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Discipleship Strategies Essay

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This class has been such a blessing to my life, and it is an honor to create this discipleship strategy for my future ministry. It is the job of the leader of the church to evaluate the spiritual growth of the church, and one of the ways to do this is by measuring expansion growth. This is a tricky subject because there are a lot of ways to define growth. There is transfer growth, which is the swapping of church members from a different congregation. This type of growth is good, but not the best type of growth. While many churches want to see their numbers increase, creating a church that takes away people from surrounding churches is not an ideal term for growth, because no new life change is happening. Tender growth is where people begin …show more content…

Lawless, is “an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other discipleship in order to encourage, equip and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ.” This concept is vital to the growth of the church, because without discipleship, a church can grow to well over a 1,000 members, yet still be full of spiritual infants. Discipleship allows a church to grow spiritually, as it takes those believers and use their gifts so that Christ might be glorified. This is modeled well in Ephesians 4:11-13, but only in certain translations of the Bible. In the KJV Bible, Ephesians 4:11-13 implies by comma usage (that is not in the original manuscripts) that evangelists, pastors, and teachers are alone to do the work of Christ. In many KJV only churches (the fact that they only use this translation is a problem in itself), they take this verse to imply that only the trained professionals are allowed to minister to the congregation. The Catholic Church does the same thing, as the clergy does not need to do ministry unless they feel called to be a trained minister. The ESV takes this verse and does not put the commas in the text, showing from Scripture that all of Christ’s body can work together to see more people come into a relationship with God. This can be seen abundantly in many TV churches today, such as the Summit. When people join the Summit, they are told in the membership class that they must serve the body of Christ in some way, shape, or form. To be a part of the Summit and not serve on a greeting, prayer, or any service team is in direct violation of their church covenant. They take the ESV translation of the Bible and use it in the life of the church, so that the body of Christ can serve Christ. This also will naturally get people more involved in the life of the church, and will allow them to feel more connected. The church best serves the people who serve the church, because they walk together through

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