The national leader from a movement recently said that coming out of Covid19 and the last election cycle (and aren’t we glad to be in another election cycle🙁), every pastor was asking the same question: “Have we ever discipled anyone?”  

Recently, a group of pastors I was with (of whom everyone would say, “They are successful”) unanimously concluded: "What we are doing (small groups, micro-groups, preaching, content) is not really discipling people."  

What is the answer? 

"There is nothing new under the sun"...even today.

We’ve tried focusing discipleship on different arenas: multiple kinds of rational cognitive transformation of the mind approaches, spiritual approaches, emotion-focused approaches, and therapy-based approaches.

We have different venues for discipleship: seminars, retreats, immersion, many stripes of small groups and micro-groups, personal retreats, and spiritual direction. 

We've polished the content and delivery of discipleship with fantastic illustrations and excellent media production--we have more content, better produced, than ever before.

And might I say, I’ve seen people grow in each of those focal points, venues, or content options....but I’ve also observed many people see no growth through them and some subsequently walk away from faith disillusioned. 

How do we understand and reconcile the stats and our own experiences with the failure to deeply disciple?

Approaches to discipleship have been more like pendulum swings, going from one extreme to another. I grew up on Larry Christiansen’s Transformation of the Mind. But that didn’t produce as much fruit as we hoped for, so we turned to healing of memories and deliverance ministry—still, too many people didn’t experience lasting change.

So, parts of the church turned to Christian counseling—I even did a Masters in Counseling because I wanted to learn more about how people change. Christian counseling saved marriages and brought healing in people’s lives, but that, too, wasn’t enough. In recent years, even Larry Crabb, the most heralded name of the Christian Counseling movement, is backing away from (not abandoning) the therapy approach.

And now we see another pendulum swing toward emotionally focused systems theory and attachment theory and spiritual formation—fantastic stuff, changing many lives (I'm a huge fan of implementing these current trends in discipleship—they are particularly timely to the discipleship challenges of our post-modern culture). 

But dare I suggest, we are at risk of continuing the church pendulum swing to the latest, greatest, newest approaches to discipleship and not truly solving the problem. 

The solution to the discipleship problem in America isn’t the focus (cognitive, behavioral, emotive) or the venue (large or small or micro-groups), or more well-produced content.  

Everything I've just mentioned has produced good fruit when done in alignment with the Word and under the gracious, kind influence of the Holy Spirit. I'm just doggedly more holistic--having seen good in all of them--together.

Encapsulating the problem is the long-voiced critique we so often hear of discipleship: 

We have educated people beyond their obedience. 

Why is that? It’s not the content, it’s not the focus, and it’s not the venue.  

The answer is a process answer. 

As a church, we do not use good educational processes that result in learning transfer. 

Learning transfer is moving knowledge into long-term memory and seeing it become practically useful in a person’s life. 

The process or learning transfer is well established, but few know it and truly understand it. It’s not a mystery. It’s not inaccessible or hard.

But there are so many theories, assumptions, and practices about learning that fail at learning transfer—but are marketed well and mistaken for good adult learning.

There are proven processes and methods of training that result in knowledge becoming learning transfer—lived out in people’s lives.  

Yet, by most research estimates,

the church spends 90 percent of its time using approaches to training disciples that yield 5 percent to 20 percent learning transfer.

No wonder people’s lives are not changing. 

Good Adult Learning Transfer Modeled by Jesus

The fascinating thing is, when you study adult learning and learning transfer, you see wonderful illustrations of adult learning transfer principles in Jesus, in Paul and the early church, in several revivals throughout history, and throughout the Bible. But we focus too often on the words of the Bible and miss the processes it illustrates. 

What would happen if: 

Instead of the church spending hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of millions of hours per year doing things that get a 10% return, we started spending that time and money doing things that got a 30%, 40%, 50%, or even 60% return?  

Can you imagine the impact? Can you imagine the multiplying work of the Holy Spirit and the pleasure that would bring God? 

Can you imagine how much better our time and money would be used?

You can realize that dream that just popped into your head by taking two actions:

 

Teaching You to Turn Learning into Changed Lives: A Train-the-Trainer Bootcamp

Second, subscribe to the emails from 5Minutes2Lead™ in the footer at the bottom of this page to receive more reasons discipleship training fails to deliver learning transfer.

 

What is the cost of NOT learning the skills to increase learning transfer going to continue to make on discipleship and leadership development for the Kingdom of God here on earth? 

 

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