Managing Change Towards Disciple-Making
How leaders, key influencers, and emerging voices work together to shape disciple-making communities.
This past weekend, we hosted a special edition of our “Holy Spirit” training weekend—the same one we normally take our missionaries-in-training through in the summer. (I wrote about the summer version here.) Since we introduced the training two years ago, some of our older missionaries hadn’t had the chance to experience it. So we offered an opportunity for some of our more seasoned leaders to go through it as well.
While this was a simple logistical solution, it actually highlights how we’ve navigated change management over the years. One of the questions I’m asked most often is, “How can we change our church to be more passionate about disciple-making?” The biggest challenge is usually that the longest-standing members of a community are the slowest to adapt to change. Yet it is these same members, those who provide stability, influence, and trust, who often determine the success or failure of any change effort.
So what do we do?
1. Start With Myself
Before any change is brought to a church, it has to begin in the life of the leader(s). Unless a leader is personally invested in and passionate about disciple-making, it will never take root in the community.
I need to be willing to do the work myself and develop credible experience in the things I’m asking our community to undertake. The willingness of leaders to model first is an essential component of a healthy discipleship ecosystem.
This requirement for modelling is what sets a discipleship-oriented, multiplication-driven environment apart from a corporate system. In a corporation, the core work can be delegated to “worker bees” while executives steer from above. But Jesus made it clear that His church is to do what He did with His disciples—multiplying outward. Jesus wasn’t birthing a corporation but a family of disciple-makers. We must begin with ourselves as the first change-agents.
For example, when we set out to shift our evangelism culture, I began going out to talk to strangers myself, sharing my learnings and experiences with our leaders afterward. Before asking anyone else to do the same, I wanted to show our community that I had been out there for a while, on the good days and the bad days.
2. Focus on the Key Leaders
As we work to bring about change, we intentionally build buy-in among our key leaders and invite them to model the same change we hope to see spread throughout the church. This gives us valuable, credible data early in the process.
For discipleship-related change, it’s important that this early experimental team isn’t limited to direct reports but distributed across the whole ecosystem. This gives us a horizontal view of how a change will be received in different contexts and personalities.
Equally important, perhaps even more important than my own voice, is ensuring consensus and buy-in at the leadership level when rolling out a change. Consensus, buy-in, and harmony among leaders become a stabilizing force when inevitable bumps and challenges arise. The behind-the-scenes work to create this kind of unity is hard work, but skipping it only creates confusion down the road and misses out on valuable insight from trusted leaders.
3. Build From the Bottom Up
After we work with the key leaders, a seemingly top-down approach, we actually do the opposite in practice. Very early in the process, we identify up-and-coming leaders who don’t carry the baggage of “this is how we’ve always done things” and who don’t have pre-set opinions about the change. We invite these leaders to take up the best possible version of the change and run with it.
This strategy brings several benefits:
Increased risk tolerance: Young leaders often take bold swings, giving the effort strong momentum and generating valuable data.
New leader development: It helps us discover and strengthen emerging leaders outside our existing systems and structures.
Fresh energy and innovation: When the change starts with new leaders, it introduces a sense of vitality and newness to the community.
Visible proof for the cautious: More change-averse members get to see the benefits firsthand before being asked to participate.
Gradual whole-church shift: We don’t have to turn the entire ship at once; we can bring change from both ends of the community at a sustainable pace.
About seven years ago, we used this exact process as part of an initiative called the “Emerging Multipliers Intensive.” We recruited young, up-and-coming leaders to a weekend retreat where we cast a vision for a new model of church planting that prioritized evangelism and disciple-making. We knew it would be too difficult for our core community to adopt immediately. By empowering younger leaders to run with it, we saw many churches planted and many leaders developed. At the same time, we slowly brought about change in our broader community, so much so that our long-term direction now looks remarkably similar to what we hoped for when we began.