Making Disciples Who Make Disciples
A 19-Session Pathway for Following Jesus, Helping Others Follow Him, and Forming New Churches
This series is designed to help believers follow Jesus together, help others follow him, and form new churches. It moves in three stages. First, it establishes the foundations of making disciples, clarifying Jesus’s vision, mission, and approach. Second, it develops the core habits of making disciples, shaping a lifestyle that is relational, prayerful, and outward-focused. Third, it provides a simple launch plan for small groups of three to four people who are ready to begin a new gathering and take practical steps toward multiplication.
Phase 1: Foundations of Making Disciples (1–4)
These first sessions establish a clear and shared understanding of what Jesus is doing through his church. They help participants align their thinking with Scripture, embrace Jesus’s mission, learn a simple and repeatable approach to disciple-making, and identify common obstacles that often slow or prevent action.
1. Jesus’s Vision for His Church
2. Jesus’s Mission for His Church
3. Our Approach to Making Disciples (Love God and Love Others, The Ongoing Commitments, and The Five Movements)
4. Overcoming Obstacles to Making Disciples
Phase 2: Core Practices of Making Disciples (5–12)
These sessions focus on the core habits that shape a life of following Jesus and making disciples. Participants learn how to engage people in their everyday relationships, depend on God through prayer, serve others, share the message of the gospel, form simple gatherings, and help others grow. Each practice is simple, practical, and designed to be lived out consistently.
The Center
The Ongoing Commitments
6. Identify Our Natural Networks of Relationships
7. Pray for Ourselves and Others
The Five Movements
8. Serve to Meet Practical Needs
9. Seek to Find Receptive People
10. Invite to Discover the Christian Message
11. Gather to Grow in Biblical Community
12. Equip to Develop New Leaders
Phase 3: Launch Plan for New Gatherings (13–19)
Introduction
These final sessions are designed for people who are already seeking to make disciples and are now preparing to come alongside a point leader to start a new Gathering. The point leader and several others form a small launch team and work together during the months leading up to launch. These sessions are practical discussion and action guides rather than traditional teaching lessons. Each session begins with Scripture and helps the team assess where they are, identify and address obstacles, make concrete plans, and take increasing responsibility in an existing Sunday Gathering. The team then reviews what happened, learns from experience, and adjusts its plans with the help of its coaches. The goal is not simply to complete seven sessions or develop a launch document. The goal is to form a committed and increasingly capable team that can gather people, lead a biblical Gathering, care for those God brings, work together under healthy leadership, and continue making disciples and developing new leaders after launch.
Learning, Planning, and Practicing Together
Many launch teams will benefit from working through a session first to understand its teaching and discuss their situation, then meeting again during the week to make specific plans and prepare to act. For example, identifying your natural networks involves naming people, considering their circumstances, and developing a regular pattern of praying for them and staying in contact. Learning to lead a gathering requires preparation, practice, and feedback. These responsibilities develop gradually and often overlap. Expect to revisit earlier sessions, address several areas at once, and adjust your plans with help from your coaches. Use the sessions to guide an ongoing process of learning, planning, practice, and review.
Main Outcomes: Confirm the direction toward starting a new gathering, identify and address obstacles, and commit to preparing together for launch.
Main Outcomes: Form the launch team, clarify the roles of the point leader and team members, strengthen trust and unity, establish expectations for working together, and begin sharing responsibility in preparation for launch.
15. Engaging and Inviting Our Networks
Main Outcomes: Review the team’s natural networks, identify receptive people and households, and make specific plans to pray for, serve, engage, follow up with, and invite them as the team prepares to launch.
16. Choosing a Meeting Place and Planning for Growth
Main Outcomes: Choose a meeting place that serves the people you hope to reach and supports the gathering’s shared life. Clarify hosting responsibilities and practical arrangements, and establish criteria for accommodating growth, moving to another location, or preparing to start another gathering.
Main Outcomes: Understand how the major parts of a gathering work together, assess your readiness to lead them, and make a plan for your launch team to lead your first gathering.
18. Explaining and Applying Scripture
Main Outcomes: Learn how to prepare and lead a Discipleship Series lesson faithfully and clearly, helping others understand Scripture, participate in discussion, and respond to God’s Word. Practice leading a lesson in an existing gathering or discipleship setting and receive feedback from other leaders.
19. Shepherding and Coaching God’s People
Main Outcomes: Learn to know, pray for, and care for the people in the gathering, stay in meaningful contact outside the weekly meeting, help each person take appropriate next steps, equip people to participate in ministry, connect developing disciple-makers and leaders to ongoing coaching and training, and help them begin developing others.