The Church Revitalization Podcast – Episode 291 – Streamlining adult discipleship ministries
Your church has eighteen different groups, six Sunday school classes, four Bible studies, two men’s groups, three women’s ministries, and a handful of other gatherings that meet sporadically throughout the month. Despite this abundance of options, many of your members aren’t engaged in any of them, while others seem overwhelmed by trying to participate in too many. Sound familiar? This is what streamlining adult discipleship ministries seeks to solve.
This common scenario plays out in churches of all sizes across the country. The intention behind offering numerous adult discipleship ministries is admirable – to provide something for everyone. However, the actual result is often confusion, inconsistent participation, and spiritual growth that happens by accident rather than by design.
In this week’s episode of the Church Revitalization Podcast, we discussed this exact challenge. The problem isn’t necessarily having too many ministries (though that can certainly be an issue). Rather, it’s the lack of a clear, intentional pathway for adult discipleship that members can easily understand and navigate. When your church’s approach to adult discipleship becomes a confusing buffet of options rather than a well-marked journey, even the most committed members can struggle to know where and how to engage.
Streamlining adult discipleship ministries doesn’t mean eliminating everything and starting over. Instead, it means reimagining how these ministries work together to create a coherent process that moves people forward in their spiritual journey. It’s about shifting from program-oriented thinking to process-oriented thinking, and the difference can transform your church’s effectiveness in developing mature disciples.
Shifting Discipleship Ministries from a Program-Oriented Menu to a Process-Oriented Pathway
The first step in streamlining adult discipleship ministries requires a fundamental shift in mindset. Most churches operate with a program-oriented approach – constantly adding new options in an attempt to meet every conceivable need or interest. This approach stems from good intentions: ensuring no one feels left out. What often happens, though, is that the more you start to subdivide, the more affinities you’ll find.
Consider what happens when a church tries to create something for everyone. You begin with a general women’s Bible study, then realize some women work during the day while others stay at home. So you create separate groups. Then you notice single women have different needs than married women, so you create another division. Soon, retirees, young professionals, new mothers, and empty nesters all have separate groups. Before long, your adult discipleship ministries have fragmented into dozens of niche programs, each with their own curriculum, meeting times, and leadership challenges.
In contrast, a process-oriented approach focuses on having a pathway for everyone rather than a specific program for everyone. Instead of asking what activities you can offer, you ask how you can help people grow spiritually in a clear, sequential way. This shift allows church leaders to make better strategic decisions about which adult discipleship ministries to support and how to structure them.
The power of this approach lies in its clarity. When members and visitors alike can easily understand your church’s discipleship pathway, they’re much more likely to engage. Favor clarity over variety. People won’t engage with what they don’t understand, no matter how many options you provide.
A process-oriented approach also allows church leaders to monitor the effectiveness of their adult discipleship ministries more accurately. Instead of simply tracking attendance across numerous programs, you can evaluate whether people are actually growing spiritually and moving forward in their discipleship journey. This shift in perspective transforms how you measure success from program participation to spiritual transformation.
Combine Adult Discipleship Ministries into a Primary Pathway
Once you’ve adopted a process-oriented mindset, the next step is to organize your adult discipleship ministries into a coherent pathway. In our Strategic Envisioning process, we typically recommend developing a pathway with three to five clear steps that represent different aspects of discipleship.
These steps often include a gathering step (weekend worship services), a growth step (spiritual formation and fellowship), a service step (ministry engagement within the church), and an outreach step (evangelism and community impact). Each step plays a vital role in the discipleship journey, helping people move from initial engagement to spiritual maturity and multiplication.
Within each step of this pathway, identify what we call a “primary ministry.” This is the main environment where that aspect of discipleship is developed. A primary ministry isn’t just another program; it’s the optimal environment you’ve created to cultivate a specific element of discipleship. It’s the call to action that you want everyone to take.
For example, in the growth step, your church might currently have Sunday school classes, small groups, men’s Bible studies, and women’s Bible studies, and they are all functioning independently with different curricula, different meeting schedules, and different leadership structures. Instead of maintaining these as separate silos, consider how you might combine them under a unified adult discipleship ministry with shared DNA and leadership.
This doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating all variety. You can still offer different meeting times and locations to accommodate various schedules and preferences. The key difference is that these options now share a common purpose, curriculum approach, and leadership structure. When someone asks about getting connected, you can clearly and confidently direct them to this primary growth ministry rather than overwhelming them with numerous disconnected options.
The benefits of this approach extend beyond just clarity for members. By consolidating your adult discipleship ministries, you can implement stronger quality control and leadership development.
Identify Secondary Discipleship Ministries to Align or Sunset
After establishing your primary discipleship pathway and ministries, you’ll likely discover that some of your existing adult discipleship ministries don’t fit neatly into this new framework. This is where the real courage of leadership comes into play. You now face important decisions about what to do with these remaining ministries.
In our Strategic Envisioning process, we recommend two possible approaches for these ministries: align them as secondary ministries or sunset them. Let’s explore each option.
Secondary adult discipleship ministries are those that complement your primary ministries but aren’t meant for everyone. They typically serve one of two purposes. First, they can function as “on-ramps” or short-term experiences designed to help people connect to your primary ministries. For instance, a six-week newcomers’ class might serve as an on-ramp to your ongoing small group ministry. These on-ramps are valuable because they provide a lower-commitment entry point that helps people eventually engage with your primary discipleship pathway.
The second type of secondary ministry may be a “step beyond” or “deep dive.” These are opportunities for deeper engagement that go beyond what you might expect from the average member. A one-on-one mentoring program is a perfect example. While you might love for everyone to participate in mentoring relationships, the reality is that not everyone has the time or readiness for this deeper level of commitment. By designating these as secondary ministries, you clarify that while they’re valuable, they’re not the expected next step for everyone in your church.
The key to secondary adult discipleship ministries is intentionality. You can’t allow secondary ministries to become just a new catch-all for your ministry bloat. Every secondary ministry should have a clear connection to your primary ministry and a specific purpose in your overall discipleship pathway.
For ministries that don’t align with your pathway even as secondary ministries, you may need to consider sunsetting them. This is undoubtedly the most challenging aspect of streamlining adult discipleship ministries, as people become emotionally attached to programs they’ve participated in or led. However, continuing to invest resources in ministries that don’t contribute to your discipleship strategy ultimately diminishes your church’s effectiveness.
The goal isn’t to eliminate ministries for the sake of minimalism, but to ensure every aspect of your adult discipleship ministries is contributing effectively to the formation of mature disciples.
Moving Forward with Streamlined Adult Discipleship Ministries
The process of streamlining adult discipleship ministries isn’t a simple weekend project. It requires thoughtful evaluation, courageous leadership, and clear communication. But the benefits far outweigh the challenges. Churches that successfully implement these principles experience increased engagement, improved ministry quality, and most importantly, more effective disciple-making.
People will engage with what they understand. When your church communicates a clear discipleship pathway with well-defined primary ministries, you remove the barriers of confusion and overwhelm that prevent many from connecting. Your members will know exactly how to grow spiritually, and your leaders will have a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of your discipleship efforts.
:If you’re ready to begin streamlining your adult discipleship ministries, we invite you to explore our resources at the Healthy Churches Toolkit. The new master class on the six areas of groups ministry can help you grow your group ministry by 30-50% in six to twelve months. You can also access our Strategic Envisioning Training course, which walks you through the entire process of creating a clear discipleship pathway for your church.
Remember, the goal isn’t to simply do less. The goal is to do what matters most with excellence and intentionality. When you streamline your adult discipleship ministries around a clear pathway, you position your church to fulfill its calling to make disciples who make disciples.
Watch this episode on YouTube!
Church Revitalization Podcast Transcript:
A.J. Mathieu [00:00:00]:
Okay. Your church has a bunch of groups. It’s got classes. It’s got bible studies, and your people aren’t in any of them. Or maybe they’re in way too many. Let’s talk about streamlining your discipleship ministries today on the church revitalization podcast.
Introduction [00:00:15]:
Hello, and welcome to the church revitalization podcast brought to you by the Maelfors group team, where each week we tackle important, actionable topics to help churches thrive. And now, here’s your hosts, Scott Ball and AJ Mathieu.
Scott Ball [00:00:33]:
Welcome to the Church Revitalization podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I’m joined by my friend and cohost, AJ Mathieu. Woo. Alright.
A.J. Mathieu [00:00:41]:
Right on.
Scott Ball [00:00:42]:
Man. So couple of things before we get into this. I think this is gonna be a very helpful episode because I I don’t know that I’ve walked into very many churches where this wasn’t a problem, where we’ve got a lot of stuff happening, but communication isn’t super clear. Some people are involved in too much. Some people aren’t involved in anything. So I think we’re gonna help people get some clarity today on how to do that differently or how to approach that issue, topic, problem. But before we dive into that, couple of things I wanna announce. We just announced last week a new partnership with Build Groups with our friend Adam Ehrlichman and his team at Build Groups.
Scott Ball [00:01:25]:
We have a new master class on the six areas of groups ministry. And, man, if you follow the instruction in that course, you may be able to grow your group’s ministry by 30 to 50% in six to twelve months. They they have example after example of churches that they have worked with and partnered with, and the amount of material and information and tools they have included in this master class is pretty unbelievable in my mind. I was, as I was putting all this together inside of the Healthy Church’s toolkit, I was pretty I was I was like, wow. This is a lot of value. So to take advantage of this, go to healthychurchestoolkit.com. Sign up for a seven day free trial. You’ll get full access to the master class.
Scott Ball [00:02:14]:
You’ll be able to start accessing that content. And number two, connected to that, we have a workshop with Adam coming up this Thursday as this is being released. So that would be tomorrow. Tomorrow? As this is being released, it will be tomorrow. Yeah. Mhmm. And that is happening at remind me the time. Is it so I think it’s 11AM eastern is when the workshop is happening live.
Scott Ball [00:02:40]:
If you attend live, you can ask questions. You could ask Adam some questions. And
A.J. Mathieu [00:02:44]:
11AM. Yeah. Yeah. Twenty twenty five.
Scott Ball [00:02:48]:
Yeah. Adam’s gonna be coleading that workshop with us, and we’re gonna be diving deeper. I believe we’re gonna be focusing on that first. There’s six six areas of groups ministry, and I think we’re gonna dive a little bit deeper in the first area of groups ministry, which is discover. So how to increase the number of leaders that you have, the number of group leaders, whether that’s Sunday school classes or small groups, doesn’t matter. But the number of leaders and teachers that you have available, we’re gonna dive a little bit deeper into that in the workshop. So but that’s only available to people who are in the toolkit. And if you’re like, I don’t wanna pay for the toolkit right now, or I’m not sure, again, sign up for seven days for free.
Scott Ball [00:03:31]:
And if you happen to be listening to this after the workshop has already happened, you’ll still go and sign up for a seven day free trial, and you can go back and watch the replay. That’s a lot of words I just said. Did I miss anything?
A.J. Mathieu [00:03:45]:
All they need to know is great new class in the toolkit. Go to healthychurchestoolkit.com now. Start your seven day free trial, and you’ll be glad you did. If you’re outside of North America, go to healthychurchesglobal.com and get your free access subscription to the toolkit there. Yeah. Okay.
Scott Ball [00:04:04]:
One last thing I wanna mention, before we get started in the content for today. This is the only place, at least for now, this is the only place that you can access this masterclass. So even if you go to build groups, this doesn’t live somewhere on their website. At least that could maybe someday that will change in the future, but for right now this is an exclusive partnership. So this is the only place where you can watch this masterclass. You can’t get it on MinistryPass, you can’t get it from somewhere else, you can’t watch it on YouTube. It’s only inside the Healthy Churches toolkit. So sign up healthy churches toolkit dot com or healthychurchesglobal.com if you live outside of North America.
A.J. Mathieu [00:04:42]:
Great response to it already. So we’re excited to have it. Okay. Let’s talk about streamlining discipleship ministries in your church, such as groups, right? That’s kinda why we’re talking about this. We’re groups heavy with the toolkit this month, but we are always heavy on intentional and streamlined discipleship in churches every day at the Malphurs Group and Healthy Churches Global. This is a key area, One of the most significant areas that we work in throughout our strategic envisioning process that we do with churches is focusing on how are we gonna organize ministries in our church to most efficiently and effectively disciple people into becoming disciple makers. And so that requires, as I just said, intentionality in it. We want to make sure that our ministries are achieving that goal, that we’re not just doing things because it was trendy or because it seemed like a good idea and then just kind of leaving things to hopefully have good outcomes and never really know.
A.J. Mathieu [00:05:45]:
We want things super intentional that we’re able to monitor and see, okay, is this really working well? And that people are super clear about what’s what’s the best thing? How should I use my time here at church? So, Scott, we’ve got three points. So let’s start off in our first area here.
Scott Ball [00:06:02]:
Let me call back for one one second and just say, you know, because I think you said this really well sort of in the teaser for this episode, but this this is the problem that we’re trying to solve today. You have, you know, let’s say you’ve got 18 different groups that meet, women’s groups, men’s groups, bible study groups, you know, you’ve got six different Sunday school clat- classes that happen, you know, and then you have these random smattering of of other kinds of affinity groups or whatever that that meet throughout the week or once a month. They’re all on different curriculum. They are all on different meeting time schedules. They’re all on different frequency of meetings. They’re all on different start and stop times, like some run all year, some run only during you know, they don’t meet at all during the summer or whatever. And as a result, some people are engaged in a lot of these things, and some of them people aren’t engaged in any of them at all. And so the problem is that you have varying levels of engagement.
Scott Ball [00:07:04]:
And from your perspective as the pastor, you think, well, we’re offering a lot of stuff. How can we see such different results? Some people wait almost too involved because they’re getting stuck there and they’re not taking any other step. And other people who they only come on Sunday morning and they’re not engaged. And so the point of this episode is to give you three actions that you can take to solve this problem. How can we streamline the things we’re doing? We’re we’re in particular talking about adult discipleship ministries. You had mentioned a second ago, you know, sort of a holistic. We can take the same logic and apply it across all of our ministries, but we we wanna drill down and specifically talk about adult discipleship ministries today using that as a broad category to cover bible studies, small groups of Sunday school, etcetera.
A.J. Mathieu [00:07:54]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly it. So first, the first thing that we’re we wanna talk about is this this shift in function and in mindset from being program oriented to being process oriented. And what we mean by that, the program mindset is what most churches really find themselves in, and that is we have something for everyone. Or maybe we’re trying to have something for everyone. There’s churches that even they aspire to just have more so that perhaps we’ll we’ll nobody can get left behind because we have found every niche possible, and they just keep adding and adding and adding as opposed to a process oriented mindset in which we say, we have a pathway for everyone. And and we’re able to move people through, in the way we teach and work through this, a relatively short amount of things or small number of things that we ask people to engage in.
A.J. Mathieu [00:08:53]:
And it provides a much greater framework for decision making, for monitoring the health of ministries, for monitoring the output success of ministries. And what we mean by that is can we active can we actually see that people are, maturing in the faith? Are they becoming more like Jesus? Is are their behaviors changing? Is their life transformation happening? And not just, you know, monitoring a spreadsheet of attendance numbers across 15 or 50 different things that happen at the church every week or every month. And so this this is the the first primary point here in streamlining ministries, discipleship ministries into greater effectiveness and efficiency is developing a pathway that we can clearly organize things in the church.
Scott Ball [00:09:49]:
Yeah. So the the key here is that we wanna emphasize clarity over variety. So a lot of churches get stuck because they think we need to have something for everyone. Everyone needs to feel like I have a group, and we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but not for a while. But this trap that churches get stuck in where no matter how much you subdivide, you can always subdivide more. We have something for women, but do we have something for single women? Well, we have some but some moms are working moms, and some moms are stay at home moms, and the diff the times for them would be better or different. We need something for men. We need something for men.
Scott Ball [00:10:27]:
What about men who are retired? Men who are working? What are we what about people who you you the more that you start to the more affinities you look for, the more affinities you’ll find. And when you start chasing that route, you don’t win. And what happens is people start to not understand where it is that you want for me to connect. And some people will just say, well, you’re just, this is just a simple church, you know, I’ve I’ve read that book. But that’s not quite right, and I’m not criticizing simple church, but the point isn’t, well, just do fewer things. That isn’t even the point either. It’s about speaking clearly about what we are doing so that people know what their next best step is. How should I engage? How do you want for me to engage? So even if we do have a variety of of meeting times or options or places, we’re not communicating in a way that makes it makes it look like a buffet.
Scott Ball [00:11:28]:
And instead, they are there’s there’s slots of options for me to engage with that fit within a framework of a clear discipleship pathway. Hopefully, this will make more and more sense as we kinda move through the points, but the first key point that we’re trying to make here is we need to shift our thinking from program oriented thinking, we need to have something for everyone, to process oriented thinking. We need to have a pathway that moves people forward in discipleship that includes everyone. So that’s the first key point, and then I think hopefully this will make more sense as we move through.
A.J. Mathieu [00:12:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s just keep going. So our second point is combining ministries into a primary pathway. So which I’ll it’s already a presenter. What? What does that mean? We speak of having three to five steps in a discipleship pathway in the church. And there’s there’s order and significance to what these steps would accomplish. And generally speaking, there’s there’s a gathering.
A.J. Mathieu [00:12:25]:
There’s like your Sunday worship service. There’s a large group gathering. There’s a step for growth, increasing in maturity, and fellowshipping with believers. We would call this a growth step. There’s a service step in which we’re intentionally engaging people in the work of the ministry, in the church, introducing them to to concepts that they may not even be familiar with and spiritual gifts and temperament, personality types to help them find how God has created them for work in his kingdom. And outreach. Getting outside of the church to to bring the gospel to people and to meet the needs in the local area and around the world. And so we’ve got an order to this in engaging with other believers as the body of Christ, supporting one another, supporting the church, living out our faith in the world, and of course also starting with giving praise and worship to God.
A.J. Mathieu [00:13:19]:
But we have to then be able to start to put some words or names to these functions within the framework of the pathway. And so we have to have a primary thing in each of these spaces or steps along the pathway. We have to be able to direct people to something concrete that we can say, here’s what we’ve developed at our church. This is gonna be the greatest use of your time to engage in these things. We call those primary ministries. And we work through a series of tools, when we’re working with the church, and that are described in the strategic envisioning training course on the Healthy Church Toolkit to be able to to develop these and to organize them. Again, as Scott just said, clarity is what we’re going for. We wanna be able to communicate in a very simple way, a few simple things for people to engage in.
A.J. Mathieu [00:14:08]:
So the development of of primary ministries within the pathway is key to that.
Scott Ball [00:14:15]:
Yeah. So imagine I asked you to sort of describe for me what a disciple is or what a disciple looks like, what does a mature Christian look like, you probably wouldn’t start with describing the things which he or she attends. You maybe wouldn’t begin by saying, oh, a disciple is someone who they’re at church every Sunday, and they also attend a a mature disciple is someone who attends a men’s Bible study at 6AM on Thursdays. Those those might be programs that they attend, but that’s not the image of what a disciple is. If I just asked you in the abstract, I said, describe to me what a disciple looks like. You probably say, a disciple is someone who worships the Lord with their whole life. They have a really active prayer life. They’re sharing their faith outside the walls of the church.
Scott Ball [00:15:10]:
They’re studying God’s word, and they have deep spiritual friendships. That’s probably what that would look like. So then I would have to turn to you and say, well, how are we cultivating that kind of behavior or that kind of maturity inside of a person at your church? What is it that we’re doing that helps to bring about that level of maturity in each person?
A.J. Mathieu [00:15:35]:
Mhmm.
Scott Ball [00:15:36]:
Now we have a framework for thinking about what a program is, and the problem is that we often don’t start there. We go, okay. We’re a church. We need to have things that we do. Rather than go, we’re a church. We have we have people we’re trying to develop into something. And when you so that was the first shift that we’re trying to talk about. So then when we talk about a primary ministry, we go, okay.
Scott Ball [00:16:00]:
A primary ministry is merely the primary or environment where we’re trying to develop some aspect of discipleship. So as you talked as AJ talked about, we have these different steps in a discipleship pathway, and in each step, we’re trying to cultivate some different element of mature discipleship. And we don’t want anyone to get stuck in any one of these steps because we want them to grow to a deeper level of maturity. And when it comes to discipleship ministries, this is often where we’re talking about some sort of edification or Christian maturity or what we often just call generally discipleship, although we would argue discipleship’s a bigger vantage point than just this. But we’re trying to cultivate community and fellowship and a love for God’s word and a deep prayer life for one another in this step. If you have so many programs going on, they all kinda tackle things from a different perspective. It’s possible for a person to engage in some or all of these things and not actually come become mature. Mhmm.
Scott Ball [00:17:05]:
And the point of a primary ministry is to optimize this thing and say, we’re going to try to create one environment that if we could get everybody in our church to engage in this environment, it positions them best to cultivate this kind of thing, a love for God’s word, deep spiritual friendship, a healthy prayer life, and so on. And and so it’s sort of that relentless commitment to saying no to other things so that we can say, let’s put all of these things together so people will engage in this one thing which has best positioned them to to grow in maturity. So you can do that by combining a bunch of things into into one bucket. You could say, alright. We have Sunday school classes, and we have small groups, and we have these bible studies, but they’re all kind of the same thing. So rather than trying to divert a bunch of attention, let’s create some shared DNA and some shared language to maximize clarity while maintaining the most amount of time slots available and options for people to engage. Yeah. Let’s refine this one program a little bit so that it it’s optimized for this.
Scott Ball [00:18:10]:
But we are committed to the process and the outcome, not the program. So if the program becomes ineffective, we can ditch the program and come up with something else. But the because the program is merely a means to accomplish the maturity. It isn’t the end itself.
A.J. Mathieu [00:18:26]:
Yeah. I think too many people underestimate the power of clarity because all of these things because, I mean, I think people could have listened to a lot of what you just said, Scott, and go, yeah. Yeah. We agree. We agree. And that’s why we’ve got 18 groups, and we got 19 classes to choose from. You know, that’s why we’ve got so much stuff because, yeah, we we wanna have that same thing. And I think you underestimate the the negative impact that overwhelm has on people when you cannot speak clearly about outcomes and benefits to people’s lives wanting with a desire to mature in the faith.
A.J. Mathieu [00:19:00]:
And instead just being overwhelmed by the stuff. Like, oh my gosh, there’s just too much. And if if it feels like I’m gonna have to be at church every night of the week to try to piece this together, then basic you know, the the unspoken answer to your invitation is going to be no. I’m just not gonna do
Scott Ball [00:19:21]:
I’ll go a step further. I think that most churches overestimate the quality of a lot of their programs.
A.J. Mathieu [00:19:29]:
That’s true too.
Scott Ball [00:19:30]:
So many, there’s no reasonable way for a church to do good quality control on the number of programs they have going on. Whereas if you, one, condense things into a clearer format, where you have a a clearly defined primary ministry, which you can hold to a high standard and ensure a high level of quality control, and two, build your leadership pipeline around that primary ministry so that you ensure levels of accountability all the way down and up. Then you can really make sure that the thing that it’s supposed to accomplish, the maturity it’s supposed to develop, it’s actually developing. I I’m a % convinced, and I know this because we’ve worked with hundreds of churches at this point, and I’ve we’ve taken them through our discipleship pathway workshops. And without fail, there’s all kinds of programs that churches are doing that when you start measuring their discipleship output, not their attendance, but the actual maturity that they are producing, it’s quite low. And it’s a little bit of a wake up call for a lot of churches to go, oh man, we are spending a lot of resources and time and attention on something that might be well attended but isn’t producing much spiritual fruit.
A.J. Mathieu [00:20:49]:
Yeah. And so often, you know, the churches that have just got a ton going on, or even if they have, you know, even in groups, they’re all in on groups no matter what format they might take. Often, they don’t have a format. And so they just have this huge collection. And if you ask them to describe, like, okay, well, what do groups look like at your church? Well, it depends on the group. And then they start to describe, well, some do this and some do that and some are more like that and some are this, you know, this, particular niche or others. And you have to take a step back and just think for a minute. If a new person comes to my church and they wanna get engaged, how am I going to communicate that to them? You know? Like, oh, let me do they need to fill out a questionnaire to figure out what which of our groups might you be a good fit for? Or would you, as a leader, like to be able to have something in place in which you can confidently know no matter what group they go to, they’re going to get the same experience barring personality differences.
A.J. Mathieu [00:21:51]:
But generally speaking, they’re gonna get the same experience with the same discipleship outcomes no matter where they go. I tell you what, I would sleep much better at night as a leader or pastor knowing I know this person is gonna do great here instead of, like, boy, if they end up over there in Jim’s group, I just don’t know if that’s gonna be a good fit or, you know, this one over there. I think this is how we should want to serve people and especially new people getting engaged.
Scott Ball [00:22:19]:
And this isn’t exactly the same thing, but, you know, I feel this way, say, about, like, our strategic envisioning process and our guides. While certainly maybe one one of our guides might be a better fit based on geography or, you know, theological background and experiences or personality fit, certainly those things play some role. But I feel confident that any church can engage with any of our guides and have a great experience because I trust our process. Yeah. Our process is tried and true. The workshops are reliable. We’ve done them so many times now, you know, with different kinds of churches that I know that they’re gonna have a good experience. And Mhmm.
Scott Ball [00:23:04]:
And I’ve taken out to some to the degree that I can, I’ve removed the variable of, well, how good is this person? Again, that’s why we train our guides. By the way. You can go to malphorsgroup.com/certification if you have interested in learning that process. I don’t want to say that your guide doesn’t make the experience, because definitely it does. I hope you know what I’m saying. I I just I trust we vet our guides and we train our guides, but also I trust the process, and I know the process is effective. And what you’re trying to remove in the group’s context is the singular variable of who the teacher is. Obviously, some of your teachers are gonna be or group leaders are gonna be better than others or more experienced than others, and that’s gonna make a difference.
Scott Ball [00:23:45]:
But if you have a really good system for groups and they’re designed to work and function in a particular way, you minimize that variable to a large degree, not entirely, so that you can ensure that no matter what group someone attends, they’re gonna they’re going to grow as a disciple, and that’s what you want.
A.J. Mathieu [00:24:04]:
Yeah. I mean, you know,
Scott Ball [00:24:05]:
to to make maybe not one for one correlation, and I don’t mean to denigrate and go, it doesn’t matter. Our guides are all the same because that’s not true. But it yeah. I don’t know. There’s limits to the analogy, I suppose.
A.J. Mathieu [00:24:18]:
Well, yeah. Sure. Yeah. No. I think I think the point comes across. I mean, yeah. Whenever yeah. When they’re all trained to do the same thing the same way, then for the most part, the experience is going to be similar no matter no matter who it is.
A.J. Mathieu [00:24:31]:
But, yeah, I mean, you know, so many churches, you’ve you’ve got a bunch of groups, and you can almost always predict. They’re like, yeah. Well, that one is you know, they’re super heavy bible study. You know? It’s like, this is like kinda like this theological intellectual group. These guys over here, it’s mostly fellowship. So some of our groups are felt more fellowship oriented and some are more bible study oriented. Well right there, okay, you’ve already now I mean play this out in your mind.
Scott Ball [00:24:56]:
Okay, I
A.J. Mathieu [00:24:56]:
pick the fellowship group. Great fellowship, great relationships. Couldn’t couldn’t find first Corinthians to save my life. But man, I’ve got some great friends at church. Or the opposite. My, you know, I am just deep, deep in the word. And if, you know, if I got in a car accident, I don’t know who I would call. So you have to almost kinda play out some extremes because otherwise you’re you’re you’re not saying it, but you’re telling people you might wanna be in about three groups to try to cover all of your bases depending on what your bases yeah.
A.J. Mathieu [00:25:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. Do we even know what the basis are? Oh, that’s good. Have
Scott Ball [00:25:34]:
we established this? This may be a good transition, though, to this third point, which is to go, okay. Well, if we’re not kind of just making a melting pot of everything we do, then that maybe doesn’t make sense. You can merge and combine some things together into a primary ministry and refine them and try to optimize the DNA so it’s consistent and all those things we just talked about, but that’s not gonna work for every ministry. So then what do you do with those things? What can we those things that can’t be combined, what do we do with them? And so there’s a couple of things you can do with them. The first is that you can align them, and the second thing is that you can sunset them. So the things that we say align, these are things that we would call secondary ministries. These are these are ministries that you do that are connected to the primary ministry, but in a way that you don’t expect every person necessarily to engage with them. So typically, they function in one of two ways.
Scott Ball [00:26:31]:
One, it could be an on ramp. So it’s a short term thing that we do in order to get someone plugged into the primary thing. It’s an event or it’s a shorter run program, something like that that helps someone get plugged into the thing that you want them to be engaged in for the long term. The second kind of secondary ministry is something that I call a step beyond, or you might think of it like a deep dive. It is it is a deeper level of commitment or engagement than you might expect the average person to have the time or energy to commit to. So maybe you like a mentorship program. Maybe you would love for everyone to be engaged in one on one discipleship or triads or mentorship or whatever, but that’s not realistic for everybody. So you have that available, but as sort of a a higher degree of engagement than you have as an expectation for everyone.
Scott Ball [00:27:26]:
So that would be secondary ministries, and then of course you can sunset things. Some things you don’t have to, this is something that, I think we talked about this maybe in last week’s episode with Adam. I don’t remember. I I heard this from him though maybe even in the first episode we recorded with him a long time ago. This idea of mowing around the stump, like, you have some things that are are ministries that you’re not necessarily going to continue to to grow or or gonna continue to function, but you don’t have to rip out the whole stump, you know, and ruin the yard. You can just mill around the stump, and that’s true. You can you can sort of sunset some things and go, alright. The this ministry doesn’t have to go away, but we don’t have to be promoting it either.
Scott Ball [00:28:08]:
It can kinda just exist, and when it eventually goes away on its own, and that’s okay too. So I just said a bunch of words. AJ, I don’t know what you wanna say about secondary ministries and sunsetting ministries.
A.J. Mathieu [00:28:22]:
Yeah. I mean, this this is the hard part right here. I mean, this is this is where some serious decisions end up having to be made, and it takes some fortitude and leadership to work through these things to make sure that people see the value and understand why these decisions are being made. Obviously, the sunset the sunsetting of ministries is the most sensitive because people get emotionally attached to things. Sometimes. Not always. Not always. But yeah.
A.J. Mathieu [00:28:50]:
And then also not allowing secondary ministries to become just a new catch for your bloat. Like, alright. We don’t really wanna get rid of anything, so we’re gonna call it a secondary ministry. So again, you know, I mean, all of this takes intentionality. And it has it has to be permeated with a desire for a better future. And we, Scott, I, our guides, we never come in with any any authority or ability to twist your arm.
Scott Ball [00:29:21]:
Or an agenda.
A.J. Mathieu [00:29:22]:
Yeah. Gotta get rid of this. Oh, this is for your church to be healthy and and hopefully produce, more and better disciples. Yeah. You know, I mean, it this this is just the tough part of the process. This is where most of the work goes in in the planning phase anyway, not in implementation. But, yeah, making sense, having strategic secondary ministries and, of course, primary ministries, and then making some tough decisions in love and with information clarity. That’s that’s where that has to happen.
A.J. Mathieu [00:29:49]:
Yeah. This is the necessary tough work.
Scott Ball [00:29:51]:
This past weekend, we often use the analogy of cleaning out a garage
A.J. Mathieu [00:29:57]:
Or a closet. Yeah. Cleaning anything out.
Scott Ball [00:30:01]:
And, actually cleaned out my garage this past weekend and, did did what you have to do, which is everything has to come out. You can’t go little bit by little bit. You’ve gotta get everything out. Because you can’t organize everything. I mean, if you if you just go piece by piece, you can’t really organize. So you gotta get it all out of there. And, I was going through this, and we have some wreaths that we we have hung up in the garage because we cycle them through seasonally. You get the spring wreath and the
A.J. Mathieu [00:30:30]:
The spring wreath. Yeah. The fall.
Scott Ball [00:30:32]:
The fall one. The Christmas wreath. We’ve got hooks for them in our in our on the wall, in the back of our garage. I mean, cycle through. We had, one of the wreaths that was hanging up in there and it was really big is a wreath from our wedding. It was, you know, had like fake fake flowers.
A.J. Mathieu [00:30:48]:
No, it was decoration used at the wedding
Scott Ball [00:30:51]:
decoration used at our wedding.
A.J. Mathieu [00:30:53]:
Yes. Boy, that sounds like, that’s, that’s going in the trash. If in AJ’s house that was be ready for the trash.
Scott Ball [00:31:00]:
So it’s obviously well, wow. You are
A.J. Mathieu [00:31:03]:
You didn’t get married last year. You’re a charmer.
Scott Ball [00:31:06]:
AJ. You know that? You’ve been married a
A.J. Mathieu [00:31:09]:
few years now.
Scott Ball [00:31:11]:
Yeah. Almost twenty. So we we both kinda looked we we’ve not it is it’s something that we have used as a decoration in the past.
A.J. Mathieu [00:31:21]:
Okay. It’s not it’s not single dimensional. It can it’s an appropriate decoration for another time besides a wedding?
Scott Ball [00:31:29]:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
A.J. Mathieu [00:31:30]:
Okay. I thought you’re I mean, I’m picturing something with wedding bells and white streamers and stuff.
Scott Ball [00:31:34]:
No. No. No. No. No. It’s like, it’s fake flowers, obviously, because real flowers would have rotted. It’s it’s a wreath. Like, it’s a wreath like you might buy.
Scott Ball [00:31:41]:
Yeah. We use
A.J. Mathieu [00:31:41]:
them like a wedding wreath or something.
Scott Ball [00:31:44]:
It’s a wreath that we you that we had, and we had several of them. They were on windows all throughout the the church. Okay. And some family kept one, we we kept one, so on. And we’ve used it as decor in the past
A.J. Mathieu [00:31:57]:
Gotcha.
Scott Ball [00:31:58]:
On occasion, but we haven’t hung it out in years, because we have other things that are newer that we like better. But we kinda had to look at each other like, what are we doing with this thing? She’s like, do you care if we get rid of this wreath? And I was like, I don’t care if we get rid of this wreath.
A.J. Mathieu [00:32:13]:
And so we I love those conversations, especially when we we agree. Those are awesome.
Scott Ball [00:32:18]:
I think we were both maybe a little bit afraid of, like, this is from our wedding. Like, is what does this mean for us to part ways Yeah. With this wreath? You know? And we decided we’re gonna attempt to sell it because it’s it’s it’s in good shape. Like, someone might want it you don’t look at it and go from a wedding. It’s a I I think you have something in your mind of, like, what it’s
A.J. Mathieu [00:32:41]:
No. You no. You I did it first. No. Okay. Yeah. Okay. It’s it’s
Scott Ball [00:32:45]:
just a A
A.J. Mathieu [00:32:45]:
sellable? A twenty year old sellable. You think there’s it’s got value on the secondary market? A buck. Okay.
Scott Ball [00:32:53]:
Two in a yard sale. Someone goes, oh, I love those colors. Yeah. It’s kind of in a sort of summery springy. It’s pretty. There’s no it’s not ugly. It’s pretty. It’s just not something that we wanna hang out
A.J. Mathieu [00:33:06]:
on our house anymore.
Scott Ball [00:33:08]:
Yeah. The point is not about the wreath. The point is that you can have things like this that are going on in your church that have been around for twenty years.
A.J. Mathieu [00:33:18]:
Yeah.
Scott Ball [00:33:18]:
And people are afraid to say, is this something that we can get rid of now? Do we have to have this? And no one we were never gonna touch that wreath until we cleaned out the garage. Mhmm. I wasn’t gonna just go in there one day and take it down. Neither was she. But we’re here we were in this moment cleaning out the garage. That’s what she wanted for Mother’s Day was, can we clean the garage? So we’re out there for hours cleaning the garage, and we had a built in opportunity. And that’s why strategic envisioning, you know, having these opportunities, built in opportunities to ask questions you wouldn’t normally are so important because not only are you able to get clarity around what matters most, you’re also able to maybe let go of some things that it’s past time to kinda just go. We don’t need this.
A.J. Mathieu [00:34:04]:
Yeah. Boy, it feels good getting rid of stuff. Man, I love throwing stuff away. Me and Erica got to a new point in our relationship in the last year, so we both love to throw stuff away. It’s
Scott Ball [00:34:14]:
I’m I’m happy with getting rid of stuff. Shit. Stuff. Yes. But, generally, if it’s something like from our wedding, neither one of us is gonna make that decision unilaterally. You’re gonna have a conversation.
A.J. Mathieu [00:34:25]:
Yeah. Yeah. The wedding album We
Scott Ball [00:34:28]:
can keep keeper.
A.J. Mathieu [00:34:29]:
You can keep the wedding album. Pictures I
Scott Ball [00:34:30]:
have a t shirt I have a t shirt that kinda fits that I wore when we left and when we pulled out
A.J. Mathieu [00:34:37]:
Okay. Yeah.
Scott Ball [00:34:38]:
From the from the church? Yeah. This says just
A.J. Mathieu [00:34:41]:
married? Mister? Oh, you got a just married.
Scott Ball [00:34:44]:
It’s a it’s a life is dead shirt that says just married.
A.J. Mathieu [00:34:47]:
Yeah. I’m
Scott Ball [00:34:48]:
not getting rid of it. It doesn’t take up much room in my drawer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
A.J. Mathieu [00:34:51]:
We’ve, yeah. Everybody should have their space for their little personal keepsake things. I got I got t shirts. I got, yeah, t shirts from past days.
Scott Ball [00:35:00]:
Yeah. And there’s so I guess I would say in the analogy, there’s place for that kind of thing in church. Should we go, you know what? The juice isn’t worth worth the squeeze. We don’t need to get rid of this. It’s okay.
A.J. Mathieu [00:35:10]:
Yeah.
Scott Ball [00:35:12]:
But the reality with the wreath, if man, I’m really making stretching this analogy out, is we had more wreaths than we had hooks. We needed to clear out some wreaths.
A.J. Mathieu [00:35:23]:
You established a pathway. There wasn’t room for everything.
Scott Ball [00:35:26]:
There wasn’t room for it.
A.J. Mathieu [00:35:27]:
You had to evaluate and keep the most valuable things.
Scott Ball [00:35:31]:
So I can keep this shirt because it I had plenty of room in the drawer, but I can’t keep the wreath because I don’t have enough hooks. So the wreath’s gotta go.
A.J. Mathieu [00:35:38]:
That’s good. How dusty is that wreath? Keep it in the garage. It’s not in the bag.
Scott Ball [00:35:43]:
I don’t I don’t know what it is that you think how I live,
A.J. Mathieu [00:35:45]:
but my Garbage are dusty anyway. It’s it’s It was fine. Giant door open to the outside.
Scott Ball [00:35:50]:
But it’s not open most of the time. It’s closed. I mean, I guess it was it’s in the back it was in the back of the garage. I don’t know. It was, I guess, a little dusty. Not that bad.
A.J. Mathieu [00:35:59]:
Put the wreath in it. Put it in the bag. You can still hang it. Put a bag over it and hang it back up. Just keep it nice.
Scott Ball [00:36:03]:
Oh, good grief. Some of our wreaths are in a bag. Alright. The ones that have, frocking flocking. The the have the fake snow?
A.J. Mathieu [00:36:09]:
Yeah. Christmas, flocked wreaths. Those are in a bag. Yeah.
Scott Ball [00:36:14]:
Wow. People really care about hearing this. This is some riveting podcast content right here. Let’s talk more about
A.J. Mathieu [00:36:19]:
Too deep talking about reads.
Scott Ball [00:36:21]:
Yep. Cash.
A.J. Mathieu [00:36:22]:
That’s good stuff.
Scott Ball [00:36:23]:
Alright. Let’s, put a fine point on this. Okay. People won’t engage here’s a recap. People won’t engage in what they don’t understand. And a lot of you have a lot of stuff going on in your churches, and there’s not a lot of structure to it, and some of it isn’t very good. And so you need to take some intentional time to streamline your ministries, take the principles that we’ve applied here, go to HealthyChurchesToolkit.com, watch the strategic envisioning training, contact us and get a guide to help you if you feel like you need some extra help, and so we can walk you through the workshops, the strategic envisioning workshops. And take the time to sort out your ministry garage because there’s stuff that needs to be cleaned out that hasn’t, there’s stuff that needs to be reorganized that’s disorganized, and there are conversations that need to be had that you’re avoiding.
Scott Ball [00:37:09]:
And and so please go to healthychurchestoolkit.com, get a trial for seven days, join us for the workshop that’s coming up tomorrow as this is releasing, and, jump start your discipleship growth in your church. It’s possible.
A.J. Mathieu [00:37:25]:
Yeah. There you go. There’s links below either in your podcast app for this episode or on YouTube if you’re watching and enjoying the video podcast. Links below for this week’s article and for, yeah, jumping onto Healthy Churches toolkit or Healthy Churches Global for our outside North America friends around the world. We’re so glad you guys are with us. We’ll be back again next week with something great. It’s gonna be great, Scott. Next week is really gonna be good.
Scott Ball [00:37:57]:
Yeah, you’ll have to tune in to find out what it is.
Responses