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. do not understand how quickly persecution can begin for seekers and new believers coming out of the Islamic context. I have witnessed this first hand and have had teams I supervise experience this here in the US as they tried to meet 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. Longer term discipleship is, in a perfect world, the best thing to do 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 has been trained to begin immediate discipleship with the new convert. They usually have the lessons on an SD card so that they can be left with the new believer. I suggest using a micro SD card because it is the easiest thing 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 new 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 which were the things they felt the new believer needs to know to survive until they find more teaching. These lessons must be simple and easily “caught” by the new believer. Topics often include prayer, Christian view of God, role of the Holy Spirit, security of the believer in Christ, how to respond to persecution, importance of the Bible, and whatever else the team believes is foundational. Trusting the Holy Spirit to lead the new believer (and us) through this 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” begins to be incorporated into those meetings. Also the earliest and simplest forms of leadership development begins here. This is where we begin practicing the MAWL method of developing leaders. You may have to fight against that urge to “be the one in front” all the time. As the group meets and is discipled, they learn about praise and worship and having times of thanksgiving to God. The leadership of various aspects of the meeting time is also passed around from person to person so that many (if not all of them) learn how to participate in leading a group. You can find various resources for leading small groups and transitioning them to being a church. The simplest outline is something like this:
1. Fellowship/welcoming time
2. Worship with song and prayer
3. Review the last story/lesson and accountability time
4. Introduce and learn a new story/lesson
5. Discuss how we will use this new story/lesson and who we will share it with
6. Ending prayer time
The literacy levels of your group members will be a determining factor in how you conduct these meetings. If their literacy rates are very low, then almost everything must be done in an oral format. Most people I have 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 will eventually cover the Biblical characteristics of a New Testament style church. If the members of your group are practicing those things then they should reach a point where they realize that they are a church body. As that happens, hopefully they will have appointed their own leaders (and you have been training them and allowing them to lead), and have already been moving forward in starting other small groups of believers that will become churches. Holding them accountable to tell others during your discipleship lessons is key to this happening. Not all will start their own groups but hopefully some will and the work will spread.
Be careful not to insist that the new “church” must have a building. This should be their decision only as they are 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 with seeing a small movement begin, please refrain from visiting all those “downstream” groups. Your very presence there can lead to issues developing which can cripple the work. Stay in the original groups and trust those leaders to pass the teachings down through the movement.
A good resource to help you here is: https://www.frontierventures.org/mission-frontiers/many-small-victories-whats-really-happening-in-movements
If you do not speak the language of your people group well and you are looking for some materials in their language, you might try this website. We have used it often in West African work.
Next Post: Leadership Development and Exiting the Work
