I grew up on the Knox County side of the Union County line, which kind of made me a double agent. I went to Halls High School but spent a big part of my life on my Papaw’s farm in Union County, and plenty of time on Norris Lake, mostly at Hickory Star Marina.
I was saved at Milan Baptist Church in Maynardville and later received the call to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I had no idea what I was doing but I made a commitment to God that if He would open the doors, I would go through them. That was several years ago.
I have now been able to minister in ten different countries at this point in my life. I have had some amazing experiences and seen my share of failures, but I would not trade my experiences for anything. I learned and I am learning valuable lessons in the highs and the lows.
I was recently encouraged by my lifelong friend, Archie Wilson, to write a series of articles for my hometown newspaper, as a way to give back to the people and the area that shaped my early life. I don’t think I could ever give back enough in return for the values and ethics that our town built into me.
I know that God called me to my first full time church in Sweetwater, Tennessee, but I’m pretty sure the introduction to the church came because my mother’s side of the family was from Union County.
One of my greatest passions in life is evangelism. God called us to make disciples, not converts. A disciple is a disciplined follower of Jesus Christ. Discipleship is a lifelong process. As an associational missions strategist, I primarily communicate with pastors and church leadership. I have edited what follows somewhat to hopefully make it understandable for anyone.
Given the choice of enrolling a new believer into a Sunday School class, or giving your members a tool to lead a person to the Lord, then personally disciple that believer, which would you choose? I have developed a discipleship pathway that can be used with little pastoral involvement or can be used with total pastoral involvement. I was praying for clarity when I was impressed with a path to clarity. It wasn’t what I was looking for, but it was what I needed to develop a sustainable discipleship pathway.
When I began serving as the missions strategist in our association, I conducted a ten year annual church profile study and found a 60 percent decline in discipleship. During that ten-year period many churches had stopped having discipleship training. In reality, much of the discipleship training during that time was the equivalent of having another Sunday School on Sunday evening.
That model of discipleship failed because the goal was addition. The goal of true discipleship is multiplication. New Testament discipleship is living together in community and experiencing community on a daily basis.
It is sharing in one another’s lives, similar to the Acts 2:42-47 passage. Real discipleship means getting dirty, dealing with the mud in each other’s lives.
Proverbs 14:4 states “Where no oxen are, the trough is clean; but much increase comes by the strength of an ox.”
One of my first jobs was cleaning stalls at Red Gate horse farm, which made this passage come alive to me. Big expensive horses make big expensive messes, but when they reproduce they keep the farm running.
Discipleship that is reproducible is messy but can produce incredible results in a system designed for growth.
Discipleship by addition has resulted in major declines in baptisms, a serious shortage of trained pastors and church leaders, and a church system that is anemic compared to the church in other countries.
One of my responsibilities is to analyze our church systems and develop strategies to help our churches reach more people with the gospel of Jesus Christ. I studied the 60 percent decline in discipleship and found that many of our churches had completely given up on both discipleship and evangelism training. Missions training had also become a relic of the past.
The sad reality is that many of our church members have little to no foundation and have developed into consumers instead of disciples. Church consumers want to know what you can give them or sell them. A true disciple of Jesus wants to know how he or she can do more for Christ and His church, and they are waiting on you to be shown how. A discipleship pathway is an effective way to develop growing Christians and show them how to serve with enthusiasm.
In developing a discipleship pathway, “forming a foundation” kept resonating through my mind and eventually became the acrostic F.O.R.M.
F is “the foundations of what we believe,” O is “ordinances to observe,” R is “relational lifestyle to live by,” and M is “mapping and merging it together to develop your purpose in life.”
The pathway is not designed to be used in a classroom setting but it can be. The pathway is designed to be conducted in missional community.
This discipleship pathway is most effective when it is presented in a church member’s home. I recently shared the model at one of our executive board meetings. After the meeting, one of the men asked me how long the process would take. When I told him that is a ten- to 16-week pathway, he quickly informed me that if it could be done in an hour that his church would do it.
We live in an instant gratification society and have allowed the microwave mentality to creep into our churches. You can grow mushrooms in an hour. In three months, you can grow a beautiful garden. In thirty years, you can grow a beautiful oak tree.
Multiplication takes time but will result in more and healthier disciples, ministries and churches.
My passion is evangelism, which is why the first week of the pathway answers the foundational question, “Who is God?” and includes a brief evangelism training.
A Christian can use this training to lead one of his neighbors to Christ and immediately start discipling that new believer in his home. Once the foundation has been formed (F.O.R.M.), the growing disciple is challenged to grow in his faith (G.R.O.W.) G is for “go and tell what you have learned.” R is for “relate, vertically with God and horizontally with people.” O is for “offer your testimony to others about how Jesus changed your life.” W is for “watch for opportunities to serve your community and your church.” F.O.R.M. is forming the foundation and G.R.O.W. is living out your Christianity in a biblical model that is sustainable, reproducible, and won’t end up in the storage room of the church basement.
We have an ongoing church planting partnership with a church in Cuba that has seen incredible growth in their house churches. One particular house church has birthed five other churches.
When I go to Cuba I go to learn. The Cuban discipleship model is incredible. But earlier this year we translated the F.O.R.M. and G.R.O.W discipleship pathway into Spanish and used it as part of a discipleship seminar.
The seminar was attended by 170 Cuban pastors, church planters and missionaries. About a month after we concluded our discipleship conference the church hosted an evangelism conference that was attended by over 1,500 people, resulting in over 300 professions of faith, and immediate implementation of discipleship pathways for many of the new believers.
About four months after we conducted the discipleship conference, one of the pastors shared that our pathway had become a useful resource to develop new converts into healthy disciples.
Teachers, attorneys, doctors and many other professionals are required to receive continuing education credits each year to maintain their practices.
Our church members could greatly benefit by completing a yearly basic training in spiritual disciplines. Discipleship pathways are useful in developing new Christians and reinforcing older ones. And remember when you are green you are growing, and when you are ripe, you rot! Keep learning and keep growing.
Keith Pierce is the associational missions strategist of the Clinton Baptist Association in East Tennessee and the founding pastor of Endeavor Church and Iglesia Biblica Amistad in Atlanta, Georgia. He has a Doctor of Ministry in Strategic Leadership from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and a bachelors degree from the University of Tennessee.