On Tuesday 22nd November we held our final session of The Living Room for 2022.

Libby Leach and Tori Handel from Harbourside Presbyterian graciously shared their thinking about “Growing Disciples of Jesus”. The thing that strikes me about their presentation (watch it here!) is the broad and insightful approach they take. They begin with Matthew 4, where Jesus calls his first disciples and from the very start, connects following him with being a disciple maker (“Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of people!). From there, they show us how to build a culture of discipleship in your church. In careful detail they take us through the steps their own church took in this process; from creating a shared a vision among the leadership, to modelling, training, building confidence and celebrating. They share videos of people from their church sharing their own experiences of being discipled and being disciplers. We hear the ways this can be done creatively and with a sense of fun. Tori and Libby also share some of the challenges and difficulties that arise and how to avoid potential pitfalls, ensuring this ministry is one that multiplies and lasts the distance. I hope you enjoy watching this session. There’s loads of great ideas in here!

Tori and Libby have also generously provided resources for us to use. Here’s what they have to say about them:

We hope these documents are helpful. We've included Two modules from the GROW course (our leadership training course). One is the Introductory Module which will give you some context for the GROW course on the whole (including the importance of discipleship within the programme), and the other is the actual Discipleship Module.

We’ve also given you the training module that each of our growth groups did over 2 sessions. Apologies for the less-rigorous approach to citations etc. as it was an internal document so we worried less about citing all our sources. Our instructions for our growth groups leaders, who each ran the workshop in their own group, were as follows:

It's up to you how you teach it, but my recommendation would be to get the members of the group to do some hands-on activities in each of the 2 sessions, and to encourage them to pray and start making plans for how to be involved in discipleship. Maybe Week 1 doing (in pairs) a look back-look up-look forward time combined with a brief Swedish method on a few verses of your choice, and then in Week 2 doing the Short Steps discussion on Assurance in pairs. Each time we give people some hands-on experience, we want to also give them the opportunity to feed back to each other and the wider group what they found good about that experience. The training module is really designed to talk through with people where they are at with discipling, and help them move forward.