The Failure of Alignment
Well-meaning churches can’t establish a disciple making culture if people aren’t in sync. A failure of alignment has doomed many initiatives to the program graveyard.
In my prodigious history of learning the hard way, I crashed a discipleship program before it even started. The COVID pandemic had just hit, and everyone, especially the pastor, was caught flatfooted. But a fellow staff member and I had this clever idea to use the crisis for a micro-church experiment, where we could temporarily subdivide the church into regional “hubs” of ~20 people, meeting our state’s limit for gatherings. The pastor would pre-record the sermon and an elder would lead each hub. We’d meet in homes and offices and barns. There would be personal discipleship and accountability in the new format. Two of us drafted the documents, then called each of the elders and deacons one by one to gather support. The problem? We called the pastor last. He was categorically opposed to “breaking up the church.” One by one, he called all the same elders and deacons and convinced them to kill the program. Talk about awkward.
Alignment is imperative when taking on something as big as discipleship. Our efforts are paralyzed when, inside the congregation, there isn’t alignment between pastor, consistory, and members. And in the bigger picture, the Alliance of Reformed Churches will struggle along unless it manages to line up congregation, network, and denomination.
THE MISALIGNED CONGREGATION
“Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!” (Psa 133:1, ESV). And how nasty and unpleasant when they don’t. I heard from various leaders a litany of disappointments about promising discipleship ideas being chopped into pieces. Sometimes, like with my pandemic micro-church experiment, the pastor was left out of the process and refused to support it. Other times the elders or deacons weren’t informed along the way, which led to them playing defense. Still other times, the actual needs of actual members and attenders weren’t considered in the equation, resulting in people voting with their feet.
Plans come from exploratory leaders, but pastors I spoke to told cautionary stories about getting too far ahead of the crowd. Stories abounded of solid discipleship plans that weren't joined to patient articulation and crowdsourced strategies. The vision part was easy; garnering enthusiasm was not. Leaders’ frustration with this is reflected in Barna’s finding: where only 20% said the roadblock was their “difficulty casting a vision for discipleship,” 72% of pastors said the discipleship roadblock was “people not making it a priority in their life.”
The problem of alignment could be especially noticeable in larger churches with multiple staff. One pastor explained to me how one congregation he worked with struggled on account of too many discipleship plans put forward simultaneously or in rapid succession. “Everything was siloed so badly among the staff,” he said. “We were all pointing to Jesus, but we were getting there from different directions.”
For some churches, I found that elders were not properly informed or involved along the way. A fully-formed discipleship initiative would land on the consistory agenda. Staff persons were looking for a rubber stamp, not discussion and co-design. Either elders would passively sign off, or grow leery and then hamstring the idea, if only to slow it down.
“Selling” the whole congregation on the discipleship effort could be a particular point of tension. It took enormous effort to communicate a discipleship initiative, and then there was no guarantee that members and attenders would make time. Getting people to invest in dedicated discipling relationships seemed especially difficult to implement.
Yet this was a point where the national statistics told a different story. In a 2022 study supported by The Navigators, a whopping 88% of Christians said that having a discipling relationship in their life was important. While rank and file Christians weren’t making other disciples, it wasn’t because they didn’t have the bandwidth to do so. Rather, they were most likely to give the reason, “I don’t think I am qualified” or “No one has ever suggested it.” In other words, congregants expressed a surprising amount of readiness to jump into a high-investment, high-impact form of discipleship.
One statement has stuck with me. A lay leader named Scott was sharing how he had stepped up to the role of a disciple maker. What was the game changer for him? His answer: “Someone finally asked.” His pastor dared to call him out, to call him up. By name.
New discipleship initiatives have been failing, then, because of poor alignment. Pastors and staff and elders and deacons and rank-and-file members aren’t coordinated. Communication is inadequate. Efforts are compartmentalized. Timing is rushed. The problem isn’t necessarily willingness, but the challenge of getting everyone on the same page.
THE MISALIGNED FAMILY OF CHURCHES
In the background was another misalignment that hobbled discipleship designs. Congregations tried to do things apart from their networks, which in turn were pursuing discipleship initiatives that were out of step with the larger denomination. It could take a lot of coordination to get a discipleship movement, especially when “every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Jdg 21:25, KJV)! Alliance leaders I spoke with weren’t necessarily bitter about past misalignments, but expressed frustration with a lack of unity.
Sometimes misalignment took the form of a “top-down” push that missed the churches. A denominational office failed to get a broad spectrum of stakeholders in its planning, or they neglected the things that were actually working at the congregational level. As one leader told me, it felt to her like churches were regularly being asked to sign on to the denomination’s latest “pet project.” Even when there were committees in play, “The denominational heads weren’t necessarily listening unless you were in ‘the club,’” she said.
Accordingly, congregations haven’t always appreciated, or even understand, what they were signing up for. “At times the buy-in from the grassroots was insufficient to meet the vision,” Ben Ingebretson wisely put it.
Other times the “bottom-up” push meant that churches were alienated from the networks and denomination. Local leaders could be skeptical of any idea that wasn’t their own. In maintaining their independence, they missed important resources and support. It was expensive to design a discipleship system from scratch, since there was a kind of invisible "custom content" tax. Even when there was a successful blueprint designed and deployed, the system couldn’t “talk” to other churches’ systems.
A joint study concluded that 32% of churches in America have achieved a disciple making culture, at least to a degree. That means that there are plenty of congregations that have established patterns where disciples are making other disciples. But what good is it if their success is kept from the rest of the family?
HOPE FOR A UNIFIED DISCIPLESHIP EFFORT
So yeah, it’s been a relatively bleak study. Combing through the heap of discarded discipleship initiatives, I’ve come to realize that there are many points of failure when it comes to a disciple making culture. The failure of theology negates all our efforts with an unbiblical paradigm of add-on, passive discipleship. The failure of intentionality decimates fruitfulness by being unfocused and unmeasured. The failure of accountability punches holes in our discipline and job descriptions, sinking our initiatives. And the failure of intentionality leaves us lonely, with misaligned congregations and church family.
There have been brilliant points of light along the way, however. Reformed churches have had seasons of enormous fruitfulness. Some churches today, indeed Alliance churches, are seeing significant breakthroughs. A disciple making culture is coming together for them.
Just as importantly, I’m hearing a hunger for a discipleship framework, one that blesses disciples at every stage. “It would be huge if we had consensus about what discipleship looks like,” Jeff Atherton told me. Here’s where networks can be an enormous blessing, offering tools and support. Here’s where the Alliance can be an enormous blessing too, syncing up churches and offering a discipleship framework.
I’m genuinely thankful to be working with a denomination that is so passionate about following Jesus. Something fresh is afoot. It’s innovative, but it has deep origins. “It’s time to return to our roots, dig in, and do what Jesus truly called us to do,” said Greg Alderman, pointing to dynamic reformed practices of the past. “We’re here to make disciples – and nothing is a close second.”
