Friday, February 22, 2008

Helping people grow

There's an interesting article on the Christian Today website about tools they use at Saddleback to help people grow in their relationship with God. Rick Warren begins by saying:
All living things grow. Growth is evidence of life. If a child doesn’t grow up, that’s a tragedy. If a believer never grows to spiritual maturity, that’s a tragedy.
He then outline the tools they use at Saddleback:

The first tool is to put everyone into and through six levels of spiritual growth:

1. Community (everyone in driving distance)
2. Crowd (regular attenders)
3. Congregation (part of the family)
4. Committed (living a disciplined Christian life)
5. Core (committed to using their spiritual gifts in a ministry)
6. Commissioned (these are described as the people who take the Great Commission seriously)

The second tool is a weekly commitment card. Everyone is encouraged to make a practical application of the weekend message.

The third tool is the weekly message notes that are made available.

Clearly it's a very strategic approach, (you'd expect nothing less from someone with Rick Warren's gifts) that might not suit everyone. But I have to say that there is a lot to be said for raising the level of expectation of a response from folk if we are truly concerned for their spiritual development.

I think too, that the six levels raise valuable questions about how we get people to move from one level to the next, and how we measure the effectiveness of the process and the growth that comes from it. Given Willow Creek's recent discovery that programmes alone don't guarantee growth, we wouldn't want put all our discipleship eggs in the one basket, but then again we don't always appear to put them anywhere anyway!

You can read the full article here.

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