May 21, 2025 • 38 mins
Is your church overwhelmed by a maze of groups, classes, and ministries—or struggling to get people engaged at all? On this episode, we break down how to streamline your discipleship ministries for greater clarity and real spiritual growth.
Your hosts, Scott Ball and A.J. Mathieu from The Malphurs Group, bring years of hands-on experience revitalizing churches. Each week, they share practical strategies for church leaders to create healthier, more effective ministries—no matter your church’s size or context.
In this episode:
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[00:02:14] Announcement: New “Six Areas of Groups Ministry” Masterclass partnership (and why it matters)
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[00:07:04] The real issue: Why variety confuses people and stalls engagement
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[00:08:53] The program vs. process mindset (and how to shift gears)
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[00:12:25] Building a clear, 3-5 step discipleship pathway—what primary and secondary ministries are (and aren’t)
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[00:26:31] Practical steps to combine, align, or sunset ministries for maximum impact
Episode Links:
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Try the Healthy Churches Toolkit for free: healthychurchestoolkit.com
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Read the full article: malphursgroup.com/291
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Connect with us on social: facebook.com/malphursgroup | twitter.com/malphursgroup
Take your next step toward a healthier church today!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Okay. Your church has a bunch of groups. It's got classes. It's got
bible studies, and your people aren't in any of
them. Or maybe they're in way too many. Let's talk about
streamlining your discipleship ministries today on the church revitalization
podcast. Hello, and welcome to the church revitalization
podcast brought to you by the Maelfors group team, where each
(00:22):
week we tackle important, actionable topics to help churches
thrive. And now, here's your hosts, Scott Ball
and AJ Mathieu.
Welcome to the Church Revitalization podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined
by my friend and cohost, AJ Mathieu. Woo.
Alright. Right on. Man. So
(00:43):
couple of things before we get into this. I think this is
gonna be a very helpful episode because I I don't know that
I've walked into very many churches where this wasn't a
problem, where we've got a lot of stuff happening,
but communication isn't super clear. Some people
are involved in too much. Some people aren't involved in anything. So
(01:06):
I think we're gonna help people get some clarity today on how to do that
differently or how to approach that issue, topic, problem.
But before we dive into that, couple of things I wanna announce. We
just announced last week a new partnership with Build
Groups with our friend Adam Ehrlichman and his team
at Build Groups. We have a new master class on
(01:28):
the six areas of groups ministry. And, man, if you
follow the instruction in that course, you may be able
to grow your group's ministry by 30 to 50%
in six to twelve months. They they have
example after example of churches that they have worked with and partnered
with, and the amount of material and information
(01:50):
and tools they have included in this master
class is pretty unbelievable in
my mind. I was, as I was putting all this together inside of the Healthy
Church's toolkit, I was pretty I was I was like, wow. This is a lot
of value. So to take advantage of this, go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com. Sign up for a seven day free
(02:10):
trial. You'll get full access to the master class. You'll be able to
start accessing that content. And number two, connected to that, we
have a workshop with Adam coming up
this Thursday as this is being released. So that would
be tomorrow. Tomorrow? As this is being released, it will be tomorrow.
Yeah. Mhmm. And that is happening at remind me the
(02:33):
time. Is it so I think it's 11AM eastern
is when the workshop is happening live. If you attend live, you can
ask questions. You could ask Adam some questions. And 11AM.
Yeah. Yeah. Twenty twenty five. Yeah.
Adam's gonna be coleading that workshop with us, and we're gonna be
diving deeper. I believe we're gonna be focusing on that first.
(02:58):
There's six six areas of groups ministry, and I think we're gonna dive a little
bit deeper in the first area of groups ministry, which
is discover. So how to increase the number of leaders
that you have, the number of group leaders, whether that's Sunday school
classes or small groups, doesn't matter. But the number of leaders and teachers
that you have available, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into that in the
(03:19):
workshop. So but that's only available to people who are in the
toolkit. And if you're like, I don't wanna pay for the toolkit right now,
or I'm not sure, again, sign up for seven
days for free. And if you happen to be listening to this after the workshop
has already happened, you'll still go and sign up
for a seven day free trial, and you can go back and watch the replay.
(03:41):
That's a lot of words I just said. Did I miss anything?
All they need to know is great new class in the toolkit. Go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com now. Start your seven day free trial, and
you'll be glad you did. If you're outside of North America, go to
healthychurchesglobal.com and get your free
access subscription to the toolkit there. Yeah. Okay.
(04:04):
One last thing I wanna mention, before we get started in
the content for today. This is the only place, at least for now,
this is the only place that you can access this masterclass.
So even if you go to build groups, this doesn't live somewhere on their
website. At least that could maybe someday that will change in the future, but for
right now this is an exclusive partnership. So this is the only place where you
(04:25):
can watch this masterclass. You can't get it on MinistryPass, you can't get it
from somewhere else, you can't watch it on YouTube. It's only inside the
Healthy Churches toolkit. So sign up healthy churches toolkit dot com or
healthychurchesglobal.com if you live outside of North
America. Great response to it already.
So we're excited to have it. Okay. Let's talk about streamlining
(04:48):
discipleship ministries in your church, such as groups,
right? That's kinda why we're talking about this. We're
groups heavy with the toolkit this month, but we
are always heavy on intentional and
streamlined discipleship in churches every day at the
Malphurs Group and Healthy Churches Global. This is a key area,
(05:11):
One of the most significant areas that we work in throughout our strategic
envisioning process that we do with churches is focusing on how are we
gonna organize ministries in our church to most efficiently and effectively
disciple people into becoming disciple makers. And
so that requires, as I just said, intentionality
in it. We want to make sure that our ministries are achieving
(05:34):
that goal, that we're not just doing things because it was
trendy or because it seemed like a good idea and then just kind of leaving
things to hopefully have good outcomes and never
really know. We want things super intentional that
we're able to monitor and see, okay, is this really working well? And that
people are super clear about what's what's the best thing? How
(05:56):
should I use my time here at church? So, Scott, we've got three
points. So let's start off in our first area here. Let me call back for
one one second and just say, you know, because I think you said this really
well sort of in the teaser for this episode, but this this is
the problem that we're trying to solve today. You have,
you know, let's say you've got 18 different groups that meet,
(06:17):
women's groups, men's groups, bible study groups, you know, you've got six
different Sunday school clat- classes that happen, you know, and then you have these
random smattering of of other kinds of affinity groups or whatever
that that meet throughout the week or once a month. They're all on different
curriculum. They are all on different
meeting time schedules. They're all on different
(06:40):
frequency of meetings. They're all on different start and
stop times, like some run all year, some run only during
you know, they don't meet at all during the summer or whatever. And as a
result, some people are engaged in a lot of these things, and some
of them people aren't engaged in any of them at all. And so the problem
is that you have varying levels of
(07:02):
engagement. And from your perspective as the
pastor, you think, well, we're offering a lot of stuff. How can we see
such different results? Some people wait
almost too involved because they're getting stuck there and they're not taking any other
step. And other people who they only come on Sunday morning and they're not engaged.
And so the point of this episode is to give you three actions that
(07:25):
you can take to solve this problem. How can we
streamline the things we're doing? We're we're in particular talking about adult
discipleship ministries. You had mentioned a second ago, you know, sort of a
holistic. We can take the same logic and apply it across
all of our ministries, but we we wanna drill down and specifically
talk about adult discipleship ministries today using
(07:47):
that as a broad category to cover bible studies, small
groups of Sunday school, etcetera.
Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly it. So first, the
first thing that we're we wanna talk about is this this
shift in function and in mindset from
being program oriented to being process oriented. And what we
(08:09):
mean by that, the program mindset is what most
churches really find themselves in, and that is we have
something for everyone. Or maybe we're trying to have something for everyone.
There's churches that even they aspire to just have more so that
perhaps we'll we'll nobody can get left behind because we have
found every niche possible, and they just keep adding and
(08:31):
adding and adding as opposed to a process oriented
mindset in which we say, we have a pathway for
everyone. And and we're able to move
people through, in the way we teach and
work through this, a relatively short amount of things
or small number of things that we ask people to engage in.
(08:53):
And it provides a much greater
framework for decision making, for monitoring
the health of ministries, for monitoring the output
success of ministries. And what we mean by that
is can we active can we actually see
that people are, maturing in the faith? Are
(09:15):
they becoming more like Jesus? Is are their behaviors changing? Is their life
transformation happening? And not just, you know,
monitoring a spreadsheet of attendance numbers
across 15 or 50 different things that happen
at the church every week or every month. And so
this this is the the first primary point here in
(09:37):
streamlining ministries, discipleship ministries into
greater effectiveness and efficiency is developing a pathway
that we can clearly organize things in the church.
Yeah. So the the key here is that we wanna emphasize
clarity over variety. So a lot of
churches get stuck because they think we need to have something for everyone.
(10:00):
Everyone needs to feel like I have a group, and we've talked about this
before on the podcast, but not for a while. But this trap that
churches get stuck in where no matter how much you subdivide, you can
always subdivide more. We have something for women, but do we have something for single
women? Well, we have some but some moms are working moms, and
some moms are stay at home moms, and the diff the times for
(10:23):
them would be better or different. We need something for men. We need
something for men. What about men who are retired? Men who are working? What are
we what about people who you you the more that you start to
the more affinities you look for, the more affinities you'll find. And
when you start chasing that route, you don't
win. And what happens is
(10:45):
people start to not understand where it is that you want for me to connect.
And some people will just say, well, you're just, this is just a simple church,
you know, I've I've read that book. But that's not quite right, and I'm not
criticizing simple church, but
the point isn't, well, just do fewer things. That isn't
even the point either. It's about speaking clearly
(11:07):
about what we are doing so that people know what
their next best step is. How should I
engage? How do you want for me to engage? So even if we do have
a variety of of meeting times or options
or places, we're not communicating in a way that makes it
makes it look like a buffet. And instead, they are
(11:29):
there's there's slots of options for me to engage
with that fit within a framework of a clear discipleship pathway.
Hopefully, this will make more and more sense as we kinda move through the points,
but the first key point that we're trying to make here is we need to
shift our thinking from program oriented
thinking, we need to have something for everyone, to process
(11:51):
oriented thinking. We need to have a pathway that moves people forward in
discipleship that includes everyone. So that's the first key point,
and then I think hopefully this will make more sense as we move through. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's just keep going. So our second point is combining
ministries into a primary pathway. So which
I'll it's already a presenter. What? What does that mean? We speak of
(12:12):
having three to five steps in a discipleship pathway in
the church. And there's there's order and significance
to what these steps would accomplish. And generally
speaking, there's there's a gathering. There's like your Sunday worship
service. There's a large group gathering. There's a step for
growth, increasing in maturity, and fellowshipping with
(12:34):
believers. We would call this a growth step. There's a service
step in which we're intentionally engaging people in the work of the
ministry, in the church, introducing them to to
concepts that they may not even be familiar with and spiritual gifts
and temperament, personality types to help them find how
God has created them for work in his kingdom. And
(12:56):
outreach. Getting outside of the church to to bring the gospel to people
and to meet the needs in the local area and around the
world. And so we've got an order to this in
engaging with other believers as the body of
Christ, supporting one another, supporting the church, living out
our faith in the world, and of course also starting with
(13:18):
giving praise and worship to God. But we have to then be able to start
to put some words or names to these functions
within the framework of the pathway. And so we have to
have a primary thing in each of these spaces or
steps along the pathway. We have to be able to direct people to something
concrete that we can say, here's what we've developed at our church.
(13:40):
This is gonna be the greatest use of your time to engage
in these things. We call those primary ministries. And we work through a series of
tools, when we're working with the church, and that are described in
the strategic envisioning training course on the Healthy Church Toolkit to be able
to to develop these and to organize them. Again, as Scott just
said, clarity is what we're going for. We wanna be able to communicate in a
(14:03):
very simple way, a few simple things
for people to engage in. So the development of of
primary ministries within the pathway is key to that.
Yeah. So imagine I asked you to sort of
describe for me what a disciple
is or what a disciple looks like, what does a mature
(14:26):
Christian look like, you probably
wouldn't start with describing the things which
he or she attends. You maybe wouldn't begin
by saying, oh, a disciple is someone who they're at church every Sunday,
and they also attend a a mature disciple
is someone who attends a men's Bible study at 6AM on Thursdays.
(14:49):
Those those might be programs that they attend, but that's not the
image of what a disciple is. If I just asked you in the abstract,
I said, describe to me what a disciple looks like. You probably say,
a disciple is someone who worships the Lord with their whole life.
They have a really active prayer life. They're sharing their faith outside the
walls of the church. They're studying God's word, and they have deep
(15:13):
spiritual friendships. That's probably what that would look like.
So then I would have to turn to you and say, well, how are we
cultivating that kind of
behavior or that kind of maturity inside of a
person at your church? What is it that we're doing
that helps to bring about that level of maturity in each
(15:34):
person? Mhmm. Now we have a framework for thinking about what a
program is, and the problem is that we often don't
start there. We go, okay. We're a church. We need to have
things that we do. Rather than go, we're a church.
We have we have people we're trying to develop into something.
And when you so that was the first shift that we're trying to talk about.
(15:57):
So then when we talk about a primary ministry, we go, okay. A primary
ministry is merely the primary or environment
where we're trying to develop some aspect of discipleship.
So as you talked as AJ talked about, we have these different steps in a
discipleship pathway, and in each step, we're trying to cultivate some different
element of mature discipleship. And we don't want anyone to
(16:20):
get stuck in any one of these steps because we want them to grow
to a deeper level of maturity. And when it comes to discipleship
ministries, this is often where we're talking about some sort of
edification or Christian maturity or what we
often just call generally discipleship, although we would argue
discipleship's a bigger vantage point than just this. But we're trying to
(16:42):
cultivate community and fellowship and a love for God's
word and a deep prayer life for one another in this step.
If you have so many programs going on,
they all kinda tackle things from a different perspective. It's
possible for a person to engage in some or all of these things and not
actually come become mature.
(17:04):
Mhmm. And the point of a primary ministry is to optimize this thing and
say, we're going to try to create one environment that if we could
get everybody in our church to engage in this environment, it
positions them best to cultivate this kind
of thing, a love for God's word, deep spiritual
friendship, a healthy prayer life, and so on. And and so
(17:26):
it's sort of that relentless commitment to saying no to other things so that we
can say, let's put all of these things together so people will engage
in this one thing which has best positioned them to to
grow in maturity. So you can do that by combining a bunch of things
into into one bucket. You could say, alright. We have Sunday school classes, and
we have small groups, and we have these bible studies, but they're all kind of
(17:47):
the same thing. So rather than trying to divert a bunch of attention,
let's create some shared DNA and some shared language
to maximize clarity while maintaining
the most amount of time slots available and options for
people to engage. Yeah. Let's refine this
one program a little bit so that it it's optimized for this.
(18:10):
But we are committed to the process and the outcome, not the program.
So if the program becomes ineffective, we can ditch the program
and come up with something else. But the because the program is merely a means
to accomplish the maturity. It isn't the end itself.
Yeah. I think too many people underestimate the power of clarity
because all of these things because, I mean, I think people could have listened to
(18:33):
a lot of what you just said, Scott, and go, yeah. Yeah. We agree. We
agree. And that's why we've got 18 groups, and we got 19 classes to choose
from. You know, that's why we've got so much stuff because, yeah, we we
wanna have that same thing. And I think you underestimate the
the negative impact that overwhelm has
on people when you cannot speak clearly about outcomes
(18:54):
and benefits to people's lives wanting with a desire
to mature in the faith. And instead just being overwhelmed by
the stuff. Like, oh my gosh, there's just too much. And
if if it feels like I'm gonna have to be at church every night of
the week to try to piece this together, then
basic you know, the the unspoken answer
(19:17):
to your invitation is going to be no. I'm just not gonna do
I'll go a step further. I think that most churches
overestimate the quality of a lot of their programs.
That's true too. So many, there's no reasonable
way for a church to do good quality control
(19:37):
on the number of programs they have going on. Whereas if
you, one, condense things into a clearer
format, where you have a a clearly defined primary
ministry, which you can hold to a high standard and
ensure a high level of quality control, and two, build your
leadership pipeline around that primary ministry so
(19:59):
that you ensure levels of accountability all the way down and up.
Then you can really make sure that the thing that it's supposed to accomplish, the
maturity it's supposed to develop, it's actually developing. I I'm a
% convinced, and I know this because we've worked with hundreds of
churches at this point, and I've we've taken them
through our discipleship pathway workshops.
(20:22):
And without fail, there's all kinds of programs that churches are doing that
when you start measuring their discipleship output,
not their attendance, but the actual maturity that they are producing,
it's quite low. And it's a little bit of a wake up call for a
lot of churches to go, oh man, we are spending a lot of resources and
time and attention on something that
(20:46):
might be well attended but isn't producing much spiritual fruit.
Yeah. And so often, you know, the churches that have just got a
ton going on, or even if they have, you know, even in groups, they're all
in on groups no matter what format they might take. Often, they
don't have a format. And so they just have this huge collection.
And if you ask them to describe, like, okay, well, what do groups look like
(21:08):
at your church? Well, it depends on the group. And then they start to describe,
well, some do this and some do that and some are more like that and
some are this, you know, this, particular niche or
others. And you have to take a step back and just
think for a minute. If a new person comes to my church and they
wanna get engaged, how am I going to communicate that
(21:29):
to them? You know? Like, oh, let me do they need to fill out a
questionnaire to figure out what which of our groups might you be a good
fit for? Or would you, as a leader, like to be able to have
something in place in which you can confidently know no
matter what group they go to, they're going to get the
same experience barring personality
(21:50):
differences. But generally speaking, they're gonna get the same experience with the same
discipleship outcomes no matter where they go. I tell you what, I
would sleep much better at night as a leader or pastor
knowing I know this person is gonna do great here instead of,
like, boy, if they end up over there in Jim's
group, I just don't know if that's gonna be a good fit or, you know,
(22:11):
this one over there. I think this is how we should want
to serve people and especially new people getting engaged.
And this isn't exactly the same thing, but, you know, I feel this way, say,
about, like, our strategic envisioning process and our
guides. While certainly maybe one one of our guides
might be a better fit based on geography or, you know,
(22:33):
theological background and experiences or personality
fit, certainly those things play some
role. But I feel confident that
any church can engage with any of our guides
and have a great experience because I trust our process. Yeah.
Our process is tried and true. The workshops are reliable. We've
(22:55):
done them so many times now, you know, with different kinds of
churches that I know that they're gonna have a good
experience. And Mhmm. And I've taken out to some to the degree that I
can, I've removed the variable of, well, how good is this person?
Again, that's why we train our guides. By the way. You can go to
malphorsgroup.com/certification if you have interested in learning that process.
(23:17):
I don't want to say that your guide doesn't make the experience, because
definitely it does. I hope you know what I'm saying. I I just I trust
we vet our guides and we train our guides, but also I
trust the process, and I know the process is effective. And what you're trying
to remove in the group's context is the
singular variable of who the teacher is. Obviously, some of your teachers
(23:40):
are gonna be or group leaders are gonna be better than others or more experienced
than others, and that's gonna make a difference. But if you have a really good
system for groups and they're designed to work and
function in a particular way, you minimize that variable to a
large degree, not entirely, so that you can
ensure that no matter what group someone attends, they're gonna they're going to
(24:01):
grow as a disciple, and that's what you want. Yeah. I mean, you know, to
to make maybe not one for one correlation, and I don't mean to denigrate
and go, it doesn't matter. Our guides are all the same because that's not true.
But it yeah. I don't know. There's limits to the analogy, I suppose.
Well, yeah. Sure. Yeah. No. I think I think the point comes across. I mean,
yeah. Whenever yeah. When they're all trained to do the same thing the same
(24:24):
way, then for the most part, the experience is
going to be similar no matter no matter who it is. But, yeah, I mean,
you know, so many churches, you've you've got a bunch of groups, and
you can almost always predict. They're like, yeah. Well, that one is you know,
they're super heavy bible study. You know? It's like, this is like kinda like
this theological intellectual group. These guys over here, it's mostly fellowship.
(24:47):
So some of our groups are felt more fellowship oriented and some are more bible
study oriented. Well right there, okay, you've already now I
mean play this out in your mind. Okay, I pick the fellowship group.
Great fellowship, great relationships. Couldn't couldn't find
first Corinthians to save my life. But man, I've got some great
friends at church. Or the opposite. My, you know,
(25:09):
I am just deep, deep in the word. And if,
you know, if I got in a car accident, I don't know who I would
call. So you have to almost kinda play out some extremes
because otherwise you're you're you're not saying it, but
you're telling people you might wanna be in about three groups to try to cover
all of your bases depending on what your bases yeah.
(25:31):
Yeah. Yeah. Do we even know what the basis are? Oh, that's good. Have we
established this? This may be a good transition, though, to this third point, which is
to go, okay. Well, if we're not kind of just
making a melting pot of everything we do, then that maybe
doesn't make sense. You can merge and combine some things together into a
primary ministry and refine them and try to optimize the DNA so it's
(25:52):
consistent and all those things we just talked about, but that's not gonna work for
every ministry. So then what do you do with those things? What can we
those things that can't be combined, what do we do with them? And
so there's a couple of things you can do with them. The first is that
you can align them, and the second thing is that you can sunset
them. So the things that we say align, these are things that
(26:14):
we would call secondary ministries. These are these are ministries
that you do that are connected to the
primary ministry, but in a way that you don't expect every
person necessarily to engage with them. So typically,
they function in one of two ways. One, it could be an on ramp. So
it's a short term thing that we do in order to get someone
(26:36):
plugged into the primary thing. It's an event or it's
a shorter run program, something like that that helps
someone get plugged into the thing that you want them to be engaged in
for the long term. The second kind of secondary ministry
is something that I call a step beyond, or you might think of it like
a deep dive. It is it is a deeper level of commitment
(26:57):
or engagement than you might expect the average person to
have the time or energy to commit to. So maybe
you like a mentorship program. Maybe you would love for
everyone to be engaged in one on one discipleship or triads
or mentorship or whatever, but that's not realistic for
everybody. So you have that available, but as sort of
(27:20):
a a higher degree of engagement than
you have as an expectation for everyone. So that would be
secondary ministries, and then of course you can sunset things. Some things you don't
have to, this is something that, I think we talked about this maybe in last
week's episode with Adam. I don't remember. I I
heard this from him though maybe even in the first episode we recorded with
(27:41):
him a long time ago. This idea of
mowing around the stump, like, you have some things that are are ministries
that you're not necessarily going to continue to to
grow or or gonna continue to function, but you don't have to rip out the
whole stump, you know, and ruin the yard. You can just mill around the stump,
and that's true. You can you can sort of sunset some things and go,
(28:03):
alright. The this ministry doesn't have to go away, but we
don't have to be promoting it either. It can kinda just exist,
and when it eventually goes away on its own,
and that's okay too. So I just said a bunch of words. AJ, I don't
know what you wanna say about secondary ministries and sunsetting ministries.
Yeah. I mean, this this is the hard part right here. I mean, this is
(28:26):
this is where some serious decisions end up having to be made, and it
takes some fortitude and leadership to work through
these things to make sure that people see the value and
understand why these decisions are being made. Obviously, the
sunset the sunsetting of ministries is the most
sensitive because people get emotionally attached to things.
(28:47):
Sometimes. Not always. Not always. But yeah. And then also
not allowing secondary ministries to become just a new catch
for your bloat. Like, alright. We don't really wanna get
rid of anything, so we're gonna call it a secondary ministry.
So again, you know, I mean, all of this takes intentionality.
And it has it has to be permeated
(29:10):
with a desire for a better future.
And we, Scott, I, our guides, we never come in with
any any authority or ability to twist your arm.
Or an agenda. Yeah. Gotta get rid of this. Oh, this is for your
church to be healthy and and hopefully produce, more and better disciples. Yeah. You know,
I mean, it this this is just the tough part of the process. This is
(29:31):
where most of the work goes in in the planning phase anyway, not in implementation.
But, yeah, making sense, having strategic
secondary ministries and, of course, primary ministries, and then
making some tough decisions in love and with information
clarity. That's that's where that has to happen. Yeah. This is the necessary
tough work. This past weekend, we often use the analogy
(29:55):
of cleaning out a garage Or a closet. Yeah. Cleaning
anything out. And, actually cleaned out my
garage this past weekend and, did did what you have to do, which
is everything has to come out. You can't go little bit by little bit.
You've gotta get everything out. Because you can't organize everything. I mean, if you if
you just go piece by piece, you can't really organize.
(30:17):
So you gotta get it all out of there. And, I was going through this,
and we have some wreaths that we we have hung up in the
garage because we cycle them through seasonally. You
get the spring wreath and the The spring wreath. Yeah. The
fall. The fall one. The Christmas wreath. We've got hooks for them in
our in our on the wall, in the back of our garage. I mean, cycle
(30:38):
through. We had, one of the wreaths that was hanging up in there and it
was really big is a wreath from our wedding. It was,
you know, had like fake fake flowers. No, it was decoration
used at the wedding decoration used at our wedding.
Yes. Boy, that sounds like, that's, that's going in the trash. If in
AJ's house that was be ready for the trash. So
(31:00):
it's obviously well, wow. You are You didn't get married
last year. You're a charmer. AJ. You know that?
You've been married a few years now. Yeah. Almost
twenty. So we we both kinda looked
we we've not it is it's something that we have used as a decoration
in the past. Okay. It's not it's not single
(31:23):
dimensional. It can it's an appropriate decoration for another time
besides a wedding? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I
thought you're I mean, I'm picturing something with wedding bells and white streamers and stuff.
No. No. No. No. No. It's like, it's fake flowers, obviously, because real flowers would
have rotted. It's it's a wreath. Like, it's a wreath like you might buy. Yeah.
We use them like a wedding wreath or something. It's a wreath that
(31:45):
we you that we had, and we had several of them. They were on windows
all throughout the the church. Okay. And some family kept one,
we we kept one, so on. And we've used it as
decor in the past Gotcha. On occasion, but we haven't hung it
out in years, because we have other things that are newer that we
like better. But we kinda had to look at each other like, what are we
(32:06):
doing with this thing? She's like, do you care if we get rid of this
wreath? And I was like, I don't care if we get rid of this wreath.
And so we I love those conversations, especially when we we agree.
Those are awesome. I think we were both maybe a little bit afraid of, like,
this is from our wedding. Like, is what does this mean for us to part
ways Yeah. With this wreath? You know?
(32:27):
And we decided we're gonna attempt to sell it because it's it's it's in
good shape. Like, someone might want it you don't look
at it and go from a wedding. It's a I I think
you have something in your mind of, like, what it's No. You no. You I
did it first. No. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It's it's just a A sellable?
A twenty year old sellable. You think there's it's got value
(32:50):
on the secondary market? A buck. Okay. Two in
a yard sale. Someone goes, oh, I love those colors. Yeah.
It's kind of in a sort of summery springy. It's
pretty. There's no it's not ugly. It's pretty. It's just not something that
we wanna hang out on our house anymore. Yeah.
The point is not about the wreath. The point is that
(33:13):
you can have things like this that are going on in your church that have
been around for twenty years. Yeah. And people are afraid to say, is
this something that we can get rid of now? Do we have to have this?
And no one we were never gonna touch
that wreath until we cleaned out the garage. Mhmm.
I wasn't gonna just go in there one day and take it down. Neither
(33:34):
was she. But we're here we were in this moment cleaning out the
garage. That's what she wanted for Mother's Day was, can we clean the
garage? So we're out there for hours cleaning the garage, and
we had a built in opportunity. And that's why strategic envisioning,
you know, having these opportunities, built in
opportunities to ask questions you wouldn't normally are so important because not
(33:57):
only are you able to get clarity around what matters most, you're also able to
maybe let go of some things that it's past time to kinda just go. We
don't need this. Yeah. Boy, it feels good getting rid of
stuff. Man, I love throwing stuff away. Me and Erica got to a new point
in our relationship in the last year, so we both love to throw stuff away.
It's I'm I'm happy with getting rid of stuff. Shit. Stuff.
(34:17):
Yes. But, generally, if it's something like from our wedding,
neither one of us is gonna make that decision unilaterally. You're gonna have a
conversation. Yeah. Yeah. The wedding album We can
keep keeper. You can keep the wedding album. Pictures I have a t shirt I
have a t shirt that kinda fits that I
wore when we left and when we pulled out Okay. Yeah. From the
(34:39):
from the church? Yeah. This says just married? Mister?
Oh, you got a just married. It's a it's a life is dead shirt that
says just married. Yeah. I'm not getting rid of it. It
doesn't take up much room in my drawer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've, yeah. Everybody should
have their space for their little personal keepsake things. I got I got t
shirts. I got, yeah, t shirts from past days.
(35:00):
Yeah. And there's so I guess I would say in the analogy, there's place for
that kind of thing in church. Should we go, you know what? The juice isn't
worth worth the squeeze. We don't need to get rid of this. It's okay.
Yeah. But the reality with the
wreath, if man, I'm really making stretching this analogy
out, is we had more wreaths than we had hooks.
(35:22):
We needed to clear out some wreaths. You established a pathway. There wasn't room for
everything. There wasn't room for it. You had to evaluate and keep
the most valuable things. So I can keep this shirt because it I had plenty
of room in the drawer, but I can't keep the wreath because I don't have
enough hooks. So the wreath's gotta go. That's good. How dusty is
that wreath? Keep it in the garage. It's not in the bag. I don't I
(35:43):
don't know what it is that you think how I live, but my Garbage are
dusty anyway. It's it's It was fine. Giant door open to the outside.
But it's not open most of the time. It's closed. I mean, I guess it
was it's in the back it was in the back of the garage. I don't
know. It was, I guess, a little dusty. Not that bad. Put the wreath in
it. Put it in the bag. You can still hang it. Put a bag over
it and hang it back up. Just keep it nice. Oh, good grief. Some of
(36:04):
our wreaths are in a bag. Alright. The ones that have, frocking flocking. The
the have the fake snow? Yeah. Christmas, flocked wreaths. Those are in a
bag. Yeah. Wow.
People really care about hearing this. This is some riveting podcast content right here.
Let's talk more about Too deep talking about reads. Yep. Cash. That's good
stuff. Alright. Let's, put a fine point on this. Okay. People won't engage here's a
(36:26):
recap. People won't engage in what they don't understand. And a lot of
you have a lot of stuff going on in your churches, and there's not a
lot of structure to it, and some of it isn't very good. And so you
need to take some intentional time to streamline your
ministries, take the principles that we've applied here, go to
HealthyChurchesToolkit.com, watch the strategic envisioning
(36:48):
training, contact us and get a guide to help you if you feel like you
need some extra help, and so we can walk you through the workshops, the strategic
envisioning workshops. And take the time to sort out your
ministry garage because there's stuff that needs to be cleaned
out that hasn't, there's stuff that needs to be reorganized that's
disorganized, and there are conversations that need to be had that you're
(37:09):
avoiding. And and so please go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com, get a trial for seven days,
join us for the workshop that's coming up tomorrow as this is
releasing, and, jump start your
discipleship growth in your church. It's possible. Yeah. There you go.
There's links below either in your podcast app for
(37:29):
this episode or on YouTube if you're watching and
enjoying the video podcast. Links below for
this week's article and for, yeah, jumping onto Healthy Churches
toolkit or Healthy Churches Global for our
outside North America friends around the world. We're so
glad you guys are with us. We'll be back again next week with
(37:52):
something great. It's gonna be great, Scott. Next week
is really gonna be good. Yeah, you'll have to tune in to find out what
it is.
Okay. Your church has a bunch of groups. It's got classes. It's got
bible studies, and your people aren't in any of
them. Or maybe they're in way too many. Let's talk about
streamlining your discipleship ministries today on the church revitalization
podcast. Hello, and welcome to the church revitalization
podcast brought to you by the Maelfors group team, where each
(00:22):
week we tackle important, actionable topics to help churches
thrive. And now, here's your hosts, Scott Ball
and AJ Mathieu.
Welcome to the Church Revitalization podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined
by my friend and cohost, AJ Mathieu. Woo.
Alright. Right on. Man. So
(00:43):
couple of things before we get into this. I think this is
gonna be a very helpful episode because I I don't know that
I've walked into very many churches where this wasn't a
problem, where we've got a lot of stuff happening,
but communication isn't super clear. Some people
are involved in too much. Some people aren't involved in anything. So
(01:06):
I think we're gonna help people get some clarity today on how to do that
differently or how to approach that issue, topic, problem.
But before we dive into that, couple of things I wanna announce. We
just announced last week a new partnership with Build
Groups with our friend Adam Ehrlichman and his team
at Build Groups. We have a new master class on
(01:28):
the six areas of groups ministry. And, man, if you
follow the instruction in that course, you may be able
to grow your group's ministry by 30 to 50%
in six to twelve months. They they have
example after example of churches that they have worked with and partnered
with, and the amount of material and information
(01:50):
and tools they have included in this master
class is pretty unbelievable in
my mind. I was, as I was putting all this together inside of the Healthy
Church's toolkit, I was pretty I was I was like, wow. This is a lot
of value. So to take advantage of this, go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com. Sign up for a seven day free
(02:10):
trial. You'll get full access to the master class. You'll be able to
start accessing that content. And number two, connected to that, we
have a workshop with Adam coming up
this Thursday as this is being released. So that would
be tomorrow. Tomorrow? As this is being released, it will be tomorrow.
Yeah. Mhmm. And that is happening at remind me the
(02:33):
time. Is it so I think it's 11AM eastern
is when the workshop is happening live. If you attend live, you can
ask questions. You could ask Adam some questions. And 11AM.
Yeah. Yeah. Twenty twenty five. Yeah.
Adam's gonna be coleading that workshop with us, and we're gonna be
diving deeper. I believe we're gonna be focusing on that first.
(02:58):
There's six six areas of groups ministry, and I think we're gonna dive a little
bit deeper in the first area of groups ministry, which
is discover. So how to increase the number of leaders
that you have, the number of group leaders, whether that's Sunday school
classes or small groups, doesn't matter. But the number of leaders and teachers
that you have available, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper into that in the
(03:19):
workshop. So but that's only available to people who are in the
toolkit. And if you're like, I don't wanna pay for the toolkit right now,
or I'm not sure, again, sign up for seven
days for free. And if you happen to be listening to this after the workshop
has already happened, you'll still go and sign up
for a seven day free trial, and you can go back and watch the replay.
(03:41):
That's a lot of words I just said. Did I miss anything?
All they need to know is great new class in the toolkit. Go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com now. Start your seven day free trial, and
you'll be glad you did. If you're outside of North America, go to
healthychurchesglobal.com and get your free
access subscription to the toolkit there. Yeah. Okay.
(04:04):
One last thing I wanna mention, before we get started in
the content for today. This is the only place, at least for now,
this is the only place that you can access this masterclass.
So even if you go to build groups, this doesn't live somewhere on their
website. At least that could maybe someday that will change in the future, but for
right now this is an exclusive partnership. So this is the only place where you
(04:25):
can watch this masterclass. You can't get it on MinistryPass, you can't get it
from somewhere else, you can't watch it on YouTube. It's only inside the
Healthy Churches toolkit. So sign up healthy churches toolkit dot com or
healthychurchesglobal.com if you live outside of North
America. Great response to it already.
So we're excited to have it. Okay. Let's talk about streamlining
(04:48):
discipleship ministries in your church, such as groups,
right? That's kinda why we're talking about this. We're
groups heavy with the toolkit this month, but we
are always heavy on intentional and
streamlined discipleship in churches every day at the
Malphurs Group and Healthy Churches Global. This is a key area,
(05:11):
One of the most significant areas that we work in throughout our strategic
envisioning process that we do with churches is focusing on how are we
gonna organize ministries in our church to most efficiently and effectively
disciple people into becoming disciple makers. And
so that requires, as I just said, intentionality
in it. We want to make sure that our ministries are achieving
(05:34):
that goal, that we're not just doing things because it was
trendy or because it seemed like a good idea and then just kind of leaving
things to hopefully have good outcomes and never
really know. We want things super intentional that
we're able to monitor and see, okay, is this really working well? And that
people are super clear about what's what's the best thing? How
(05:56):
should I use my time here at church? So, Scott, we've got three
points. So let's start off in our first area here. Let me call back for
one one second and just say, you know, because I think you said this really
well sort of in the teaser for this episode, but this this is
the problem that we're trying to solve today. You have,
you know, let's say you've got 18 different groups that meet,
(06:17):
women's groups, men's groups, bible study groups, you know, you've got six
different Sunday school clat- classes that happen, you know, and then you have these
random smattering of of other kinds of affinity groups or whatever
that that meet throughout the week or once a month. They're all on different
curriculum. They are all on different
meeting time schedules. They're all on different
(06:40):
frequency of meetings. They're all on different start and
stop times, like some run all year, some run only during
you know, they don't meet at all during the summer or whatever. And as a
result, some people are engaged in a lot of these things, and some
of them people aren't engaged in any of them at all. And so the problem
is that you have varying levels of
(07:02):
engagement. And from your perspective as the
pastor, you think, well, we're offering a lot of stuff. How can we see
such different results? Some people wait
almost too involved because they're getting stuck there and they're not taking any other
step. And other people who they only come on Sunday morning and they're not engaged.
And so the point of this episode is to give you three actions that
(07:25):
you can take to solve this problem. How can we
streamline the things we're doing? We're we're in particular talking about adult
discipleship ministries. You had mentioned a second ago, you know, sort of a
holistic. We can take the same logic and apply it across
all of our ministries, but we we wanna drill down and specifically
talk about adult discipleship ministries today using
(07:47):
that as a broad category to cover bible studies, small
groups of Sunday school, etcetera.
Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly it. So first, the
first thing that we're we wanna talk about is this this
shift in function and in mindset from
being program oriented to being process oriented. And what we
(08:09):
mean by that, the program mindset is what most
churches really find themselves in, and that is we have
something for everyone. Or maybe we're trying to have something for everyone.
There's churches that even they aspire to just have more so that
perhaps we'll we'll nobody can get left behind because we have
found every niche possible, and they just keep adding and
(08:31):
adding and adding as opposed to a process oriented
mindset in which we say, we have a pathway for
everyone. And and we're able to move
people through, in the way we teach and
work through this, a relatively short amount of things
or small number of things that we ask people to engage in.
(08:53):
And it provides a much greater
framework for decision making, for monitoring
the health of ministries, for monitoring the output
success of ministries. And what we mean by that
is can we active can we actually see
that people are, maturing in the faith? Are
(09:15):
they becoming more like Jesus? Is are their behaviors changing? Is their life
transformation happening? And not just, you know,
monitoring a spreadsheet of attendance numbers
across 15 or 50 different things that happen
at the church every week or every month. And so
this this is the the first primary point here in
(09:37):
streamlining ministries, discipleship ministries into
greater effectiveness and efficiency is developing a pathway
that we can clearly organize things in the church.
Yeah. So the the key here is that we wanna emphasize
clarity over variety. So a lot of
churches get stuck because they think we need to have something for everyone.
(10:00):
Everyone needs to feel like I have a group, and we've talked about this
before on the podcast, but not for a while. But this trap that
churches get stuck in where no matter how much you subdivide, you can
always subdivide more. We have something for women, but do we have something for single
women? Well, we have some but some moms are working moms, and
some moms are stay at home moms, and the diff the times for
(10:23):
them would be better or different. We need something for men. We need
something for men. What about men who are retired? Men who are working? What are
we what about people who you you the more that you start to
the more affinities you look for, the more affinities you'll find. And
when you start chasing that route, you don't
win. And what happens is
(10:45):
people start to not understand where it is that you want for me to connect.
And some people will just say, well, you're just, this is just a simple church,
you know, I've I've read that book. But that's not quite right, and I'm not
criticizing simple church, but
the point isn't, well, just do fewer things. That isn't
even the point either. It's about speaking clearly
(11:07):
about what we are doing so that people know what
their next best step is. How should I
engage? How do you want for me to engage? So even if we do have
a variety of of meeting times or options
or places, we're not communicating in a way that makes it
makes it look like a buffet. And instead, they are
(11:29):
there's there's slots of options for me to engage
with that fit within a framework of a clear discipleship pathway.
Hopefully, this will make more and more sense as we kinda move through the points,
but the first key point that we're trying to make here is we need to
shift our thinking from program oriented
thinking, we need to have something for everyone, to process
(11:51):
oriented thinking. We need to have a pathway that moves people forward in
discipleship that includes everyone. So that's the first key point,
and then I think hopefully this will make more sense as we move through. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's just keep going. So our second point is combining
ministries into a primary pathway. So which
I'll it's already a presenter. What? What does that mean? We speak of
(12:12):
having three to five steps in a discipleship pathway in
the church. And there's there's order and significance
to what these steps would accomplish. And generally
speaking, there's there's a gathering. There's like your Sunday worship
service. There's a large group gathering. There's a step for
growth, increasing in maturity, and fellowshipping with
(12:34):
believers. We would call this a growth step. There's a service
step in which we're intentionally engaging people in the work of the
ministry, in the church, introducing them to to
concepts that they may not even be familiar with and spiritual gifts
and temperament, personality types to help them find how
God has created them for work in his kingdom. And
(12:56):
outreach. Getting outside of the church to to bring the gospel to people
and to meet the needs in the local area and around the
world. And so we've got an order to this in
engaging with other believers as the body of
Christ, supporting one another, supporting the church, living out
our faith in the world, and of course also starting with
(13:18):
giving praise and worship to God. But we have to then be able to start
to put some words or names to these functions
within the framework of the pathway. And so we have to
have a primary thing in each of these spaces or
steps along the pathway. We have to be able to direct people to something
concrete that we can say, here's what we've developed at our church.
(13:40):
This is gonna be the greatest use of your time to engage
in these things. We call those primary ministries. And we work through a series of
tools, when we're working with the church, and that are described in
the strategic envisioning training course on the Healthy Church Toolkit to be able
to to develop these and to organize them. Again, as Scott just
said, clarity is what we're going for. We wanna be able to communicate in a
(14:03):
very simple way, a few simple things
for people to engage in. So the development of of
primary ministries within the pathway is key to that.
Yeah. So imagine I asked you to sort of
describe for me what a disciple
is or what a disciple looks like, what does a mature
(14:26):
Christian look like, you probably
wouldn't start with describing the things which
he or she attends. You maybe wouldn't begin
by saying, oh, a disciple is someone who they're at church every Sunday,
and they also attend a a mature disciple
is someone who attends a men's Bible study at 6AM on Thursdays.
(14:49):
Those those might be programs that they attend, but that's not the
image of what a disciple is. If I just asked you in the abstract,
I said, describe to me what a disciple looks like. You probably say,
a disciple is someone who worships the Lord with their whole life.
They have a really active prayer life. They're sharing their faith outside the
walls of the church. They're studying God's word, and they have deep
(15:13):
spiritual friendships. That's probably what that would look like.
So then I would have to turn to you and say, well, how are we
cultivating that kind of
behavior or that kind of maturity inside of a
person at your church? What is it that we're doing
that helps to bring about that level of maturity in each
(15:34):
person? Mhmm. Now we have a framework for thinking about what a
program is, and the problem is that we often don't
start there. We go, okay. We're a church. We need to have
things that we do. Rather than go, we're a church.
We have we have people we're trying to develop into something.
And when you so that was the first shift that we're trying to talk about.
(15:57):
So then when we talk about a primary ministry, we go, okay. A primary
ministry is merely the primary or environment
where we're trying to develop some aspect of discipleship.
So as you talked as AJ talked about, we have these different steps in a
discipleship pathway, and in each step, we're trying to cultivate some different
element of mature discipleship. And we don't want anyone to
(16:20):
get stuck in any one of these steps because we want them to grow
to a deeper level of maturity. And when it comes to discipleship
ministries, this is often where we're talking about some sort of
edification or Christian maturity or what we
often just call generally discipleship, although we would argue
discipleship's a bigger vantage point than just this. But we're trying to
(16:42):
cultivate community and fellowship and a love for God's
word and a deep prayer life for one another in this step.
If you have so many programs going on,
they all kinda tackle things from a different perspective. It's
possible for a person to engage in some or all of these things and not
actually come become mature.
(17:04):
Mhmm. And the point of a primary ministry is to optimize this thing and
say, we're going to try to create one environment that if we could
get everybody in our church to engage in this environment, it
positions them best to cultivate this kind
of thing, a love for God's word, deep spiritual
friendship, a healthy prayer life, and so on. And and so
(17:26):
it's sort of that relentless commitment to saying no to other things so that we
can say, let's put all of these things together so people will engage
in this one thing which has best positioned them to to
grow in maturity. So you can do that by combining a bunch of things
into into one bucket. You could say, alright. We have Sunday school classes, and
we have small groups, and we have these bible studies, but they're all kind of
(17:47):
the same thing. So rather than trying to divert a bunch of attention,
let's create some shared DNA and some shared language
to maximize clarity while maintaining
the most amount of time slots available and options for
people to engage. Yeah. Let's refine this
one program a little bit so that it it's optimized for this.
(18:10):
But we are committed to the process and the outcome, not the program.
So if the program becomes ineffective, we can ditch the program
and come up with something else. But the because the program is merely a means
to accomplish the maturity. It isn't the end itself.
Yeah. I think too many people underestimate the power of clarity
because all of these things because, I mean, I think people could have listened to
(18:33):
a lot of what you just said, Scott, and go, yeah. Yeah. We agree. We
agree. And that's why we've got 18 groups, and we got 19 classes to choose
from. You know, that's why we've got so much stuff because, yeah, we we
wanna have that same thing. And I think you underestimate the
the negative impact that overwhelm has
on people when you cannot speak clearly about outcomes
(18:54):
and benefits to people's lives wanting with a desire
to mature in the faith. And instead just being overwhelmed by
the stuff. Like, oh my gosh, there's just too much. And
if if it feels like I'm gonna have to be at church every night of
the week to try to piece this together, then
basic you know, the the unspoken answer
(19:17):
to your invitation is going to be no. I'm just not gonna do
I'll go a step further. I think that most churches
overestimate the quality of a lot of their programs.
That's true too. So many, there's no reasonable
way for a church to do good quality control
(19:37):
on the number of programs they have going on. Whereas if
you, one, condense things into a clearer
format, where you have a a clearly defined primary
ministry, which you can hold to a high standard and
ensure a high level of quality control, and two, build your
leadership pipeline around that primary ministry so
(19:59):
that you ensure levels of accountability all the way down and up.
Then you can really make sure that the thing that it's supposed to accomplish, the
maturity it's supposed to develop, it's actually developing. I I'm a
% convinced, and I know this because we've worked with hundreds of
churches at this point, and I've we've taken them
through our discipleship pathway workshops.
(20:22):
And without fail, there's all kinds of programs that churches are doing that
when you start measuring their discipleship output,
not their attendance, but the actual maturity that they are producing,
it's quite low. And it's a little bit of a wake up call for a
lot of churches to go, oh man, we are spending a lot of resources and
time and attention on something that
(20:46):
might be well attended but isn't producing much spiritual fruit.
Yeah. And so often, you know, the churches that have just got a
ton going on, or even if they have, you know, even in groups, they're all
in on groups no matter what format they might take. Often, they
don't have a format. And so they just have this huge collection.
And if you ask them to describe, like, okay, well, what do groups look like
(21:08):
at your church? Well, it depends on the group. And then they start to describe,
well, some do this and some do that and some are more like that and
some are this, you know, this, particular niche or
others. And you have to take a step back and just
think for a minute. If a new person comes to my church and they
wanna get engaged, how am I going to communicate that
(21:29):
to them? You know? Like, oh, let me do they need to fill out a
questionnaire to figure out what which of our groups might you be a good
fit for? Or would you, as a leader, like to be able to have
something in place in which you can confidently know no
matter what group they go to, they're going to get the
same experience barring personality
(21:50):
differences. But generally speaking, they're gonna get the same experience with the same
discipleship outcomes no matter where they go. I tell you what, I
would sleep much better at night as a leader or pastor
knowing I know this person is gonna do great here instead of,
like, boy, if they end up over there in Jim's
group, I just don't know if that's gonna be a good fit or, you know,
(22:11):
this one over there. I think this is how we should want
to serve people and especially new people getting engaged.
And this isn't exactly the same thing, but, you know, I feel this way, say,
about, like, our strategic envisioning process and our
guides. While certainly maybe one one of our guides
might be a better fit based on geography or, you know,
(22:33):
theological background and experiences or personality
fit, certainly those things play some
role. But I feel confident that
any church can engage with any of our guides
and have a great experience because I trust our process. Yeah.
Our process is tried and true. The workshops are reliable. We've
(22:55):
done them so many times now, you know, with different kinds of
churches that I know that they're gonna have a good
experience. And Mhmm. And I've taken out to some to the degree that I
can, I've removed the variable of, well, how good is this person?
Again, that's why we train our guides. By the way. You can go to
malphorsgroup.com/certification if you have interested in learning that process.
(23:17):
I don't want to say that your guide doesn't make the experience, because
definitely it does. I hope you know what I'm saying. I I just I trust
we vet our guides and we train our guides, but also I
trust the process, and I know the process is effective. And what you're trying
to remove in the group's context is the
singular variable of who the teacher is. Obviously, some of your teachers
(23:40):
are gonna be or group leaders are gonna be better than others or more experienced
than others, and that's gonna make a difference. But if you have a really good
system for groups and they're designed to work and
function in a particular way, you minimize that variable to a
large degree, not entirely, so that you can
ensure that no matter what group someone attends, they're gonna they're going to
(24:01):
grow as a disciple, and that's what you want. Yeah. I mean, you know, to
to make maybe not one for one correlation, and I don't mean to denigrate
and go, it doesn't matter. Our guides are all the same because that's not true.
But it yeah. I don't know. There's limits to the analogy, I suppose.
Well, yeah. Sure. Yeah. No. I think I think the point comes across. I mean,
yeah. Whenever yeah. When they're all trained to do the same thing the same
(24:24):
way, then for the most part, the experience is
going to be similar no matter no matter who it is. But, yeah, I mean,
you know, so many churches, you've you've got a bunch of groups, and
you can almost always predict. They're like, yeah. Well, that one is you know,
they're super heavy bible study. You know? It's like, this is like kinda like
this theological intellectual group. These guys over here, it's mostly fellowship.
(24:47):
So some of our groups are felt more fellowship oriented and some are more bible
study oriented. Well right there, okay, you've already now I
mean play this out in your mind. Okay, I pick the fellowship group.
Great fellowship, great relationships. Couldn't couldn't find
first Corinthians to save my life. But man, I've got some great
friends at church. Or the opposite. My, you know,
(25:09):
I am just deep, deep in the word. And if,
you know, if I got in a car accident, I don't know who I would
call. So you have to almost kinda play out some extremes
because otherwise you're you're you're not saying it, but
you're telling people you might wanna be in about three groups to try to cover
all of your bases depending on what your bases yeah.
(25:31):
Yeah. Yeah. Do we even know what the basis are? Oh, that's good. Have we
established this? This may be a good transition, though, to this third point, which is
to go, okay. Well, if we're not kind of just
making a melting pot of everything we do, then that maybe
doesn't make sense. You can merge and combine some things together into a
primary ministry and refine them and try to optimize the DNA so it's
(25:52):
consistent and all those things we just talked about, but that's not gonna work for
every ministry. So then what do you do with those things? What can we
those things that can't be combined, what do we do with them? And
so there's a couple of things you can do with them. The first is that
you can align them, and the second thing is that you can sunset
them. So the things that we say align, these are things that
(26:14):
we would call secondary ministries. These are these are ministries
that you do that are connected to the
primary ministry, but in a way that you don't expect every
person necessarily to engage with them. So typically,
they function in one of two ways. One, it could be an on ramp. So
it's a short term thing that we do in order to get someone
(26:36):
plugged into the primary thing. It's an event or it's
a shorter run program, something like that that helps
someone get plugged into the thing that you want them to be engaged in
for the long term. The second kind of secondary ministry
is something that I call a step beyond, or you might think of it like
a deep dive. It is it is a deeper level of commitment
(26:57):
or engagement than you might expect the average person to
have the time or energy to commit to. So maybe
you like a mentorship program. Maybe you would love for
everyone to be engaged in one on one discipleship or triads
or mentorship or whatever, but that's not realistic for
everybody. So you have that available, but as sort of
(27:20):
a a higher degree of engagement than
you have as an expectation for everyone. So that would be
secondary ministries, and then of course you can sunset things. Some things you don't
have to, this is something that, I think we talked about this maybe in last
week's episode with Adam. I don't remember. I I
heard this from him though maybe even in the first episode we recorded with
(27:41):
him a long time ago. This idea of
mowing around the stump, like, you have some things that are are ministries
that you're not necessarily going to continue to to
grow or or gonna continue to function, but you don't have to rip out the
whole stump, you know, and ruin the yard. You can just mill around the stump,
and that's true. You can you can sort of sunset some things and go,
(28:03):
alright. The this ministry doesn't have to go away, but we
don't have to be promoting it either. It can kinda just exist,
and when it eventually goes away on its own,
and that's okay too. So I just said a bunch of words. AJ, I don't
know what you wanna say about secondary ministries and sunsetting ministries.
Yeah. I mean, this this is the hard part right here. I mean, this is
(28:26):
this is where some serious decisions end up having to be made, and it
takes some fortitude and leadership to work through
these things to make sure that people see the value and
understand why these decisions are being made. Obviously, the
sunset the sunsetting of ministries is the most
sensitive because people get emotionally attached to things.
(28:47):
Sometimes. Not always. Not always. But yeah. And then also
not allowing secondary ministries to become just a new catch
for your bloat. Like, alright. We don't really wanna get
rid of anything, so we're gonna call it a secondary ministry.
So again, you know, I mean, all of this takes intentionality.
And it has it has to be permeated
(29:10):
with a desire for a better future.
And we, Scott, I, our guides, we never come in with
any any authority or ability to twist your arm.
Or an agenda. Yeah. Gotta get rid of this. Oh, this is for your
church to be healthy and and hopefully produce, more and better disciples. Yeah. You know,
I mean, it this this is just the tough part of the process. This is
(29:31):
where most of the work goes in in the planning phase anyway, not in implementation.
But, yeah, making sense, having strategic
secondary ministries and, of course, primary ministries, and then
making some tough decisions in love and with information
clarity. That's that's where that has to happen. Yeah. This is the necessary
tough work. This past weekend, we often use the analogy
(29:55):
of cleaning out a garage Or a closet. Yeah. Cleaning
anything out. And, actually cleaned out my
garage this past weekend and, did did what you have to do, which
is everything has to come out. You can't go little bit by little bit.
You've gotta get everything out. Because you can't organize everything. I mean, if you if
you just go piece by piece, you can't really organize.
(30:17):
So you gotta get it all out of there. And, I was going through this,
and we have some wreaths that we we have hung up in the
garage because we cycle them through seasonally. You
get the spring wreath and the The spring wreath. Yeah. The
fall. The fall one. The Christmas wreath. We've got hooks for them in
our in our on the wall, in the back of our garage. I mean, cycle
(30:38):
through. We had, one of the wreaths that was hanging up in there and it
was really big is a wreath from our wedding. It was,
you know, had like fake fake flowers. No, it was decoration
used at the wedding decoration used at our wedding.
Yes. Boy, that sounds like, that's, that's going in the trash. If in
AJ's house that was be ready for the trash. So
(31:00):
it's obviously well, wow. You are You didn't get married
last year. You're a charmer. AJ. You know that?
You've been married a few years now. Yeah. Almost
twenty. So we we both kinda looked
we we've not it is it's something that we have used as a decoration
in the past. Okay. It's not it's not single
(31:23):
dimensional. It can it's an appropriate decoration for another time
besides a wedding? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I
thought you're I mean, I'm picturing something with wedding bells and white streamers and stuff.
No. No. No. No. No. It's like, it's fake flowers, obviously, because real flowers would
have rotted. It's it's a wreath. Like, it's a wreath like you might buy. Yeah.
We use them like a wedding wreath or something. It's a wreath that
(31:45):
we you that we had, and we had several of them. They were on windows
all throughout the the church. Okay. And some family kept one,
we we kept one, so on. And we've used it as
decor in the past Gotcha. On occasion, but we haven't hung it
out in years, because we have other things that are newer that we
like better. But we kinda had to look at each other like, what are we
(32:06):
doing with this thing? She's like, do you care if we get rid of this
wreath? And I was like, I don't care if we get rid of this wreath.
And so we I love those conversations, especially when we we agree.
Those are awesome. I think we were both maybe a little bit afraid of, like,
this is from our wedding. Like, is what does this mean for us to part
ways Yeah. With this wreath? You know?
(32:27):
And we decided we're gonna attempt to sell it because it's it's it's in
good shape. Like, someone might want it you don't look
at it and go from a wedding. It's a I I think
you have something in your mind of, like, what it's No. You no. You I
did it first. No. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It's it's just a A sellable?
A twenty year old sellable. You think there's it's got value
(32:50):
on the secondary market? A buck. Okay. Two in
a yard sale. Someone goes, oh, I love those colors. Yeah.
It's kind of in a sort of summery springy. It's
pretty. There's no it's not ugly. It's pretty. It's just not something that
we wanna hang out on our house anymore. Yeah.
The point is not about the wreath. The point is that
(33:13):
you can have things like this that are going on in your church that have
been around for twenty years. Yeah. And people are afraid to say, is
this something that we can get rid of now? Do we have to have this?
And no one we were never gonna touch
that wreath until we cleaned out the garage. Mhmm.
I wasn't gonna just go in there one day and take it down. Neither
(33:34):
was she. But we're here we were in this moment cleaning out the
garage. That's what she wanted for Mother's Day was, can we clean the
garage? So we're out there for hours cleaning the garage, and
we had a built in opportunity. And that's why strategic envisioning,
you know, having these opportunities, built in
opportunities to ask questions you wouldn't normally are so important because not
(33:57):
only are you able to get clarity around what matters most, you're also able to
maybe let go of some things that it's past time to kinda just go. We
don't need this. Yeah. Boy, it feels good getting rid of
stuff. Man, I love throwing stuff away. Me and Erica got to a new point
in our relationship in the last year, so we both love to throw stuff away.
It's I'm I'm happy with getting rid of stuff. Shit. Stuff.
(34:17):
Yes. But, generally, if it's something like from our wedding,
neither one of us is gonna make that decision unilaterally. You're gonna have a
conversation. Yeah. Yeah. The wedding album We can
keep keeper. You can keep the wedding album. Pictures I have a t shirt I
have a t shirt that kinda fits that I
wore when we left and when we pulled out Okay. Yeah. From the
(34:39):
from the church? Yeah. This says just married? Mister?
Oh, you got a just married. It's a it's a life is dead shirt that
says just married. Yeah. I'm not getting rid of it. It
doesn't take up much room in my drawer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've, yeah. Everybody should
have their space for their little personal keepsake things. I got I got t
shirts. I got, yeah, t shirts from past days.
(35:00):
Yeah. And there's so I guess I would say in the analogy, there's place for
that kind of thing in church. Should we go, you know what? The juice isn't
worth worth the squeeze. We don't need to get rid of this. It's okay.
Yeah. But the reality with the
wreath, if man, I'm really making stretching this analogy
out, is we had more wreaths than we had hooks.
(35:22):
We needed to clear out some wreaths. You established a pathway. There wasn't room for
everything. There wasn't room for it. You had to evaluate and keep
the most valuable things. So I can keep this shirt because it I had plenty
of room in the drawer, but I can't keep the wreath because I don't have
enough hooks. So the wreath's gotta go. That's good. How dusty is
that wreath? Keep it in the garage. It's not in the bag. I don't I
(35:43):
don't know what it is that you think how I live, but my Garbage are
dusty anyway. It's it's It was fine. Giant door open to the outside.
But it's not open most of the time. It's closed. I mean, I guess it
was it's in the back it was in the back of the garage. I don't
know. It was, I guess, a little dusty. Not that bad. Put the wreath in
it. Put it in the bag. You can still hang it. Put a bag over
it and hang it back up. Just keep it nice. Oh, good grief. Some of
(36:04):
our wreaths are in a bag. Alright. The ones that have, frocking flocking. The
the have the fake snow? Yeah. Christmas, flocked wreaths. Those are in a
bag. Yeah. Wow.
People really care about hearing this. This is some riveting podcast content right here.
Let's talk more about Too deep talking about reads. Yep. Cash. That's good
stuff. Alright. Let's, put a fine point on this. Okay. People won't engage here's a
(36:26):
recap. People won't engage in what they don't understand. And a lot of
you have a lot of stuff going on in your churches, and there's not a
lot of structure to it, and some of it isn't very good. And so you
need to take some intentional time to streamline your
ministries, take the principles that we've applied here, go to
HealthyChurchesToolkit.com, watch the strategic envisioning
(36:48):
training, contact us and get a guide to help you if you feel like you
need some extra help, and so we can walk you through the workshops, the strategic
envisioning workshops. And take the time to sort out your
ministry garage because there's stuff that needs to be cleaned
out that hasn't, there's stuff that needs to be reorganized that's
disorganized, and there are conversations that need to be had that you're
(37:09):
avoiding. And and so please go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com, get a trial for seven days,
join us for the workshop that's coming up tomorrow as this is
releasing, and, jump start your
discipleship growth in your church. It's possible. Yeah. There you go.
There's links below either in your podcast app for
(37:29):
this episode or on YouTube if you're watching and
enjoying the video podcast. Links below for
this week's article and for, yeah, jumping onto Healthy Churches
toolkit or Healthy Churches Global for our
outside North America friends around the world. We're so
glad you guys are with us. We'll be back again next week with
(37:52):
something great. It's gonna be great, Scott. Next week
is really gonna be good. Yeah, you'll have to tune in to find out what
it is.
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