Are We Teaching Discipleship the Wrong Way? | Moose Bright

0:10 Hey guys, it's Josh Howard with discipleship.org. I'm here with Moose Bright, my new good friends. I mean, we've known each other, uh, now for a few years, but it's— we— I was able to go up to Idaho and spend some time with him and, and with Jim Putnam, who helped launch the ministry originally. And, and, uh, dude, I love, love, love what you're doing with RDN and with the Relational Discipleship Network, you know, and everything that they're doing there. These guys absolutely love, love, love disciple-making. They love pouring into people. And honestly, they're some of the best in the country at relationally walking with people and truly helping them become disciples of Jesus.

0:49 And so, dude, I'd love to hear about that. I'd love to hear about even some ways that our people, as they're listening, might even be able— what are some even first steps they might be able to take or some things they might be able to do to step into more of a lifestyle of discipleship? So that way they can kind of, you know, come out of this better than where they started. Yeah. Well, I'll go down that road for sure. But first I want to say, if you guys are watching this and you have not been into a discipleship.org event, you need to come to it. Hey, come on. It is a great place to figure out where's the best fit for your church, even if it's not the RDN, what's the best place that you can learn to make disciples.

1:23 So discipleship.org is going to help you do that. You're going to get exposed to all these different ministries that are focused on this, make their bread and butter doing this. And so great conference. We've been a part of this conference from almost the beginning. We're going to be there this year. And so I'd love to see you guys there. Of course, we think we've got the best thing going, but if you find something better, do that. Just make disciples. I don't care who it is, but just make disciples. I didn't even ask him or pay him to say that. That's great. Thank you. All right. It's a great event. I think it's a great opportunity for churches to learn and get exposed to and figure out because there's

1:53 people that might just resonate with you more than we do. But as long as it's helping you make disciples. Now, our conviction is this. Somewhere along the lines, the church separated the methods of Jesus from the teachings of Jesus, and so we were really good at teaching what Jesus taught, but not in the way that he did it. And so Jesus had a methodology on how he made disciples. He made disciples in relationships, so that's why we're called the Relational Discipleship Network. We've got 28 years of experience.

2:19 This process has been refined, rebuilt, retooled, put back together, and we've got a long run of successfully helping churches transition from a teaching church or a seeker church or a discipleship church that just needed more help into intentionally making disciples who then can make disciples. So it's not just making disciples, it's making disciples who can make disciples. And you guys that are church leaders know this. Your job is not to do the work of the ministry. It's to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. And so if you're burned out, overwhelmed, you're feeling it, we're here for you. We want to journey with you. We want to help you figure out how to raise up disciples within your own church that can carry that weight.

2:59 We know this, the 5 people that you spend the most time with in your life are the greatest influence on how you view the world. Yeah. So as a pastor, how in the world are you going to spend time with all those people? You're not. Yeah. And so raising up other mature believers who can then influence other mature believers and replicate, that's what we help churches do. Yeah, that's beautiful, Moose. Let's, let's go back to one of the scriptures that you just quoted for a second.

3:24 So I think sometimes, although we know this in our head, practically living out the fact that we are called to equip the saints for the work of ministry, a lot of times for whatever reason, we get it in our head, especially in the US church, that all the ministry's gotta be done by us or by professionals or by full-time people, right?

3:43 And so how have you seen it practically worked out where a leader or somebody on staff can begin to shift their perspective enough to say, okay, my main role is equipping people to do the work, not doing it all myself. Like, what are some ways that they might be able to begin to kind of recenter themselves around the methods of Jesus that you're talking about? So one of the first things I would say is, if you get a worldview that says our job is to make disciples, that's what we've been commissioned to do, that's what Jesus told us to do, you can start reassessing what you're doing as a church and ask the question, is this helping us make disciples? And if it's not, you need to let it go away. That's a nice

4:25 way of saying kill it. Or stop feeding it. There's another strategy. Stop feeding it. Let it starve. Yeah. And because it's going to— it moves slower, but then it multiplies. So it's a slower walkout. But then once you reach the point where you've— so I'll give you an example of this. My wife Lisa did not spend a whole lot of time volunteering in our church when she was raising and homeschooling our 4 kids. Because she was focused on them. Now she still was involved, but now all 4 of my adult children volunteer in church or making disciples or raising people up. So she, for a season, you could have looked at her and said, well, she's not involved as much in the work of the church, but she was. She made 4 awesome disciples

5:08 in coordination with obviously myself. But then now they've been released and the impact that they can have is so much greater than Lisa could have had on her own. Yeah. So just from a super plan, you know, just from a practical standpoint, So if you— we, our church, we focused on saying, hey, let's take some church staff and dedicate them to making disciples and raising people up and having small group leaders that are mature that can then replicate.

5:29 And so we dedicated some time and resources to that, which means we had to stop doing some other things that weren't going to give ground to that. Yeah, absolutely. I think what Moose is saying here, guys, is so important for us to think about. And it's this: as a church and even as an individual, like I think we said it on a previous podcast that sometimes you've got to start with some of these things by looking at the man or the woman in the mirror first and say, how am I personally living this out, right?

5:56 And so personally, is my main mission and focus being a disciple who makes disciples? And then as a church, is that the core mission of my church, or are we living some sort of shadow mission that Jesus never really gave us, right? Because I think that's what happens more times than not, is that we end up doing a bunch of good stuff, but it's not the main thing that Jesus actually asked us to do, right? Yeah. So there's good things that are still maybe impacting the community or helping people or whatever that are great things, but we're missing the main thing that Jesus called us to do. And man, laser focusing on that is actually what the best disciple-making churches in the country are doing, is basically

6:35 like you said, letting everything else go and laser focusing their time and attention on truly making disciples who make disciples. And that's what I love about you guys. You guys have been such an incredible partner, Moose, with us at discipleship.org for many, many years now because you guys as a ministry and the churches that are part in your network have said, listen, we're going to laser focus on this and, and really truly become all that God's called us to be. As a matter of fact, in our book that Bobby Harrington and I wrote together, uh, The 7 Practices of Disciple Making, one of the RDN churches, uh, is in that book. Yeah, Brandon Ginnon's church in, in Houston, in the Houston, Texas area.

7:12 Um, and I know you know Brandon well, um, and but there's so many of your other churches that are level 4 knocking on level 5 because of that intentional, you know, we're going to make disciples who make disciples. Yeah. What do you think is the way that if a church is out there right now and they're like, man, I resonate with that, I want to make that shift, I just have no idea where to start, what do you recommend them to really begin to look at? So if you get a hold of Disciple Makers and you go, I'm gonna make disciples, this is what I want to do, it's kind of that moment where you went, I'm gonna get in shape this year, I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna like eat well, I'm gonna diet well. Here's what we know: if you don't have

7:51 running mates who are gonna meet you at the gym, if you don't have people that are gonna be there and like not only encourage you but hold you accountable and also say Hey, this is week 4, and we know this is the tough week to get through, but just press through that. Then that implementation strategy works very much like a New Year's resolution.

8:07 And it's like, it sounded good, and you were committed to the idea, but it didn't play out. And January 5th, you're done. Yeah, usually 3 weeks. 3 weeks is the mark where New Year's resolutions kind of die off. And so we want to partner with you. We want to get you into a coaching cohort with other pastors that are on that same journey with a seasoned leader that has transitioned his church to a disciple-making church. Because we don't want you to walk this out alone because you will face challenges. You will face places that are discouraging. You will encounter resistance because if we're gonna model what Jesus did and follow what he did, did Jesus meet resistance? Did he encourage— did he encounter challenges? Did he have people that said, I'm here for the

8:44 show, and now when he said, you gotta eat my flesh and drink my blood, they walked away? Well, you're gonna have that. Like, we're not selling this as an easy road. And so you need other people to journey with you, encourage you, build you up, and we're here for that. And we have coaching boards starting all the time. That's great, dude. One of your flagship programs that is kind of a lot of times a, uh, a really good first step is your Disciple Shift, uh, program, or the, or the event that you guys have that people can come to. Yeah, that's based upon, uh, Jim Putnam's book Disciple Shift. I believe Bobby actually— did he co-author that with, with Jim? He did. And that actually started, uh, so Real Life Ministries—

9:21 I started attending Real Life Ministries when they were meeting in the movie theaters, about 100 people. We made the stupid list of fastest growing churches in America. And if you make that list, this happens, not just us, any church, people show up at your door and they go, hey, what's the secret sauce? Give me the program. And Jim and the leadership team said, we have no such thing for you. But if you want to be immersed in our culture for 2 days, we'll do a program called Immersion. And so we had hundreds of pastors coming quarterly to this thing called Immersion. And you got the taste, touch, experience.

9:55 You're in small groups 75% of the time. And they knew what it meant in this deep relationship in these 2 days. As that grew, it was run by the church staff and they went, they can't do this job and this. So that's where the RDN was created so that we can do this and we can move it around the country. So we do them all over the place. We're going to be in November, we're going to be up in Real Life in Post Falls. And in January, we're going to be down on the coast of Florida. So, you know, If you can't make November, January. But we move them all around and you go through this 2-day immersive process and you actually can't join the network until you've done that because we want you to know what we're talking about.

10:34 We want you to experience it and for you to go, yes, that's what we want. Okay, that's awesome, man. Yeah. Thank you so much, Moose. This, guys, this has been so helpful, really just hearing about what, what we can actually start with to shift, to really become disciples, to make disciples, and to really be churches that have this as a laser focus.

10:56 And so guys, listen, if you don't have running mates like what Moose said, if you don't have people that are really running alongside of you, that is exactly what RDN does best. It's their bread and butter. They love coming alongside of leaders and churches to help them truly become disciples, and then churches that make disciples who make disciples. And so please reach out to Moose at RDN. How, how can they get in touch with you, man, if they want? rdn.org. Okay, go there. You guys can look at Discipleship. Just zoom in right here. That's right. If you look for Discipleship, it will list all of the— got to pronounce that right— you got to look at where they're happening all around the country. We'd love to see you

11:31 guys at one. Say it 3 times fast: Disciple Shifts. Yeah, yeah, don't do it in the pulpit. Yeah, exactly. Okay, great. Well, thank you, Moose, uh, for being here with us, dude. I've been so grateful for you, man, and our partnership. Yeah, and our friendship. And so guys, please reach out to moose@rdn.org, and then, uh, we, we cannot wait to see you guys, man, and to see what God is going to do through you and your churches. If you need any help whatsoever, uh, please come check us out as well at discipleship.org, and we would love to help, uh, connect you with partners like Moose who can really walk alongside you guys to see true disciple-making happen in your churches. We love y'all, and we'll see you next time.