The Basics of Adopting an Unreached People Group and Carrying the Gospel to Them | pt. 4
“Discipleship and Church Formation“
Focus group: church members and pastors
This is the fourth in a series of articles which are being written to show you how to effectively engage an unreached people.
By Clint B.
Whenever I lead training for churches or teams on adopting an unreached people group, I often find that many people living here in the U.S. don’t understand how quickly persecution can begin for seekers and new believers coming out of an Islamic context. I’ve witnessed this firsthand, and teams I supervise have experienced it here in the U.S. as they’ve tried to meet with new believers and begin discipleship.
Due to personal experiences, several years ago I wrote an article titled Discipleship in a Hurry. It angered a few of our older missionaries serving with me in Sub-Saharan Africa because they had a long-term discipleship mindset. In a perfect world, longer-term discipleship is the best approach with a new believer. But in persecution contexts, we often don’t have that option.
To be properly prepared for discipling new believers, we train seed-sowing teams to go in with a small set of discipleship lessons and at least one team member who is trained to begin immediate discipleship with the new convert. These lessons are usually stored on an SD card that can be left with the new believer. I suggest using a micro SD card because it’s the easiest to hide or get rid of if the need arises. The discipler introduces the new believer to the lessons, explains how to use them, and walks through the first one together.
What do the lessons cover? Good question! Before beginning this work, the team decides what those first lessons will be. We train missionaries to develop a “top ten” set of lessons they feel a new believer needs to know in order to survive until they can find more teaching. These lessons must be simple and easily “caught” by the new believer. Topics often include prayer, the Christian view of God, the role of the Holy Spirit, the security of the believer in Christ, how to respond to persecution, the importance of the Bible, and whatever else the team believes is foundational. Trusting the Holy Spirit to lead both the new believer and us through this process is hugely important. If the team is able to maintain access to the new believer, these lessons serve as a foundation for ongoing discipleship.
Transitioning from Small Group to Church
As believers are gathered for discipleship, the basics of “doing church” begin to be incorporated into those meetings. The earliest and simplest forms of leadership development also begin here. This is where we start practicing the MAWL method of developing leaders. You may have to fight the urge to always “be the one in front.” As the group meets and is discipled, they learn about praise and worship and taking time to thank God. Leadership of different parts of the meeting is shared among the group so that many (if not all) learn how to lead.
There are plenty of resources for leading small groups and transitioning them into churches. A simple format might look like this:
- Fellowship/welcoming time
- Worship with song and prayer
- Review the last story/lesson and accountability time
- Introduce and learn a new story/lesson
- Discuss how to use the new story/lesson and who we will share it with
- Ending prayer time
The literacy levels of your group members will influence how you conduct meetings. If literacy is low, you’ll need to rely heavily on oral methods. Most people I’ve worked with in Africa are from orality-based societies, and Bible storying has been very successful in those cultures.
As you move through discipleship lessons, you’ll eventually cover the biblical characteristics of a New Testament-style church. If group members begin practicing these, they will reach a point where they recognize that they are a church body. By that time, hopefully they’ve chosen their own leaders (whom you’ve been training and allowing to lead) and are already starting other small groups of believers that can become churches. Holding them accountable during discipleship to share with others is key. Not everyone will start a new group, but some will—and the work will spread.
Be careful not to insist that the new church must have a building. That decision should be theirs, led by the Holy Spirit. Experience shows that when groups meet in house-church style gatherings, their energy goes into worship, ministry, and reproduction. When they start focusing on a building, the energy shifts inward—and the church can become crippled.
Final Note
If you are blessed to see a small movement begin, please don’t start visiting all the “downstream” groups. Your presence alone can lead to problems that cripple the work. Stay with the original group and trust their leaders to pass down the teaching through the movement.
A helpful resource for this: Many Small Victories: What’s Really Happening in Movements
If you don’t speak the language of your people group well and need materials in their language, try this site. We’ve used it often in West Africa:
https://www.globalrecordings.net/en/
Next Post: Leadership Development and Exiting the Work
