BONUS: Justin on the Discipleship Dilemma
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Disciple Dilemma. I'm Dennis Allen, and in second Timothy chapter two, there's this phrase that says, entrust these things to faithful men. Leadership and discipleship is something we wanna talk about today. What does that mean? And is it all relegated just to me as a pastor or a small group leader, or is a member of a.
Can I delegate it all to them, whoever them is. What kind of environment should discipleship biblically, what kind of environment should a Christian community biblically operate in? How should leaders build a culture of churches so that we have disciples to make disciples? Our guests today is just and gra it with the navigator's, church ministry, and he lives near Dayton, Ohio.
Justin's rap sheet. He's married to Kristen. They have three daughters and one son. One of his quotes that I really liked when I started looking into him, and we kind of started stalking Justin for this podcast was, we're both committed to following Jesus and making disciple change. That's gonna be a fun one to follow up on.
So, 22 years with the navigators, right, Justin? That's. The Gravitt family's ministry just went everywhere, right? It ranges from Texas to New Mexico, to Ohio, to Indiana, to Southeast Asia. And one of his other quotes that I really thought was neat was, , he said after five years the ministry in Miami had doubled in its size and more importantly, Established a disciple making culture.
The numerical growth was a symptom of the culture. So Justin's pioneered non-traditional ministry work with Buddhist disciple pastors. Obviously, he's been encountering a lot of people one-on-one in the individual life of a disciple as he walks through these phases of growing a disciple and making a disciple making church bachelor degree at University of Miami, which.
Interesting in and of itself. It's a great school with a great legacy and Background with navigator's. Church ministry is gonna be a fascinating time as we hear from one of the guys who was , maybe a chain disciple of Dawson Troutman. That'll be a lot of fun. So we look forward to that. He's got a certificate in teaching English language from University of Cambridge.
How interesting that is. He's a ministry coach, both certified life ministry coach and an international ministry coach. Justin, thanks for being with us today, . Hey, it's my pleasure. Excited to be with you guys. Dennis. It's gonna be a fun conversation. I think I'll be a delight, and as always, I'm just thrilled and honored to have my, , my wonderful friend and mentor, Raymond Monroe with us.
Raymond, thanks for being with us today. Always a pleasure, Dennis. Always a pleasure to find out what odd thing you're gonna say during one of these podcasts. , he loves me. He loves me. Don't worry about it. Justin, I, I have a deep respect for navigators. You're in Navigator Church ministry. and your focus is on discipleship.
So tell us a little bit about navigator's, church ministry and how that works with the traditional role of navigators and how those two working together work on discipleship. The navigators do have a long history, as you mentioned, , making disciples on the campus and , in the military. And actually it started as a military.
You probably know this to the Navy, , as Shipman would come out. , for break, , out in California. , so yeah, I work with Navigators, church Ministries, which is a branch within the navigators, and I've been in this branch of the navigators for about eight years now. And what our goal is, is we come alongside church leaders and we help them become disciple makers.
And so as you guys probably have experienced that, there's many pastors, many elders, many church leaders who, , maybe are aware of discipleship but aren't clear on what it is or how to do it. , and so our goal is to really bring a relationship to those people, , and walk alongside them and help them become disciple makers.
And once that happens, then we begin to help. Building a culture of disciple making in their local church, which the whole point of that is not to make churches that look really good and, you know, grow on their own. The goal is to get out to the people that don't know Jesus. And as we grow in effectiveness in that, we're seeing, , communities impacted by their local churches as people are coming to know Jesus.
And so, . You know, for me guys, I am, I'm a missionary at heart and so been in overseas ministry in one capacity or another for really 15 years prior to coming in to navigator's, church Ministries, and my heart bleeds for the lost. And the reason I feel like God has called me personally into navigators, church ministries is because I don't think we're effective in this country at reaching the.
And we're certainly not sending missionaries out to those lost places, whole countries that don't have adequate witness for Jesus. And I think a big reason for that is our churches here aren't healthy. They're not healthy and making disciples, they're not healthy and making disciple makers and sending them out.
And so that's just a little piece of navigator's, church ministries, , kinda the history of. We've been around doing this, , with churches since the early 1970s, and it's basically came out of. , ministry that our staff was doing in communities where they were involved in churches, they were walking alongside people in those churches.
And pastors would often say, Hey, can you help us? Can you help us with this? And in early, in the early days of that help, the help looked like the Navigator's two seven series, , which you guys may have heard of it, is probably objectively speaking the number one selling Bible study of all time. , part of that's cuz of longevity.
, and so it's been around for 50 years now. , and that was how it started was that was the main emphasis that N C M Navigators Church Ministries would bring into churches to help train the people there in disciple making. So that's kind of brief sketch. Our branch or our emphasis in the navigators, but collectively as a whole, the navigators do the same thing.
We make disciples who make disciples, who make disciples, and that's what we're all about. So, so Justin, , just to follow up on that, I mean, my, my background and what you just said said there's a real focus within navigators in biblical literacy, both me biblical memorization, and then understanding that one of the shortfalls that we see now is young people are not getting that biblical literacy on the one hand.
On the other hand, adults are not seeing that as anything other than inspirational words rather than just a guide for life itself. How do you, as the navigators, especially in church ministry, develop disciples who actually are making application and trying to live out the biblical literacy that you're teaching them?
So we believe that the word of God is primary. , for disciples and disciple making, , we believe it's primary, not only to the growth of a disciple, , but also to helping those other, those helping them as they grow, be able to help others grow, right? So there's lots of data around that, but we bring it back to Jesus and we pri try to bring everything that we're doing back to Jesus, which doesn't sound controversial, but not everybody is there.
We believe that Jesus's way of making disciples is the best. And so that's where we wanna start everything. And we believe that in disciple making and in discipleship, if we look at what Jesus did and we try to do what he did, we will get where Jesus got. Now in the church, that's not exactly the way things normally go.
What I've observed in churches is that there's a separation between the teachings of Jesus and the methods of Jesus. And so they use Jesus to teach morals, to teach those things, but they don't use it to teach how to do things. So we look at Jesus's life and we look at his life in scripture. You know, in 89 chapters of the Gospels, Jesus is quoting Old Testament scripture 84 times from 70 different Old Testament chapters.
And so if you look at him, and you say, well, I wanna be like that guy. And he's called me to be like him. I can't be like him if I'm not deep in the word. Not only looking at it and examining it, but applying it to my heart and then allowing that to penetrate me and move me to obedience through application.
And so we, again, the navigators have a long history, and I'm sure the listeners don't know all the history, so I'm gonna sprinkle some things in. But, , our founder, Dawson Troutman, really believed that scripture memory is what brought him to faith. So he was in a Sunday school, like a vacation Bible school.
His situation, he was around. , 14 years old and he was memorized in the scripture for his team so they could get points for this vacation Bible school thing. And he wanted to believe her. He was there for a girl and whatever, but , he did that. He was the only one memorized them, he noticed. , but he did it, got his points.
The week ended ended. It was years later that he was working a job in a lumber yard that the Holy Spirit brought these verses to bear on his heart and he began to understand what they really meant and surrendered himself to Jesus through that. So he would point back to that. And that's kind of how deep it is in our history.
We still use, , something called the topical memory system, which currently is 60 verses arranged topically. That what I've found in my own life and the life of others that I've trained is that when you have those 60 verses, two things happen. First, you start to feel equipped to minister because they're topical.
So when these topics come at you, whether in your life or in the life of someone you're trying to help, you have something to give to them from scripture. The other thing that happens is people around you think you have the whole Bible memorized. Which is kind of strange, but it's, it's 60 verses, but they're always like, do you have the whole, Nope, it's just 60 verses.
I promise you it's not that many. , and then, but it helps people see, no, we could do this, we can memorize enough scripture and we can see the benefit of it in our lives personally as we apply them, but also in the lives of others as we share them with others. And so, , from, from the beginning of the navigators, the scripture memory has been an emphasis and something that continues to bear fruit.
For us as we minister and make disciples, and we're really failing the next generation by not allowing them when they're young and are really capable of memorizing great quantities of scripture easily to memorize scripture. , so when we are working with churches, , we are kind of by the side of the pastor and the church.
Right. And so we will advocate for things like this, but it's never our decision, never our call. Sure. And so we try to help them leverage those great resources that are out there. Iana being one of those for kids programs of using these sorts of principles for training up and equipping the next generation of disciple makers.
One of the things that we proactively do as we're helping church leaders is we help them put everything on the table that their church. So all the programs, all the events, all the, the values that they hold and we say, okay, well how does this fit with disciple making? Because what we've learned is that we have to align everything in the church.
To build disciples and make disciples. And if they're identifying something that they're currently doing that's either not making disciples or not effectively making disciples, they have to deal with that. And the way they deal with it is, well, we either gotta change it or get rid of it and replace it with something else.
So when you say, when you say making disciples, are you saying stuff I need to know, practices I need to develop, or a change in who I am? Yeah, maybe all of those, but we tend to get it backwards, right? So, , we believe that in Matthew four 19, we not only see the calling of Jesus to become a disciple. Come follow me.
Jesus said, I'll make you fishers of men. Right? We also see the job description of a disciple. And so the job description is to follow Jesus, to surrender ourselves, to be changed by Jesus and be committed to the mission of Jesus. And so when I'm talking about making disciples, I'm talking about making people like that, that are committed to following Jesus.
Committed to being changed by Jesus and committed to the mission of Jesus. What we see oftentimes in modern day Christianity is we have believed the lie that if we educate ourselves, we can educate ourselves to maturity, and that's not what the Bible teaches. The Bible actually teaches that listening to scripture and not applying it is dangerous.
Right. And that we don't, we don't think about that or talk about that, but James 1 22 talks about not only listening to the word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. Right, and so it's this difference between just learning and listening and applying. So we don't think that education leads to transformation.
We believe that education plus application over time is what leads to transformation. And these are huge paradigm things that in churches, You would be hard pressed to find a conservative evangelical church that would say, oh yeah, you don't need to apply stuff. That's okay. Just learn it. They're not gonna tell you that, but they're operating as if those things are true.
By the way they preach, by the emphases that they have within their church ministries. And so that's a big part of what we're doing is we're walking alongside pastors, is we're just kind of pressing on some of these things and asking questions and saying, okay, well if this is true and you agree with this, why is it that 95% of your sermon is about doctrine?
And 5% or less is about applic. And they're like, oh. And so we begin to just try to shift some of these things to align them with who Jesus was and what he did, because again, we believe that his way of making disciples is the best way. Justin, I love what you're saying about the transformation of life as well as helping the pastors begin to think about how they're teaching and coaching the people who are in their congregation.
So, . The question I really, really want to ask you as navigators church minister as Justin Grat, the guy who's out there in the field with these pastors, what kind of a gap do you see between what we would call biblical discipleship and contemporary western discipleship? Do you use the term unhealthy? A little while ago in church, , the church functions traditionally right in our day and time.
The church is systematic in. Right. And so there's things that happen because it's the life of the church. , one of the things I think we need to get back to as a church is loving one another. Right? And disciple making is loving one another, right? That's Jesus said. That's how they will know that you're my disciples if you love one another.
I was with, , a group of leaders This. . , and when I say leaders, I mean a mix of couple elders. , mostly the 20% of people in that church that do 80% of the work, you know, the types, right? , so I was with these people and they've been trying to team together as disciple makers for the past two years.
And what I've noticed in them, , through talking to the pastors I'm helping with this process is that they're not really a. And they say they're a team, and a lot of times we say we're loving one another, but our words don't match our reality. And so I, I had them take this quiz and I just made up some questions and, and asked them some questions like, you know, how many people on this team do you know their name, the name of the spouse that they're married to?
, how many of these people have you prayed with outside of a team or, or church function? , these sorts of questions. And it was very apparent quickly. None of those things were happening or they were happening at a very shallow level. , this is consistent with most of my experience in local churches as we're trying to build disciple making cultures, is people are relating to one another and what I call system ships.
Now, I don't expect you're familiar that term cause I made it up. But system ships is when we relate to each other within a system. It could be religious, it could be non-religious, it could be your workplace, could be whatever. And you have friends, quote unquote friends in these places. But your friendship never gets outside of those places.
And so as long as you exist in the system or the organization together, you have rapport and relationship. But anytime you step outside of. You don't have any. And so what I find is when we start talking with people about loving each other and making disciples of those who, , don't yet know Jesus, making disciples of those who already know Jesus in that church, there's a disconnect or a gap between what I'm talking about and what they're hearing.
Cuz what they're hearing is, okay, when I'm in the system, I need to pay some attention to them. But I'm actually trying to say, no, I want you to be their. and I said that to this group. I said, I'm actually talking about you being friends, not just relating in church stuff. And they're like, oh, I think that's a key point.
There's no sense of community come to church and they go away and, and, and when they're in church, they're perfectly pleasant. , right. But I don't know anything about. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It is something we, we get into in the churches that we help, , because we just have. . Right. Because it is such a big problem.
And I think not only was it true in, in your time when you were younger, that we're in an institutional world. We still are, and we're born into institutions and hospitals most of the time. A lot of us will die in the institution of hospice. I mean, and everywhere in between. We're moving in and out of these institutions and what Jesus did.
Institutions aren't bad. They're helpful in some ways. , but Jesus didn't, wasn't confined in his relationships to institutions, and I don't think we can be either. But a big part of why I think Christians have a real hard time getting disciple making is because they don't have a context for it. Right? When Jesus stood at the, , when he delivered the Great Commission, and he looked out to his disciples and he said, therefore, go and make disciples of all Nations, baptizing them, name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I've commanded.
every one of his disciples knew what he was talking about. There wasn't a doubt in his mind. It was really clear what he was asking them to do because their minds would've been flooded with memories, with experiences that they'd had with him. Right. And we go and we preach to, , a congregation and we might say those same words and they have no clue what we're talking about.
Because, yeah, because what we do is we wanna. In the ways that we've grown and the way these people have grown in the church has been with almost without exception, is within that institution going to things like structured bible studies, structured life groups, et cetera, et cetera. And when we come and say, no, this is life on life, this is a lifestyle.
It just doesn't compute because they haven't experienced. And so those are huge hurdles that we have to get over. Folks, when we come back, we're gonna continue a conversation with Justin Grat, with Navigator's Church Ministry, and this is a fascinating conversation about leadership, discipleship, and the culture of churches.
We hope all of you as pastors, small group leaders, elders, deacons, committee people, trustees who who are involved in ministry, don't hear a conversation like this as a condemnation, as a criticism, or as an. We love you and we're simply trying to have a conversation as friends, as counselors, as coaches.
Justin has a lot of experience. Raymond's got a lot of experience. My business experience is showing the same thing, so as you listen to us when we come back, Raymond will pitch the question again. We want to probe where this seems to be going as a culture of a church. But please hear us. We are praying for you.
We are on your team. We'll be right back as the disciple dilemma continues with leadership and discipleship with Justin Gra. Thanks. Folks, we're back with Justin Grat with Navigator's, church Ministry. Raymond and I are talking with him about leadership, discipleship, and culture, and I think Raymond's trying to put me on the hot seat.
I am, I am. , Justin's been advocating that we go beyond being church members who are all, , conversed to Jesus Christ that sit in the same pew every week. He's saying We really need to be friends with one another, have a relationship with one another. And you and I've had conversations about friendship, and you've had some pretty strong ideas about friendship.
I don't know how we get people to make friends, but I, you should pitch the question to Justin. How do we make friends? And you should really start out by framing. What do you mean by friendship? Yeah, I, I'm really, , interested in hearing Justin's perspective on this because if you really boil down the conversations we're having with people, the one continuously missing ingredient that we're hearing in discipleship, Justin, is relationship.
Friendship. Whether it's a non-believer or a believer, I'm not making you a project. I'm not here just to have an institutional friendship with you. I really wanna live life alongside a wing man or a wing woman or somebody who's with me to be able to move into the fray of life to serve the Lord Jesus Christ.
What do you recommend? How are you shaking the tree a little bit for your pastor friends and your church friends on this issue of friendship and relat. . One of the biggest challenges to friendship and our culture is time, right? So a lot of people don't have time. , they have committed their time to other things and they don't know how to use the time that they're doing things committed to also to do something else of coming along, people alongside people relationally.
And part of that's just cuz many of us aren't relationally attuned. I mean, I am not a naturally relational person. , and I've had to really work hard, , too. Myself in this area, right? The value valuing people, valuing depth of relationship, and as a young disciple, that's something that the, the man who is discipling me really helped me a lot with, , with pastors.
A big part of it is, , there's two big, I would say two big obstacles for an average pastor. One is whether or not he believes that he should have friendships within the church that he's pastor. Sure. Right. So some of them are taught in seminaries. This is not something you should do. You should keep an arms length distance between you and the people you're serving.
You are not their friends. You are their pastor, and that means different things to them. Now, I don't believe that because I don't see that in the scriptures anywhere. That's certainly not what Jesus did. Jesus explicitly said, you are my friends right to the disciples. And so I try to help pastors with that.
We start with that first obstacle. The other big obstacle they have is time, right? Because pastors time is extremely valuable. , they're stretched in lots of different ways, and so we have to figure out how are we gonna take things off of the plate of the pastor so that he has time for a relat. and sometimes the pastor can get there on his own.
Other times the the elders need to be brought into the conversation and say, listen guys, do you wanna have a pastor who doesn't have friends? Or, which is often the case, do you want to have a pastor that doesn't have any non-Christian friends? Do you think Jesus would be happy with either one of these realities?
And if he would not be, then what are you guys gonna do about it? Because the pastor, in some ways, often needs to hear from the elder. No, this is a priority and we will take this and this off your plate so that you have time to spend time with people and just be a person. There's some pastors I work with that have been pastoring without friends or real community for so long that when we start going down the road of disciple making, they don't know how to do it.
And what they don't know how to do is approach somebody, not what their pastor had. But just as a person and invite them in to do something with them. And that's a real challenge and a reality from years and decades of pastoring and ministering in a context in which they can never take that pastor hat off and just be pastor.
Just be Joe, not be Pastor Joe. Just be Joe. , they can't do it because they've been taught not to. And so those are the, those are really the two biggest obstacles that we try to help pastors move through in this particular area of building real friendships with people that they are supposedly in community with.
Right, and it goes back to a disciple meeting principle, I'm sure you guys have talked about it on this podcast, is we can't ask people to do what we're not willing to. You can't lead it if you're not living it. Yeah. And so if they're gonna tell people to, to love others, but they're not loving others, then it just doesn't work.
It just doesn't work. One of the, one of the key things I, in, in my, , in my professional life with the dear Christian friends I work with in a really heavy core industrial setting. I have been, , I have had some progress at making some real contributions, mainly through the friends I've made. And so what I tell young people is the way you become effective is by making friends.
And you do that by helping people solve problems. And one of the fundamental ways that you develop friendships is in the conversations you have with people, you're always trying to identify something you can do for them. and something you can do with them where you can get them engaged in helping you be more effective.
And so one of the things you're trying to do is reduce how much stuff you have to do by making a friend that can work with you and get a lot of that crap done. And so basically you start out by saying, let me do something nice for you, because next week when we talk, I'm gonna try to identify something you can do alongside me.
so that I can be a lot more effective, but I'm not really doing it because I'm trying to be more effective. I'm trying to do it because I want us to be friends. I want us to have a real relationship. So that's the way I look at it. Dennis uses the example of an IHOP friend. , have you ever heard that term?
I have not, Dennis, you gotta fill me in on this . Well, you know, I think the whole point about relationships being tough and challenging in American culture is true. I mean, just look at me trying to get along with Raymond. I mean, could anybody imagine trying to get along with Raymond? It's so hard. It's a Christian ministry.
it's, yeah, it's my outreach man. It's my outreach. The, the, the, the joke that we use. If you live in the South is, do you have any 2:00 AM Waffle House friends. Waffle House is the ubiquitous 24 hour day, seven day a week restaurant. And the question among disciples is, can you call this person up at 2:00 AM and say, Justin, meet me at the Waffle House at 2:00 AM.
Outback, bring a shovel, don't ask questions, and that friend will be there for you. Right? That's, that's this person who's alongside you in life. And Raymond and I are really, , just a big amen Justin for what you're talking about, because the lone wolf need nothing from nobody in Americana. Christianity has designed it so that the pastor is taught, like you said, stay away from them cuz they'll get you fired.
And everybody else, you need to be the incredible Hulk. You don't need nobody else. You do your own thing, your own way. Which right leaves us absolutely outside the biblical model, doesn't it? So many love one another, right? And we can't love from a distance, right? We have to be close enough. And one of the, one of my favorite passages on this is the passage, , I believe it's second Corinthians.
I mix it up, but where it talks about how. We are the fragrance of Christ, the aroma of Christ to those who are being saved and to those who are perishing. And one of the questions I ask myself, and I ask others sometimes is, are you close enough where others can smell you? Right. So I go out into my driveway and I'm getting my mail and I see my neighbor.
And as an introvert, many times I see my neighbor outside and I'm like, oh man, I, when I run inside, cause I'm not really interested in talking to them. , this is my unredeemed nature, so Right. I might just wave across the driveway. Hey, and then the Holy Spirit will bring up that verse. And Justin, is he close enough to smell?
Nope. Okay. So then I start walking over. Right. Start walking over and engage him in a conversation. Right? And then that's the, that's the practical stuff, Raymond, that you're talking about, right? Is how do we do that? Right? And what are the convictions that have to be present in a disciple so that they're willing to break out of the societal norms of just waving and saying hi from a hundred feet.
What are those things that are gonna move us to get close enough where we can, where they can smell us and they can see Jesus in our lives and we can love them and see the re the mess of their life and they can see that Jesus wants to be in their life too. My Mike Henry, Mike Henry, when we interviewed him, follower, one guy really, really was.
Really wise guy, he does, , mission trips where you stay in your job and going to work is your mission field. Mm-hmm. And he has three things that he tells people to do. One is God called you to that job. That's why you're there. Okay? You may not enjoy that calling at the moment, but that's your calling in life.
And because he's called you there, those people are there by the providence of God for you to be a disciple to Amen. And cause that every morning you should pick one of them out and pray for. and then two, every day you need to do something unexpectedly nice and personal for someone to show the love of Christ to somebody.
Yeah, and then word. When they finally ask you where, why you're so weird, you need to tell them. Using I language once I was blind. Now I see not you can't see you dummy. You need to come to Jesus . And I thought this stuff was just brilliant. And I especially like the first two. That's the way you make friends because God so loved the world.
Not that he told us a lot of good stuff, but that he gave us his only son. And the way we love other people is by finding things that we can give them that means something to us. Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love. That's that picture in the The everyday person. Right. That's going to work day in and day out. Yes.
These are the people that we're trying to reach. These are the people that we're trying to help grow to a place where they have a vital connection to Jesus. Correct. And it's just coming out of them in so many ways that they wanna spread it to others. And that they have real joy. They don't feel like that.
If they were serious about their Christianity, they'd quit their job and start a Bible study. They'd recognize that God called me where I am, and I can have great joy in sharing Jesus with other people. Yeah. Amen. Okay, you too. So here's where it gets really interesting. It's time. It is time to show the hand that you're holding in the cards, right.
So we've, we've had this lovely conversation about how there are a lot of challenges in the Christian communities in America. There's a lot of institutionalism, there's a lack of relationship. . Now what we're gonna do, folks, drum roll. We're gonna let Justin give us the two step answer that completely solves this problem inside churches.
So Justin , what we want to know, and Raymond will probably, Dennis, I think it's time for me to go actually, , we, we want you guys at navigators church ministry to tell us now the secret sauce. It's a white canvas. You're walking in to start a startup church. Financial constraints are not an issue for you.
You've got a young pastor who's alongside you saying, whatever you say, coach. I'm gonna go do it, Justin. Yep. Let's crank up a disciple making culture. Go . Okay. , first of all, we can't do it right, so only the Holy Spirit can do this, and we are working and partnering with him, right? We have learned some things that, I kind of think of it like a meteorologist, right?
We can, we can see what the conditions need to be, where it's likely gonna rain, but we can't cause it to rain. And so when we go into a church, when we start to help pastors, our attitude is we want to come and serve. And I love what you said before the break about we are not slamming the church. We are friends of the church.
We are part of the church. We are the church. And for me, and N C M. , our hearts go out to pastors because I've been in conversations with pastors time and time and time again where they're asking me for help with disciple making. How do I build this culture in my church? And I ask them to paint me a picture of what, what do you want for your church?
And they're painting this picture of disciple making, people coming to know him, impacting their neighbors, and impacting people at their workplace. People coming into the church that are new to Jesus. And then I say, that is really awesome. It sounds like you're talking about making disciples. They're like, yes.
And I say, well, tell me how it's going in your church right now. And they, they drop their head most of the time, or they shake their head side to side. It's not going so well. And then I say, okay, okay. Well help me understand what training have you had in disciple making? You've been to seminary, right? Yep.
Been to seminary. Some of 'em have PhDs behind their name. And I say, tell me about the classes that you had and how to make discipl. And they said, we didn't have any classes like that. And I say, wait a second. You went to school for how many years And they trained you for this job. Right. And this job is making disciples what you just told me.
Yep. And you haven't had any training? No. And then I can put myself in their shoes and I think all of us can and say what a hard place to. And so our heart is a heart of coming alongside and helping pastors, cuz we don't have all the answers, but we have some experience in making disciples. So the first thing we do with a pastor, to your question, we ask the pastor if he knows how to make a disciple.
And if he says yes, we say, well, who have you made into a disciple? What's their. and then, and we start from there because we can't have many disciples before we have one disciple. We can't have a culture of disciple making if we have a leader that doesn't understand how to make disciples. And oftentimes the reality is they don't know how.
And so we walk with them and help them understand by discipling them without using that language. Now, most of the time the disciple will reflect back, Hey, you've been discipling me. Sometimes they'll tell their congregation, Justin's been discipling me . And I say, Hey, I never said that. They're like, I know what you're doing.
Okay. , and so yeah, I am helping them learn how to make disciples. And as they get. What they do then is they go and start discipling someone or a couple someones in their church. Once I see them doing that, and I see the heart change, now we're ready to have the conversation about how do we build a disciple making culture.
And the first step in building a disciple making culture is building a disciple making foundation. So I wrote an , ebook about this. It's currently being put into a, a larger book with Tindale. , but the foundation of a disciple making culture is a core team of disciple makers. Now, a lot of times, churches don't think about.
They first think about what are the programs, what are the structures, how do we need to change certain things in the church? So that's focused on disciple making. But if we don't get the order right, then the whole thing crumbles a few years later. And church after church after church has seen this, and I'm betting that some of your listeners are resonating with this because what most churches do when they want to start bringing Disciple making in, is they find a great disciple making curriculum and they get some people to test it.
and they get them involved in it, right? Normally in group stuff, okay, we're gonna do this curriculum, and then after you do this, your commitment is you're gonna go and do it with another group. And so we're gonna multiply like that and all that looks wonderful. And it works great normally for three to five years until something happens.
And what happens is everybody's gone through it, that's gonna go through it in the church. And then instead of multiplying the groups, the groups begin to recede and there's fewer and fewer and fewer. And the pastor and the people that launch this , program out are back to square one. And they either think that program didn't work, or disciple making doesn't work.
We need to find the next one that's gonna work. But the actual reality is those things worked as well as they could work. The problem is you didn't have a disciple making team. You didn't have a foundation. And so again, back to Jesus, right? Jesus built a team of disciple makers. When we look at Paul and what he did, Paul went into these various cities with a team.
We see it real clear in First Thessalonians one where it talks about Paul and his team go into Thea and people begin to watch Paul and this. How they're interacting with one another, what they're doing. And they meet Jesus through interacting with Paul and his team and talking and watching and looking and examining.
And then they begin to imitate Paul and his team, and then other people begin to imitate those people. And so we get these concentric circles of imitation that starts to happen, but it all starts with a disciple making team. So early in our conversation when I was highlighting the difference between group and team, there is a huge.
and most of that book that I wrote is on how do you build a core team of disciple makers Because it's not easy because there are two goals that you have to, you have to hit two targets. The first is you have to have everyone on the team become a disciple maker. The second one is they need to become a team.
Both of those are real hard. . But once you do that, and typically we help churches do that, it takes about a year of really focused, intense work. The pastor's doing it with his team. I'm alongside the pastor helping him and coaching him through obstacles. Once that happens, now we're ready for the team to begin to model and begin to shape the broader culture.
How many generations or chains of disciples are present in the church that have three links or more. And so we begin to see are those things growing? Because if those things are growing, we're actually building life on life disciple making that's moving generationally in the church. So those are really good and really healthy, all those things I just mentioned.
But if we stop there, we haven't built a culture of disciple making because everything I've talked about is inward so far. . And so the next piece we have to add on and to help them to see is how do we impact the local community around us? If disciple making stays within the local church, it will die.
It's just a matter of time. And so we have to get the people of the church focused and moving outward towards the lost and engaged in the mission that Jesus gave us, which is helping those who don't know him come to know him. Jesus said he came to seek in disables loss. Well, that has to be a part of our mission and a big part of our mission for a church.
I feel I'm talking a lot, but I get really excited about this because I have seen these things happen and pastors move from a place of frustration and just being willing, ready to quit thinking about quitting because they're so frustrated that they're not seeing real transformation. . But once they embrace the principles of Jesus's ministry, then they start to apply it to their lives and help their people start to apply those things.
Whole cultures of churches change and communities are really impacted. That was, that was terrific. And I, I did download your ebook, so I want you to tell everybody, tell our listeners about your website, your blog. Yep. Website, your, your podcast, but certainly how to download your e. Yeah, so all that stuff can be found at my website with the, which is justin gra.com.
, hopefully you guys can put in the show notes. It's two t's at the end. The rest is just how it sounds. Justin gra.com. , I have the ebook there. , I blog regularly, , on disciple making topics. And , yeah, there's also a podcast, which you could add to this one, but don't replace this one. This one's doing awesome things too, so
Justin, it's just been wonderful listening to you with the enthusiasm and the clarity of what it takes to really make disciples and really, I mean, it's co , consistent with our views, especially Dennis's book. on the fact that we need leaders, but we need leaders who are actual disciples, who are discipling other disciples and creating a real group of leaders, not necessarily full-time staff people, but genuine Christian disciples who are living out life in Jesus.
And, and your insights have just been terrific. So thank you for joining us. It's been a delight. Look forward to having you. Sometime soon so we can extend the conversation. It's been great fun. Yeah. Thank you guys. It's been a blast. Folks, we've been talking to Justin Grat with Navigator's Church Ministry.
What a great conversation about how pastors should have hope and really a great. Process of thinking about they are no longer supposed to be the manager, just slugging it at an institution, but disciples, making disciples. Justin's had some great insights on culture, on purpose, on a path forward, and well, , make sure that that is available.
As Raymond said, , in the graphics, you can see that as we go along. We want to ask all of you to consider taking a look at our website, the disciple dilemma.com. Facebook. We're under disciple dilemma.com, as is YouTube, as in Instagram as in rumbly to talk about the fact that we've been, discipleship's been hacked for 18th centuries.
We've been stuffing the long recipe in a non-biblical recipe about discipleship. Doesn't work. We heard Justin talk about that today. Please take a look, give us a follow, give us a subscribe. And I know that Justin would appreciate that on his website and on his YouTube and on all the processes that we see him setting up with navigator's, church ministry, because it helps all of us get the word out in a very proud of digital marketplace, that discipleship matters.
Christ called us to it. And as always, folks, thanks for listening.