3 Criteria I used for my Discipleship Experience last year

Good morning, Reader,

I am so excited about some things I am working on for you and the rest of our community. It is a bit of a passion project for me that has been brewing for a couple of years, but I felt very strongly it was time to focus in and make it available to you this year.

God started stirring me in November, I think. One of the roles I fill in the church where I am on staff is overseeing discipleship and development. It is my true passion. I love teaching and coaching people into a deeper relationship with Jesus and a greater understanding of themselves.

Over the past year, I have been rebuilding our discipleship experience for our church, building a digital experience with personal touches at strategic points. Honestly, there were a couple of objectives I had in building it as a digital experience:

1. Make it accessible for people: people are busy and it has been increasingly more difficult to get people to carve out time for a 6-week class or 3-month process or anything else that required them to come to a location for multiple sessions. I wanted to create an experience that people could access when it worked for them.
2. Make it engaging: this is one of my soap boxes I get on a lot and I will continue to get on. Things we build need to be engaging. I heard an interview the other day (I wish I could remember who it was) but it was talking about people's short attention span. The point they made was that the short attention span is not the issue, but the lack of engaging content. If content is engaging, then it will hold people's attention. I wanted our discipleship experience to be engaging, so I built it with various layers, media pieces, and activities.
3. Make it administratively lean: as a busy pastor, I am sure you can appreciate this. Our church doesn't have an administrator at all. Just four pastors who take care of everything unless we have a volunteer taking care of it (which we enjoy a 67% volunteer rate at our church, which is incredible). So, I built our discipleship and development experience with a lot of automation to lighten the administrative load. I wanted to create an experience that members of our congregation could go through without a whole lot of waiting around for us as pastors. At the same time, I wanted the pastors to be able to step into the process in personal and strategic ways rather than doing administrative tasks.

As I was coming through November, I had completed the backbone of the process with the first two phases built and operating. There are still elements I want to add down the road, but members of our congregation could go from being a visitor (see the process for this here) to being a volunteer to being a captain through the new system. I felt satisfied that I had created an experience that accomplished my three primary goals.

In December, I started thinking about you and the whole ministry community that I serve and asking God what he wants me to focus on in 2024. How could I serve the pastors and ministry leaders that I love so much in this new year? I felt God tell me that in 2024, I am going to focus on helping build discipleship and development experiences that get people re-engaged with the Bible, their churches, and their communities.

According to Barna's research done in 2022, only 28% of Christians are engaged in discipleship, defined as being discipled AND discipling others. Along with that, 39% were not involved in discipleship at all. That is incredibly alarming, but also consistent with what we found out as we pastored through COVID. I believe it is time for that to change. As ministry leaders, we must turn our attention to discipling people and building engaging experiences for them to be part of.

So, this year I am going to be revealing the discipleship experience I built this past year, a couple of other experiences I have built in the past for other churches, and equipping you with the tools and resources you need to build or enhance your discipleship experience.

I am super excited about this and looking forward to partnering with you and ministry leaders all over the country on this endeavor to bring discipleship to the forefront of our ministries.

I hope you have an awesome day, Reader,

Dr. Brandon Pardekooper

PS If you have a specific way I can help you build or enhance your discipleship experience, reply to this email and let me know. I am building resources for you and the more I can tailor them for you the better. :)