The Importance of Discipleship to Community Groups

Community groups, incarnational communities, fellowship groups, mission groups--a rose by any other name, as it were, but whatever we choose to call them, they're central to the implementation of a missional/incarnational church.  But they can also pose a real challenge, especially for a traditional congregation transitioning to a missional/incarnational congregation.

Partly it's that DNA thing again.  New churches, starting from scratch, and especially if they're reaching out to the unchurched, can make community groups part of who and what they are from the proverbial get-go.  Living your walk with the Lord in a community group is just part of what it means to do and be church.

But, for traditional churches especially, it's also about baggage.  People in traditional congregations hear "community groups," they think "small groups."  Small group ministries of various stripes have been church staples for decades.  For many people, their experience of small groups was positive; for just as many, however, the experience was something else...a weekly commitment to forced intimacy that made them profoundly uncomfortable.  The idea of yet another small group experience...no thanks..been there, done that.

And there is the matter of time.  Being in a community group is just one more thing to have to make time for in a schedule already begging for mercy.

We're very mindful of all this as we gear up to launch our first community groups.  And because we are, we've come to the conclusion that the success of our community groups hinges on us first emphasizing the importance of discipleship.  We're certainly not alone in this.  Mike Breen, among others, has argued that apart from a discipleship process, community groups and missional/incarnational church are doomed to failure.  The key, we believe, is in educating our congregation that Christian discipleship, rightly understood, is naturally lived out in a community group.  Such groups, in fact, are the best expression of living life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.  This is not pedagogical slight-of-hand, either.  The Scriptural, theological, and ecclesiastical basis for such an approach is sound.

Further, it's not about forced intimacy.  It's about living your life with others. Appropriate levels of intimacy may naturally develop as a result, but there is no performance expectation as far as intimacy is concerned.  Besides, we're all already living our lives with groups of people anyway.  It's a matter of doing so with some intentionality because that's where our discipleship to Jesus and the work of the Kingdom leads us.

So, we're really working on ways to explain, explore, and emphasize discipleship as a necessary foundation for launching our community groups.  In the coming weeks and months, I'll document what we discover.    

In the meantime, we're interested in hearing about your experience.  How have you defined discipleship vis-a-vis community groups?  What role does discipleship training play in involving people in community groups?