The Foundation of a Disciple Making Culture (feat Justin Gravitt)

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Building a Strong Foundation for Disciple Making Cultures - Workshop with Justin Gravitt

In this workshop, Justin Gravitt from Navigators Church Ministries dives into the critical process of developing a sustainable disciple making culture within the church. Drawing on over a decade of experience, Justin explains the importance of having a strong foundation and shares actionable steps to grow and maintain it. He uses the analogy of a Jenga tower to illustrate how foundational weaknesses can cause a disciple making culture to collapse. Throughout the session, Justin emphasizes the importance of forming a core team and making disciple making a foundational part of church culture, not just an additional program. He also answers practical questions about how to start and sustain this initiative, ensuring that both leaders and participants are equipped to become effective disciple makers.

Check out Discipleship.org for resources on disciple-making: https://discipleship.org/resources/ 

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Key Takeaways

00:00 Introduction and Workshop Overview

00:51 The Importance of Actionable Steps

01:49 Building a Foundation for Disciple Making

02:33 Jenga and Disciple Making Culture

04:14 Challenges in Disciple Making

11:32 Creating a Core Team

17:13 Common Vision and Team Dynamics

25:02 Relational Resilience in Teams

28:09 Navigating Team Conflict

28:37 The Importance of Relational Depth

29:08 Endurance in Team Building

32:55 Three Barriers to Culture Change

37:51 Starting Disciple Making in Your Church

40:21 Q&A: Practical Steps and Challenges

51:10 Concluding Thoughts and Resources

Resources on Disciple Making Culture 

Disciple Making Culture Visual Introduction

Cultivating a Disciple-Making Culture at Your Church

Disciple-Making Culture

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In this session, Justin Gravitt from Navigators Church Ministries in Dayton, Ohio, leads a workshop on creating an intentional disciple-making culture in churches. He starts by introducing himself as the director of innovation and advancement for Navigators.

Justin focuses on developing a disciple-making culture, sharing insights from his ten years of experience. He highlights that the goal of the workshop is to equip participants with actionable strategies for effective discipleship in their communities.

He shares a story about a conference attendee who found valuable insights but lacked specific steps to implement them. Justin agrees and aims for attendees to leave with practical strategies for building a disciple-making foundation.

To illustrate the importance of a strong foundation, Justin compares it to a game of Jenga. He explains that just as removing key pieces from the bottom weakens the tower, neglecting foundational aspects of disciple-making can undermine a church's culture.

Engaging the audience, he encourages them to see parallels between Jenga and disciple-making, emphasizing the need for strategic planning in complex environments.

Justin warns against viewing disciple-making as an extra task rather than a core priority. He stresses that if it's not ingrained in the church's foundation, other activities will overshadow it, leading to ineffective efforts.

Drawing from his experiences with various churches, Justin notes that initial successes in disciple multiplication can plateau without a solid foundation. This realization inspired him to contribute to an ebook on disciple-making culture.

He outlines the workshop's structure, which includes two goals: transforming a group into a team with a shared mission and ensuring every member becomes an active disciple-maker.

The workshop covers establishing a common vision, fostering ownership of disciple-making, building relational resilience, and ensuring endurance in the process, all crucial for a sustainable disciple-making culture.

Justin emphasizes the importance of diversifying the team to reflect the church community, selecting members based on their faithfulness, availability, and teachability, rather than just experience.

He differentiates between a team and a group, noting that teams share a mission and diverse skills, which promotes accountability and purpose. The leader plays a vital role in facilitating these changes.

He also highlights the need for team members to embrace disciple-making as part of their identities, sharing fictional examples of common obstacles they might face, like feeling inadequate.

The session addresses these obstacles, encouraging leaders to engage with team members to understand their struggles and foster genuine connections. Building relational resilience is key for support beyond surface-level interactions.

To track progress and avoid burnout, Justin suggests practical exercises to evaluate relationship depth within the team and demonstrates healthy conflict resolution. He stresses the importance of ongoing support and engagement from leaders to keep the team motivated.

Finally, Justin emphasizes the need for clear and consistent communication about disciple-making to prevent cultural drift. Leaders should regularly revisit foundational principles to maintain focus. He also discusses how to scale teams according to church size, ensuring effective coordination.

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