by Gary Reinecke | Aug 19, 2021 | Disciplemaking |
If you are one of our followers who has taken the Disciple Coach Quiz, processed the results with us and passed it along to your own disciples, you might be wondering what you can do next. How can you utilize your Quiz results even further? Discipleship is a life-long journey, and wherever you are on that path, there is always a next step; a way to grow and bear more fruit, a way to deepen your relationship with God and others.
If you still haven’t taken our FREE Disciple Coach Quiz, CLICK HERE.
For those who are looking for a next step, we are offering a webinar on the 5 habits of a Disciple Coach. This webinar, like our inaugural webinar in November 2020, will be led by InFocus’s Executive Director, Gary Reinecke, and long-time InFocus partner Micah Dodson. This webinar is a great way to follow up on your newfound insights after you have taken the quiz and can help further deepen your understanding of Discipleship and hone in on the habits of a Disciple Coach. We will help you clarify your missional values, activate prayer, make relational connections and strategic partnerships, while learning how to create your own Disciple making Cycle.
Check out the 5 Disciple Coach Habits training coming up October 11 – CLICK HERE!
In addition to the 5-hour webinar, we are also offering personal triad sessions following the webinar. In these sessions Gary or Micah will work closely with you and another Disciple Coach on your team, processing the webinar, working through your personal strengths and weaknesses, and discover your own unique and most effective way of making disciples. These five sessions of fifty-five minutes will help you to develop yourself and the future leaders around you!
5 Disciple Coach Habits webinar – Monday, October 11 from 10-3 PST
Cost: $250.00
The full package includes the webinar AND triad sessions:
Cost: $475.00
by Gary Reinecke | Aug 12, 2021 | Disciplemaking |
God has given us a personal mission to make disciple in our life in our own unique way, however… we don’t need to tackle that mission on our own! The Lord created us to be relational beings. We are meant to help each other strengthen our faith and grow as people. We need each other, especially when it comes to working through our mission. Partnerships keep us on the paths we’re meant to be, pursuing the mission that God gave us. When alone, it is easy to wander and to get distracted or discouraged.
Jesus understood the importance of working with others. He sent His disciples out in pairs to minister together, and encouraged them to debrief their experience when they returned. Jesus understood the importance of learning through experience, obedience and accountability, and knew they needed to learn to rely on each other because he wouldn’t be with them forever. Jesus trusted that they had what they needed to further the mission to make more and better disciples: strategic partnerships with one another and the Holy Spirit. Proverbs 27:17 tells us, “as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” We can, and should, rely on each other, trust each other and grow together.
Accountability is essential in making and coaching disciples, and strategic partnerships answer the question: “Who will help me stay on mission?” Finding others around you who are making and coaching disciples as well, can help. Like the original disciples, having a partner to debrief experiences, discuss struggles and, most importantly, hold each other accountable. These relationships provide accountability, with grace, to the important actions that will support the newest disciples on their spiritual journey. Accountability helps the disciple coach keep the main thing the main thing, learn from real experience and stay in motion.
There are many ways to practice accountability. You can practice on your own (a great skill to build, but the hardest to hold yourself to), with a coach and with God.
- Accountability with yourself
- How am I prioritizing life events as a disciple coach?
- What am I not doing that I know I should be doing?
- Accountability with a partner
- What do you do to process missed opportunities as a disciple coach?
- How do you celebrate your progress when you act as a disciple coach?
- What do you do to process setbacks with a disciple when their good intentions don’t produce the intended fruit?
- What progress are you observing with the disciples you are coaching on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis?
- Accountability with God
- What are you learning about God?
- How do you know when you are doing the things God has called you to do as a disciple coach?
If you still haven’t taken our FREE Disciple Coach Quiz, CLICK HERE.
Check out the 5 Disciple Coach Habits training coming up October 11 – CLICK HERE!
by Gary Reinecke | Aug 6, 2021 | Uncategorized |
In Jesus’ ministry, he always met people where they were on their journey towards the Lord. Look at the disciples; before He asked his disciples to follow Him, each disciple was at a different place in their lives and their faith… wherever they were, that is exactly where Jesus started discipling them. He began the discipleship process before they were even aware of it; in the harvest.
We all have our own story of how we came to follow Jesus, and we will have taken different paths to reach where we are today. All our journeys are unique to who God designed us to be; but there are certain critical elements that are always the same in the process; that is the discipleship cycle. We can see clearly that Jesus had a method in his mission to make disciples:
- STEP 1 – “I do – you watch.”
- STEP 2 – “You do – I watch.”
- STEP 3 – “You do – someone else watches.”
Jesus used this simple method to make disciples who made disciples. He understood that everything He did was reproduced in the lives of His disciples from the day he met them. Jesus’ mission was to catalyze disciple making movements through his disciples. He modeled the inner work of being a disciple and the outer work of making disciples. This cycle is the key to multiplying the Kingdom of God. It means we are making disciples that will make disciples, who will make more disciples.
Real-life Journey
My friend Glenn shared the following about his journey:
I have several friends that I consider to be accountability partners. They help me grow in my faith and hold myself to the standards that God would want of me. We spend a lot of our focus on discipleship and how to become better disciple coaches. As I became more aware of, and committed to, developing relationships with people who don’t yet have a spiritual connection with Christ, we were thrilled to see people growing in faith and being added to our discipleship group. It was exciting to see this progress, yet although this process was reproducible, our efforts were only additive. We shifted our approach to the framework of a “cycle” and are now seeing our efforts multiply. For example, one of our initial group members is branching out to start a Hispanic discipleship team, reaching a group of people that would be almost impossible for me to reach. It is exciting to see where the multiplication effect takes us next!
Reflection Questions:
- Who have you shared your disciple-making cycle with in the last 90 days?
- If you haven’t shared your disciple-making cycle recently, what is getting in the way?
- What changes do you need to make to your disciple-making cycle?
- How transferable is your discipleship cycle?
- Who have you discipled that is using your cycle with other disciple coaches?
- What elements need to be refined further or added to make your cycle more transferable?
If you still haven’t taken our FREE Disciple Coach Quiz, CLICK HERE.
Check out the 5 Disciple Coach Habits training coming up October 11 – CLICK HERE!
by Gary Reinecke | Jul 30, 2021 | Uncategorized |
Relational connections are really the foundation of discipleship. God created us as relational beings, we thrive when making connections, and are at our best when we feel supported and loved. A relationship between a disciple and their teacher can be a life-long and powerful connection, but it always just starts with simply getting to know each other. From the relationships we make, we can build true friendships and from friendships, discipleship can grow.
So let’s think about our friendships: When it comes to our Christian friends versus our non-Christian friends, it is easy to emphasize the importance of one over the other. What normally happens when a new Christian follows Jesus, is their relationships with “outsiders” begin to shrink while their relationships with “insiders” begins to expand. We only have a finite amount of time and it’s easiest to spend it with the people who already fit within our normal routines. When looking to disciple others, it seems natural and easy to draw from those who fit neatly into your life already. It’s all well and good to draw from your Christian community (we all need a mentor at certain points in our lives!) but where we really need to begin is outside of the walls of the church; with our friends who don’t fit so neatly into our lives. After all, we can’t share the good news with people who already know it!
If you realize that you have very few non-Christian friends, you can start with building meaningful relationships with people that God has already placed in your life. We should intentionally be looking to disciple people different from us; people who believe differently, and live different lifestyles. These connections build bridges, not just between yourself and your disciple, but between larger communities; plus we have more of a chance for growth within ourselves, than if we stick to what we know. As we begin to enter a less familiar world and build relationships with people who make choices we might not choose, who think in ways we don’t, we can fall into judgement very quickly. It is necessary to remember we all have our own path to Jesus. We’ve all struggled with doubt, we’ve all given into temptations. We are not there to judge. We are there to seek to understand. All healthy relationships are built on respect and authenticity. Building relationships is not a job or task; it’s just about letting God work through you in the natural relationships you already have.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Who are you intentionally forming discipleship relationships with in your life?
- Where in your life could you develop authentic relationships with not-yet Christians?
- What skills do you need to develop and apply to move your relationship or friendship forward to discipleship?
If you still haven’t taken our FREE Disciple Coach Quiz, CLICK HERE.
Check out the 5 Disciple Coach Habits training coming up October 11 – CLICK HERE!
by Gary Reinecke | Jul 23, 2021 | Disciplemaking |
One of the most vital and often overlooked elements of discipleship is prayer. Of course, as Christians, we know that prayer is important; it’s significance is repeated over and over in the Bible, by our pastors and our entire Christian community, but it can be so easy to fall into the pattern of passive prayer: that is prayer we do out of obligation or habit, without thinking or connecting.
Learn about the Disciple Coach Quiz – CLICK HERE!
For many of us, prayer happens at particular times of the day; before bed or dinner; maybe you pray first thing in the morning. Maybe you even carve out time intentionally every now and then, but even in your intentional time, it can begin to feel like a chore; some words to say before moving on with your day. We need to remember that prayer is our deepest and most personal way to connect to Jesus. It’s our lifeline to God and can be one of our strongest tools for finding disciples; we pray for them to come into our lives and trust that God will send them our way.
If you still haven’t taken our FREE Disciple Coach Quiz, take it HERE!
Incredible things can happen when we turn passive prayer into active prayer; that is, prayer done with intention, with engagement and love for our Lord and for the people in our lives. I had a friend who had been intentionally building relationships with non-Christians, but there hadn’t been any fruit in quite a while. After a brief conversation with him he stopped and prayed for those he was in relationship with. That day one of the individuals called him out of the blue and wanted to meet to talk about this “Jesus thing”. It is easy to just slide these and other examples into the coincidence bucket, but the Bible shows us the power of prayer and its ability to change lives.
This next week, here are a few things you can pray for to jumpstart your intentional time with the Lord:
- Pray for yourself… that you can be who God needs you to be. That you will be blessed with a heart and mind for the lost, that translates to compassion and action.
- Prayer for those God is leading your way. We can pray they are open to the touch of the Holy Spirit and responsive to our actions.
- Pray for two random people you encounter each day. Pray for God to fill them with wisdom and understanding: for the things of God. Pray that God uses you to love them, in whatever capacity he desires (from a prayer and a smile to becoming a friend). They may be a Christian, they may not, but they are all God’s children.
Also coming up: a new webinar on 5 Disciple Coach Habits. It will take place Monday, September 13 from 10-3 PST. Get tickets HERE!
Look into our full webinar package with five triad sessions, following the webinar. Get tickets HERE!
