Tim O’Neill
National Leader, Exponential Australia
Ten SHIFTS to Birth Disciple Making Multiplication In Your Church or Plant
No.7 Clarify the Purpose of the Relational Spaces in Your Church
What outcomes do you want for your weekend service? Or for small groups? Or for any other gathering points in your church?
And how will they contribute to making disciples? Or perhaps they won’t.
Frequently, churches have relational spaces without thinking through their ultimate purpose and how they will contribute to the outcomes leaders want to achieve. All too often there isn’t a clear link with disciple making. But there can be.
Take for example a typical weekend service. How does this contribute to disciple making? How could it be used? What practices might be introduced that would see it’s effectiveness increased? As an example some churches finish with discussion questions to help assimilate the teaching, highlight application and provide a safe environment for people to practice having spiritual conversations.
Getting a good attendance is great, but how does that contribute to making disciples? One thing that we know for certain is that attendance does not equal making disciples unless there is intentionality that takes place to either make disciples or to move people to another space where genuine disciple making does take place.
Another example is small groups. As an example I frequently use Discovery Bible Story as a way of facilitating discussion, learning and application, using questions like:
- what did you like about the story / passage we have just read?
- what did you see Jesus doing?
- what did the people do / how did they respond?
- what lesson is there for you to apply?
Each Relational Space should have a purpose that is predetermined and practices that are intentionally applied to help achieve those purposes and to see disciple making advanced.
Steve Addison in “What Jesus Started” adapted the “Four Fields” approach to:
- See the Need that will be responded to,
- Determine how we will connect with people with that need i.e. what space will we use,
- Ascertain how we will share our story or God’s story with the people we connect with
- Ascertain how we will train (disciple) them to be authentic followers of Jesus as well as effective fishers of people.
- Gather them into Christian community
- Multiply by sending them to connect with others and repeat the process.
Rich Robinson in his book “All Change: Unlocking Kingdom Potential in a World We Weren’t Prepared” uses the term “platforms” to describe what we have called “relational spaces” and alludes to the intentionality that we need to have when he says that “Jesus movements cultivate paradigms, platforms, principles, and practices that embrace the challenge of pursuing generational growth and adapt to different circumstances and cultures.”
Intentionality is key. Instead of allowing relational spaces to just happen in the way they have always happened – because they have always happened that way, we need to be intentional about how our relational spaces contribute to the making of disciples (who will make disciples).
The Alan Hirsch and Rich Robinson workshop “Creating a Movement Culture” (to be held in Melbourne and Brisbane in June 2025) helps us to workshop the intentionality we need to have. Jeff Vanderstelt writes about some different relational spaces in his free ebook “180: A return to Disciple Making”
When looking at the relational spaces in a church, it’s important to ask how they can be used to help make disciples and what practices or tools can be used in these spaces. As mentioned above, intentionality is key!
