All talk, no strategy …

In the nearly 40 years I’ve been a minister, I’ve worked in most church ministries, have been a senior minister, planted a church, and helped with other churches plants. One of my favorite times of service was being responsible for Christian education for all ages in a couple of churches.

In other words, discipleship beginning with evangelism to teaching believers through spiritual maturity was part of my ministerial oversight … and I loved it!

It was exciting to craft a strategy that would provide teaching, equipping, training, and fellowship to help disciples of Jesus grow from new Christians to mature saints. And that’s a key objective for the church!

“Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church,” Ephesians 4:11-15.

Such a Christian education (or “spiritual formation”) strategy is a vitally important element for every local church, a fact alluded to in an interesting way by John Maxwell in “Developing the Leader Within You”:

A group of tourists visiting a picturesque village walked by an old man sitting beside a fence. In a rather patronizing way, one tourist asked him, “Were any great men born in this village?” The old man replied, “Nope, only babies.”

Every person who is a born-again believer starts life as a baby in Christ. Whether the new convert is six or sixty, that person is still a new Christian and needs to grow in the Lord. A baby Christian who has been saved for forty years is a tragedy. God intends for us to grow and mature so that we can be a positive influence in the lives of others. Until we learn to dig into the meat of the Word for ourselves, we will never grow.

Unfortunately, most churches today are more talk about “spiritual formation” than action, as a majority completely lack any serious (or sufficient) strategy for helping guide church members from starting as a new Christian to developing into a mature disciple of Jesus. In my work as Minister of Christian Education, we developed a Christian education strategy for all age groups — literally from nursery through senior adults. A helpful tool for this was devising and implementing a “scope and sequence” for what we taught and any curriculums used.

Just exactly what is a “scope and sequence”? A curriculum scope and sequence is a foundational framework used in education. “Scope” refers to what is taught in a curriculum. It encompasses all the areas of learning that the curriculum covers. For effective literacy instruction, it’s crucial to include all age-appropriate skills and concepts. “Sequence” refers to when skills are taught. It outlines the intentional order in which students learn various skills. A solid sequence ensures that students build skills systematically and cumulatively.

If your church mostly uses curriculums from Christian publishing companies, some of those curriculum publishers can provide you with a scope and sequence for the materials they offer. At the very least, church staff and your church elders should IDENTIFY and give serious consideration and prayer to the current spiritual condition of the members of your congregation; identify the Christian education, training, and equipping they need to help them grow from where they’re at now and then on into spiritual maturity; and then devise a strategy that includes a scope and sequence to provide that needed Christian education (discipleship).

A primary contributor to why the church today is ineffective, weak, floundering, and even declining is a failure to craft and implement a comprehensive strategy for the spiritual formation of Christians. Dr. Larry Petton describes the problem like this:

The problem is that Christians do not go on with God. They get saved, give a testimony of their salvation, and that’s all they ever have. They never maintain a serious study of the Word of God, which is essential to growth.

They are like the little girl who fell out of bed one night. When the little girl began to cry, her mother rushed in and said, “Honey, how come you fell out of bed?” The little girl replied, “I think I stayed too close to the place where I got in.”

That is the problem of the Christian today. We stumble and falter and fail because we are staying too close to the place where we got in. We need to go on — this is a long distance race.

Helping them “to go on” is the work of a good shepherd. Do you understand what the discipleship needs of your church members are? Do you have a real strategy — including something like a scope and sequence — to guide your members from where they are today on into spiritual maturity? If not, why not?

Scotty