Our church is heading into a season of transition from a church-growth assimilation model to a missional multiplication model. We’re re-thinking everything. One of the main things that we’ve been working on is a new scorecard. How do we measure discipleship outcomes and not just church attendance? One of the main innovations we’ve been working on is just naming a dream disciple at Grace. What kind of disciples of Jesus do we need to produce in order to reach our region.
Now this conversation started through our work with Clarity House who helped us through a 9-month process of reshaping our church model. The first step of the process was looking at our “local predicament.” Our church is located in the Erie, PA region. So we asked, what are some of the issues that our Erie region is facing right now from a spiritual standpoint? And after a lot of conversation and investigation we summarized that Erie is plagued by some broken narratives. Those broken narratives express themselves in three identifiable ways:
There’s an insecurity about us that just isn’t warranted. Some of our city’s formal and informal slogans include. “It’s OK to love Erie,” and “The Mistake on the Lake,” and “Dreary Erie.” Do you hear the insecurity? It’s ironic because Erie is an amazing place to live. A small city with big city amenities. A beautiful lakefront. Incredible colleges, and businesses, and social services. People who move here from somewhere else usually see the benefits. People who are from here generally focus on the negative. Kids who grow up here think they need to get away from Erie to make something of themselves. This is a broken narrative.Change Resistant.
Erie is also change resistant. Any new initiative that tries to come through is an uphill fight the whole way. People are stuck in their ways and dig their heels in against most new things. National companies who are testing new products often use Erie as a test market. The phrase, “if it can work in Erie, it can work anywhere,” has become commonplace. And it all traces back to this change-resistant mindset. Some even suggest that we are fighting against a national ‘curse’ pronounced against our area after an 1850’s conflict called “Erie’s War of the Gauges,” (you can look it up) where the local government essentially refused the progress of an east to west railroad that needed to pass through Erie over the width of the gauges required. Horace Greely of the New York Herald wrote, “Let Erie be avoided until grass grows in her streets.” This is a broken narrative.Fractured.
Finally our community is fractured. There’s a disunity and territorialism that has come to define us. From churches, to businesses, to social agencies. There is racial fracturing and socio-economic fracturing. There are invisible lines drawn all over our region that people are not inclined to cross. This is another broken narrative.
I remind you what Jesus does with broken dysfunctional narratives… He redeems them. The gospel tells a better story. The gospel writes over brokenness with a story of healing and hope, a story of unity and restoration, a story of justice and mercy. And this is true not just of community narratives, but the story of each individual. Countless thousands could stand up and testify in our churches that their life is a trophy of God’s grace. Jesus takes stories of addiction and rewrites wholeness. He takes stories of anxiety and rewrites peace. He takes stories of sin and rewrites forgiveness. We want to be a church who partners with Jesus to rewrite the broken narratives all around us.
This idea of God’s story overcoming broken narratives has impacted our thinking about the future of our church. In fact, the new mission statement we have adopted says, we are a people who are following Jesus as we live out God’s story every day, everywhere. This is phrased in a way so it’s not just something that our staff does, or our elders, this is an all play everyday mission for every person in our church.
What does that look like in real life? One of the other innovations we’re exploring is the possibility of defining discipleship locally. Obviously, there are biblical mandates that all disciples of Jesus are required to embody. But we have grabbed ahold of the idea that we can put modern words around those requirements and then build out tools and resources to help develop them and assessments to measure them. Here’s how we are defining our dream disciple roles at Grace. We are hoping that every believer in our church will embody and develop all four of these roles in increasing measure. These are the kind of disciples we believe can reach our region and can partner with Jesus in redeeming the broken narratives. You can find out more information at our dream disciple website.
- Compassionate Storyteller:
I know God’s story, my place in it, and am motivated to tell the people in my life. - Savvy Follower:
I discern God’s voice and follow his lead at the right time in the right way. - Intentional Friend:
I partner with God to build healthy relationships and restore broken ones. - Embedded Influencer:
I understand how God has purposefully gifted and positioned me to multiply His work in the world.
Building these kinds of disciples is becoming our holy obsession. We believe as more and more Christians are trained to fulfill these roles, we will begin to see true gospel penetration in our region and see Jesus lifted up like never before.
