We are exploring the mDNA component -disciple-making or discipleship from Alan Hirsch’s forthcoming book and how it applies to Northern Community. The other posts in the mDNA series are here

Approaches to disciple-making (continued)

CMA Life Transformation Groups

Church Multiplication Associates (CMA) has had remarkable growth in establishing churches in a short period of time. Neil Cole states the central tenet of CMA is: “…to lower the bar of how church is done and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple”. Meeting in a whole range of locations and facilities they have simplified the way they do church and created what they call Life Transformation Groups (LTG’s). These LTGs are simple disciple-making groups that meet regularly. As Hirsch notes:

An LTG simply involves a staple of Bible reading, story-telling, personal accountability and prayer. In the CMA movement it is required that all who call themselves Christians be in a LTG, and this is not just something done in the initial phases of Christian life. It is an ongoing commitment for all who are involved in the various expressions of CMA including leadership at every level. In other words they are basically a disciple-making movement.

At Northern as we have planted new congregations, we too have attempted to “lower the bar of how church is done”. Not all of our new congregations have achieved this but most have. The challenge in front of us is how to raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple.

Religious orders

Christianity has a great heritage of religious orders. In some ways it is strange to be including religious orders in a section of new discipleship methods. Yet, there seems to be resurgence in looking at religious orders – particularly in Protestant circles which have for many years shunned this type of language and structure. The Protestant movement when it broke away from the Catholic Church started out by attempting to be without what Winter calls the sodality structures (orders) as opposed to the modality (congregations).

Winter believes:

this omission, in my evaluation, represents the greatest error of the Reformation and the great weakness of the resulting Protestant tradition. Had it not been for the Pietist movement, the Protestants would have been totally devoid of any organized renewing structures within their tradition.

John Wesley is a good example of the pietist movement where the sodality nourished the modality. The pietists were sodality (religious orders) in that they were “adults meeting together and committing themselves to new beginnings and higher goals as Christians without conflicting with the stated meetings of the existing church”.

Winter asserts that the sodalities of religious and missional orders have existed throughout Christian heritage and that there is a crucial role for them to play in renewing the modality of local congregations. In the context of discipleship at Northern, there is a challenge to create a religious or missional order within a local church. Perhaps a way forward for Northern would be to offer a missional order with the relevant spiritual and missional practices within the context of the church.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 8:39 am by phil and is filed under mDNA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.