bible in discipleship” isn’t as helpful as people mean for it to be because it doesn’t point to how to use the Bible.