Jeremy Smith: Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome to the Making Disciples podcast. I'm Jeremy Smith, Vic Green. We're back, about to get into probably one of my least favorite parts of the disciple making. Not because it's not awesome. It is. I know I I say everything's my favorite and everything's awesome in this process. But this is this was the hardest part of the process for me to wrap my mind around and really sort of
Vick Green: Ooh, okay. All right.
Jeremy Smith: get get super super excited about the design part of this. We'll get into it in a minute. Vic, I've got a question for ya to to get started. It I don't know how this is gonna hit you. This is a super hard hitting question, but it's a it's a source of controversy in my office area today. What color is this shirt? Is this shirt gray or green to you?
Vick Green: Ready. I mean it's grayish green, but I actually was gonna go with the lightest of greens. That's what I was gonna say.
Jeremy Smith: The You were going to say that? You've been thinking that this whole time until I asked it, just brought it out. Yeah. Okay.
Vick Green: Yes. I I don't know if I was thinking that. Probably had you not asked, I would have just like if you had asked me after we got off, I would have said, he was wearing a gray shirt. Am I sitting the fence well enough? I feel like I'm doing a really good job at not answering and so
Jeremy Smith: And if you're not watching this and you're listening to it, I'm sorry about this intro. it won't be that helpful for you. Go to the YouTube channel and subscribe on YouTube as well. There you go. There's a there's a little push for that. Right. Everybody tells me it's green and and kind of that light green, but I'm seeing gray. That when I bought it, it was gray. So, you know, I I the beholder.
Vick Green: There it is. Hey, I I it could go both both ways, so I think you're you I think you're safe either way.
Jeremy Smith: Okay. That's why that's why people tune into this podcast to find the hard hitting questions, to find answers to the hard hitting questions in life.
Vick Green: That's right. You've always said I w what is it? You have a face for radio? You have a wardrobe for radio, Jeremy, so
Jeremy Smith: Okay. I've never won a hat to the podcast though, which you know I'm okay next time maybe. All right, here we go. We're jumping in. Last last episode we talked about our dream disciple, which is one of my favorite parts of this because it answers the fundamental question that I think we all have to answer and that was haunting me for years and years. But here here's the next part of it. How do we create
Vick Green: You're missing out, dude. Yes.
Jeremy Smith: those kind of disciples. We're moving up one whole sort of area of the vision plan from from motivation to method and we're going into talking about a discipleship pathway everybody's favorite topic this is really like a divide last week we talked about or last episode we talked about you know dream disciple can get both kinds of thinkers on board and excited pathway
Vick Green: Right.
Jeremy Smith: I I'm not sure. I think we're talking about one style of thought or or thinker in particular that's gonna be excited about this one.
Vick Green: Yes. They usually the room is divided, and by the end of it, half of the room is like, I don't care what we decide, y'all just decide. And the other is like throwing down fighting. And so yeah. What's interesting, so the pathway I love that you put it like you connect it to the dream disciple because you can't separate the two. Yet a lot of times we do. We talked about this last time. Like, you've got to know what success looks like before you build a strategy for it. And so the dream disciple really is the outcome. A lot of times I see people jump to a method, they jump to a strategy, but man, you can't solve the strategy problems until you actually know the disciples you're developing on the other end. I mean, you can, I guess. It's just not going to be very effective. And so we've got to start with that dream disciple and then go to the pathway.
Jeremy Smith: Well, okay, let's jump into that question then. What is a discipleship pathway? I think a lot of people think they know what that is. It's a buzzword, I think in the church world right now. So what is one? And then what does make it effective? You mentioned effectiveness a minute ago.
Vick Green: Yep. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I I think just the it's ultimately it's your pathway is what is the essential path for someone to become your dream disciple. So think about it. It's looking kind of at your church strategy, but from an individual's lens. And so if you were to tell somebody new to your church, how do they how do they become the dream disciple? And what it is is your dream disciple is looking at the individual traits within that person. The pathway is going to look at your organizational environments. So your worship service, your small groups, your volunteer teams, how do they all work together to develop your disciple disciple? Another way you can think about it is where does Joe go to grow? And and so does he go to worship? Does he go to small groups? Does he go to D groups? If so, how do they work together? And what order do I go to? It's answering all of those questions. What this also does for your staff is it helps them begin to see what are the most important environments that we do and what is the when, what's the purpose in each program environment as it relates to developing our people. So your discipleship pathway is the how your people grow. and so that's gonna be the pathway. Here's the thing, though, that is interesting. How does it like what makes it effective is Come back to COVID. We've talked about it before. COVID was a national disciple making test or national pop quiz on disciple making. If your people own the mission, or if if if your people lose your programming, will they own the mission? And they missed it. They they've by and large, they failed that, right? The second half of that, though, is connects to discipleship pathways, strategies, and being effective. During COVID, what a lot of people figured out was that there it when you took away that program, they know what to do. Even the people that were always in your church building every time the doors were opened didn't know once they couldn't. And so I hear all the time like deacons who aren't reading their Bible and people who were always at every event, but like they don't really know how to grow in their faith for their own self. Here's the thing that happened when it came to developing church strategies. Is that we were we were using program engagement to determine success. And the thing is, program engagement is a byproduct of your strategy, but it's not the purpose behind your strategy. And here's what I mean: is that the purpose of it is so that they may become a disciple maker, that they begin to live a disciple making lifestyle as they go through steps of your pathway. they will become, they will get more engaged in your small groups, more in your volunteer teams. But what we did is we looked and made the deeper engagement the metric of success and made deeper engagement in our church the goal. And what happened that COVID did is it exposed it said that actually if you don't have the dream disciple, if you're not talking about a disciple making lifestyle, that actually you're a fully engaged church member can be fool's gold. You can think you're winning, but it's actually falling short of the mission. And so what makes an effective pathway is we actually use a different end goal for our pathway. The end goal is not that they're serving or doing more in the church, but it's are they reaching their kingdom circle? We've talked a lot about that, but just for the language, in case somebody hasn't heard it. The kingdom circle, what that is, is that every person in your church has a circle of influence that they're called to bring the kingdom of God into. And so your pathway, what makes it success is how how many people is it helping send out to reach their kingdom circle? And that metric actually helps us hold to a disciple making lifestyle, not just are they attending our church service more?
Jeremy Smith: I remember seeing that flip happen real time with the guys in my very first D group. I there there are two guys in particular sort of plateaued in their faith and they they were coming to me asking me what they should do. And I I kept talking to them about this thing or that thing, trying to plug them into the programs of our church and and they were still sort of in the same place. And so I said, Hey, why don't you try to do this group with me where we learn how to what it means to be a disciple? Now, we were still using the marks of a disciple that replicate gives at that point. We didn't have which
Vick Green: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: By the way, high highly recommend. I don't know how we didn't say that in the last episode. If you don't have your dream disciple yet, there there are some sort of standard templates you can use in the meantime to to help people. But we were still using that. And I said, Hey, why don't you jump in understanding what it means to be a disciple and me discipling them and us doing that together? And then here's what happened: they caught fire for Jesus and they started doing all the things that I'd wanted them to do.
Vick Green: Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: The whole time they started engaging in the programs, exactly what you're saying. They started attending and giving and serving and doing all that more when they were engaged in understanding what it means to be a disciple and in that relationship with the Lord.
Vick Green: That's right. That's true. Yeah, absolutely. And it's and I think because you're aligning it to people's purpose, like you're helping them, especially with Kingdom Circle, you're helping them figure out how to make a difference in their unique way with the people in their life. And it ends up always coming back to also help the church in that and all and step into all those other spaces as well. Okay, so that's that's what a pathway is. That's what makes one effective. Let's go back, golly, now like five years ago, or so, four years ago. I don't know how many it was, but we started working on the pathway at Cross Point, which for the record, doing it with six sites and as large a church as you guys, I mean, got pretty simple, right? And so not not a lot of opinions and and unique expressions to to navigate. So
Jeremy Smith: Right.
Vick Green: We start doing the pathway with you guys. What do you remember as you went through that process? What what do you remember to be in some of the challenges of developing your pathway?
Jeremy Smith: I I think one challenge was like a a philosophical challenge and the and and and then we had a manifestation of that in in one part of the pathway in particular. I think the philosophical obstacle that some of us, including me, had to get over was we had to we have to create the perfect pathway. Like, you know, like it has to it has to be exactly it's gonna move people and this is this is You know, if they just do these things, it's gonna create the the perfect kind of disciples we're trying to create. And just just coming to the understanding that there's no such thing as a a perfect pathway. And we know disciple making is not and making disciples is not linear, you know, it's here, there, it's everywhere, and then you kinda three steps forward, two steps back. So that was a little bit of a philosop philosophical obstacle that we're not gonna get this perfect, we're just gonna try to help people move, like understanding the real reason for this to become these kind of disciples and be deployed in their unique role of of leadership. that manifested itself in the middle step for us. So our pathway is connect with Christ, develop in community and deploy on mission, which is a total flip from come, meet, grow, serve, which kind of what it was before, I've talked about that before. That serve became serve the church. We didn't mean for it to become that, but that's totally what it became. So having the end of our pathway be deploy on mission is so freeing. Because again, it's you're not trying to sell people on we need more volunteers. You really need to be a part, you need to be coming more, you need to be giving more, you need to be volunteering more. What we're trying to help them find is like, here's who, here's the people you're called to reach, and how you can go reach those people and be the disciple God's called you to be. So that when you stand in front of Jesus, you can say, I did what you asked me to do. I went.
Vick Green: Yes.
Jeremy Smith: And made disciples. so connect, develop, deploy. Well, in that develop phase, we have little triangles that help you move forward. they we thought it looked like a fast forward button, but our our staff thought it looked like three Doritos. So that's what it's become for us. But
Vick Green: It that's what it is for every church that I work with because I show your diagram and I'm like, what does this look like? And I'm like, they thought it looked like Doritos. And after that everybody's like, totally Doritos.
Jeremy Smith: The three Doritos. That's what ours is. That's an amazing pathway. It fits perfect in our culture. but in that developing community, we had like a a two-day, you had to come back another month in order to help settle this debate between whether we were gonna do groups and serve teams, or we were gonna do groups or serve teams and try to
Vick Green: Ha ha.
Jeremy Smith: as we try to help people move along the pathway. And we ended up going with or understanding that people will do whatever they want to do. But we were gonna try to we were gonna we only got a certain amount of time with them and two or three hours a week. And so we wanted them to try to pick one to develop in community. So I remember that was a huge battle that we had in our in our room and and really exposed kind of a shift we had to make.
Vick Green: Yeah. I I remember that one because I think what's and and I think a lot of churches struggle with this of if we're not careful like our pathway, like I've seen it sometimes, and it's like if we run the time slot test on this thing, it's like you expect one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours of your people, you know, and it just keeps compounding. And that means that we are expecting five hours. And hey, before we ever started on this, like we weren't making disciples anyway. So like we've got to now add six, seven, eight hours. And it's like, what the the challenge that feels impossible in the moment is that we are trying to get more from our people than we've ever gotten when they're giving us less time than they've ever given us. And it feels like an impossible game to win in the pathway and strategy.
Jeremy Smith: Yeah.
Vick Green: We know that we need to better develop disciple makers. We need them to grow in maturity and multiply themselves. And we know that they're not giving us the time they're used to. So how do we do that? And I think that's always the challenging game of man, how do we and what it means is we can't just keep running ministry the same way that we've always run it. And I think sometimes what we do is we just keep running all the same programs, all the same ministries. I I'm I'm sure there are many people in here that even in the last two years, you probably did pathway work. You got clear language. You relabeled some things. You started calling Sunday school and life groups small groups, just some that meet on Sunday and some that meet during the week. And you started doing things that you may have changed language and gave the appearance of simplifying, but behind the scenes, everything stayed the same. And I think ultimately that that it doesn't help us. The pathway, what it needs to do, it doesn't mean that we have to blow everything up or cut everything, but we do have to look and say, how do we be more efficient in the box, in the ministries of the church, so that we can better empower people to go and reach their circle where they're making disciples, where they live, work and play. And so we've got to be more efficient so we can be more effective. And I think that was one of those moments for you guys. Like I think kudos for you is you wrestled all over it. And what I would say holds true is there's a connection between churches that actually bog down the most in pathway conversations and who are most successful. Churches that just go through the pathway section and they make quick changes, no problem, don't lean into conflict, they don't actually understand what they did. They just relabeled some stuff and they continue on. The churches that struggle the most actually are understanding the implications and are trying to create a new way of doing something, not just make it look different. And when they do that, they end up having stronger conviction behind it and are more committed to actually doing it for the
Jeremy Smith: Wow. That that's hopeful, a little counter little counterintuitive from what you'd normally think, but I can see that you're you're actually considering the implications.
Vick Green: Ha.
Making Disciples with Replicate: Hey church leader, I hope these podcast episodes and the Movement Ready Church book that Robbie and I have written are helping you get disciple making started in your church. What I'm excited for in the next season is that we're taking the Movement Ready Church book to your church. We're doing one day workshops where myself or one of the navigators on our replicate team come on site to your church and work with your staff and leaders to take the principles of this book and to put it into action. What I love about this workshop is that we're not going to do just trainings from the book, but we are actually going to help you create something personal for your church. We're going to give every one of your leaders some essential training to grow as disciple makers and to be a developer of leaders. Secondly, we're going to give you a personalized assessment of your disciple making culture. And then thirdly, we're going to create a one year focus and a first step to get started so that you can see your movement begin. So all you have to do is go to movementreadytraining.com to get more information and to get started. You'll see it's pretty simple. Let's jump on a call together. Let's create a personalized training day for your church and then let's our team take care of the rest and we will bring the Movement Ready Church to your church. So just go to MovementReadyChurchTraining.com and let's get your movement started. Now let's get back to our conversation together.
Jeremy Smith: Speaking of your experience with churches, what themes, as you've I don't know how many times you've done this now and seen people argue over and or or or whatever it is, but what themes do you see when it comes to
Vick Green: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Smith: actually getting that clarity that we're looking for. Cause I love what you said. Like it clarifies things for the staff. It clarifies things for people about what's most important. What themes do you see when the most when it comes to getting that clarity on the pathway?
Vick Green: Yeah. You named one earlier that I thought was really good, the idea of like the philosophical shift. I think so many churches they want perfect clarity and it actually prevents them from just getting clearer. And I a lot of times I'm just like, Hey, is it clear right now? Like, no, we don't have any pathway. And then they like push back on it because they're like, Are people? I mean, that's not totally true. And what about this person? And I'm like, we have got to create
Jeremy Smith: Yeah.
Vick Green: An ideal path of some sort. Is that how everybody's gonna go through the path? No, that's not the purpose. Clarity is the purpose. And so, how do we get more clear in it? And so I think so many times, and and I think that kind of leans into probably a second thing that I see. I think we try to get clarity with people who have already been through our pathway, and we miss getting clarity for the next person that's trying to come through our pathway.
Jeremy Smith: Mm. That's really good. I think you've developed that since since you led us through the process. I didn't I don't remember hearing that way.
Vick Green: And and and Sorry, I made you I made you all figure that one out on your own. Well, but but I I think if you get into it when conversations start, you start thinking when you didn't have a pathway or when you didn't have clarity, your all stars of the of the church found their way through your programming and got to a level maturity. And then everybody uses because there was no one way, there was all these different ways that it happened, everyone uses them as case studies to do to to make their pitch for how the pathway should go. And the truth is we're really trying to provide structure for the person who most needs it. For the new person that's like, I don't really know what church looks like. I don't really know what my first step is. And so often we use all these case studies of how other people got connected are man, this person loves women's ministry or men's ministry or this class. If we get rid of it, then or if it's not on the pathway, then what? And they get so stuck in the people who are already at the end of the pathway that they never give the first steps for the people who are just stepping into it. And so a lot of times I'm just like, hey, think about the person who comes to your church next week. Let's create the pathway for them. We can figure out how to have leadership transition conversations with the people who are already bought into our mission. But if we can't get clear on to the new person where do they even start, we're never gonna see this movement go to the next season. You're nodding your head. Tell but tell does that it resonate as you think through the pathway conversations?
Jeremy Smith: Well, one of the main conversations I have with people in in my tribe, the Global Methodist Church, is about Sunday school and what do we do with people in Sunday school and what do we do with, you know, so or what do we do with this and that? And I that's the and or conversation that we had is we have this one way of thinking about things but it's a total insider way. And that that's a great observation that we've designed it. We're designing it or we want to design it. First off to include everybody so we don't hurt anybody's feelings.
Vick Green: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Smith: I think that's one of the biggest challenges that we continue to face even three years in is first off, implementation. I thought it was gonna get easier. It I don't it's like the dream disciple. I don't know that it ever gets easier. You're never done with implementing pathway because you you have to constantly keep people focused on it and there's constant creep to want to add more to it or to emphasize different things. I I will say at our at our best, our staff will go.
Vick Green: Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: How does this apply to the pathway? And and it and it does help us kind of baseline all that. so just just your whole like there's no perfect pathway and design it for the people who aren't on it yet, but they will become the kind of disciples that you're trying to create. and again, I want to connect the importance of dream disciple to pathway because I I used to think vision and then method.
Vick Green: Mm. Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: And then, you know, motivation was probably mixed in there somewhere. And but we're trying to create these kind of disciples, not just trying to get somewhere else down the road.
Vick Green: That's right. And I think one other final thing I would probably add too in that your theme, maybe theme question maybe think about it is this is probably oversimplification, but dad gummit, it reads a lot of mail for people when I first share it. most pathways is the connection step of the pathway is crowded. The coaching step of the pathway is missing. And the commissioning or the leadership. Step of the church is fuzzy. Connection is crowded, coaching is missing, and commissioning and leadership is fuzzy. And so there's usually small groups, Sunday school, men's group, women's group, support groups, you know, whatever other group and another group and volunteer teams, and all of that is crowded. There's usually not a place where we're developing the skills for disciple making. And then when we talk about leadership, every ministry has their own definition, has their own leadership structure. And we don't necessarily know who a leader is and how we partner with them. And so I think getting clear on that of is is huge in your pathway. All right. So if that's the design stuff, though, I think one of the things that's a great privilege, Jeremy, for you is like you are now four years down the road. I feel like the number one thing that I always have to tell people is like with your pathway, you can design it in day, you can communicate it over the next couple of months, but it will take years for you to live into it. And I don't and and it is never perfect. It's never arrived. It's never easy. And I think that's always I think that's a sigh of relief sometimes. And I think people are like, gosh, okay. You are in year three or four. What tell us a little bit, what does it look like to lead your pathway now year three and four, maybe some of the difficulties and maybe some of the successes that you're seeing with?
Jeremy Smith: Like I said, the the main difficulty is keeping people focused on it and not adding not trying to add to it. and and keeping focused on it yourself. Or I I think what I've had to do, and this is difficult for me, I don't know, maybe it's not for some lead pastors, is let go of control of the pathway and how we're moving people along it to people who are actually gifted at that kind of administrative organizational leadership stuff. And so I don't lead implementing the pathway across six campuses in all our ministries. We're just now getting it all implemented in the family ministry. We we still are implementing in different ministries how do we bring this pathway? How do they apply to the pathway? So that I'm gonna tell you that implementation is gonna take longer than you think. Vic told me that and I'm like, I don't we got it. We can do this. And And you got to hand it off to the people who are most gifted to do it. So I don't lead those meetings. I don't lead those processes. Jagger, who we this podcast has has introduced, he leads all that for he's better at that than me. So I think releasing that, keeping focused on the reason why we're doing it, keeping it in front of people and not not letting things creep into it. I remember it was like, I don't know, in between year one and two, I was like, I don't think the pathway's working like we want. We need to redesign it. And we brought you in to kind of help us with that. And what did you talk to us about?
Vick Green: Mm-hmm. Here's the million dollar question is when you think about the problems you're facing, you just ask, is the issue that we're facing a design, a communication, or an implementation issue? Design, communication, or implementation. So you guys were like, we made a change. I was like, cool, like we're totally up for tweaking it. I think in pathway, you learn stuff. I mean, the goal is not you don't have a finished product that you never touch for seven years. What we're trying to do is to refine, not just like recreate something. And so we put up with your team. I think I was like, give me all the problems we're facing. Just fill this chart, guys, and get probably 15 to 20 of them. And I was like, Okay, is it a design issue, a communication issue, or an implementation issue? And I I think of the 15, I think there was 13 I's and two C's and no design issues. And I was like, So guys, what do we want to do? And they were like, I think we just need to execute better. I was like, all right, let's have that conversation. And I but and I and I again commend you guys because I think you y'all did not just go back and redesign. Redesigning is great because we we love the idea of creating something new and we can avoid being held accountable to just continuing to run and do the hard work of what is ahead of us. And I think you guys have done a good job of s holding yourselves accountable and continuing on it.
Jeremy Smith: one huge key to that has been first off the personal conviction that all of us have about disciple making, about D groups, about helping people get to the the place of learning what it means to actually be a disciple and go make other disciples and be deployed on mission, go through Kingdom Circle, that sort of things and find that for themselves. But but secondly, we meet monthly as a team and we have goals every semester. You you've helped us lead through some through a lot of that and design Brad and design that process. But that monthly meeting where we're talking about goals and implementation and how we're helping people move along this has been so helpful.
Vick Green: And and and we're talking all about the challenges. People are like, you know, like the tone's so different. I do think I'm I am big on like, hey, let's have sober expectations of what the pathway is and what it's not, what's what what's called for it. But I mean, share just a little what's the impact that it's had. Because I think those are the difficulties. But when you look at people deployed on mission, knowing their unique role, share just a little of what impact that the pathway has had and created.
Jeremy Smith: It's the same freedom for me that I've talked about many times of being able to say to people, we don't want something from you, we want something for you. And here's the process we have designed to use to help you become this kind of disciple and help you, again, what I said earlier, be able to stand in front of Jesus one day and say, I did what you asked me to do. I didn't just read the Bible a lot and pray a lot or go to worship services. I actually know my unique role and how I make disciples and I'm able to go do that. And we have multiple. examples of of people working through that. It's not perfect, but going through a life group or a multiply group, D group, and then going to disciples story or kingdom circle and and and beginning to live into the ministry plan that that they've designed. So being able to say that and then watching people do it. And then even now we're sort of redesigning our connections team, how how we help people get connected to the life of the church. It's been super helpful. We don't have to come up with some new connections process. Like we have a connections process. We have the pathway right here. And so it's clarifying in that way. It clarifies things for our ministry areas. so so many the so many advantages like that.
Vick Green: And and y'all how many how many people have named their unique role and stepped into their mission? Is it five man, five so five hundred people being able to reach their kingdom circle, which again, it's like what you don't get there without a pathway. And it's and and and I would say you don't get there waiting for the perfect pathway either. And so you get there by putting a pathway out there and doing the work of it. I think you guys done it super well.
Jeremy Smith: Right at five hundred, yeah.
Vick Green: here's here's what I want to do in the leader notes. We've been talking about all about pathway stuff. We talk about it in Movement Ready Church. So you can get the book, you can walk through that section there. but also in the leader notes, we have a pathway test that we do. It's five questions that you have to answer to create a pathway that develops disciple makers. And so it's gonna hit all of these principles, but also it's gonna make sure that you don't fall in the trap of creating a pathway that gets you program engagement, but not disciple makers. So if you want to grab that our pathway test, just get the leader notes and it'll be included in there as well. And as always, if maybe yours, you're talking about it, you're saying, man, my team needs to talk work on pathway. We need to do a process like share this with your team, jump on a phone call with our team. We would love to talk with you about how we can help you not just get a dream disciple, but a pathway to get there. As always, subscribe, share, and we'll be with you next time.
Vick Green: Ooh, okay. All right.
Jeremy Smith: get get super super excited about the design part of this. We'll get into it in a minute. Vic, I've got a question for ya to to get started. It I don't know how this is gonna hit you. This is a super hard hitting question, but it's a it's a source of controversy in my office area today. What color is this shirt? Is this shirt gray or green to you?
Vick Green: Ready. I mean it's grayish green, but I actually was gonna go with the lightest of greens. That's what I was gonna say.
Jeremy Smith: The You were going to say that? You've been thinking that this whole time until I asked it, just brought it out. Yeah. Okay.
Vick Green: Yes. I I don't know if I was thinking that. Probably had you not asked, I would have just like if you had asked me after we got off, I would have said, he was wearing a gray shirt. Am I sitting the fence well enough? I feel like I'm doing a really good job at not answering and so
Jeremy Smith: And if you're not watching this and you're listening to it, I'm sorry about this intro. it won't be that helpful for you. Go to the YouTube channel and subscribe on YouTube as well. There you go. There's a there's a little push for that. Right. Everybody tells me it's green and and kind of that light green, but I'm seeing gray. That when I bought it, it was gray. So, you know, I I the beholder.
Vick Green: There it is. Hey, I I it could go both both ways, so I think you're you I think you're safe either way.
Jeremy Smith: Okay. That's why that's why people tune into this podcast to find the hard hitting questions, to find answers to the hard hitting questions in life.
Vick Green: That's right. You've always said I w what is it? You have a face for radio? You have a wardrobe for radio, Jeremy, so
Jeremy Smith: Okay. I've never won a hat to the podcast though, which you know I'm okay next time maybe. All right, here we go. We're jumping in. Last last episode we talked about our dream disciple, which is one of my favorite parts of this because it answers the fundamental question that I think we all have to answer and that was haunting me for years and years. But here here's the next part of it. How do we create
Vick Green: You're missing out, dude. Yes.
Jeremy Smith: those kind of disciples. We're moving up one whole sort of area of the vision plan from from motivation to method and we're going into talking about a discipleship pathway everybody's favorite topic this is really like a divide last week we talked about or last episode we talked about you know dream disciple can get both kinds of thinkers on board and excited pathway
Vick Green: Right.
Jeremy Smith: I I'm not sure. I think we're talking about one style of thought or or thinker in particular that's gonna be excited about this one.
Vick Green: Yes. They usually the room is divided, and by the end of it, half of the room is like, I don't care what we decide, y'all just decide. And the other is like throwing down fighting. And so yeah. What's interesting, so the pathway I love that you put it like you connect it to the dream disciple because you can't separate the two. Yet a lot of times we do. We talked about this last time. Like, you've got to know what success looks like before you build a strategy for it. And so the dream disciple really is the outcome. A lot of times I see people jump to a method, they jump to a strategy, but man, you can't solve the strategy problems until you actually know the disciples you're developing on the other end. I mean, you can, I guess. It's just not going to be very effective. And so we've got to start with that dream disciple and then go to the pathway.
Jeremy Smith: Well, okay, let's jump into that question then. What is a discipleship pathway? I think a lot of people think they know what that is. It's a buzzword, I think in the church world right now. So what is one? And then what does make it effective? You mentioned effectiveness a minute ago.
Vick Green: Yep. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I I think just the it's ultimately it's your pathway is what is the essential path for someone to become your dream disciple. So think about it. It's looking kind of at your church strategy, but from an individual's lens. And so if you were to tell somebody new to your church, how do they how do they become the dream disciple? And what it is is your dream disciple is looking at the individual traits within that person. The pathway is going to look at your organizational environments. So your worship service, your small groups, your volunteer teams, how do they all work together to develop your disciple disciple? Another way you can think about it is where does Joe go to grow? And and so does he go to worship? Does he go to small groups? Does he go to D groups? If so, how do they work together? And what order do I go to? It's answering all of those questions. What this also does for your staff is it helps them begin to see what are the most important environments that we do and what is the when, what's the purpose in each program environment as it relates to developing our people. So your discipleship pathway is the how your people grow. and so that's gonna be the pathway. Here's the thing, though, that is interesting. How does it like what makes it effective is Come back to COVID. We've talked about it before. COVID was a national disciple making test or national pop quiz on disciple making. If your people own the mission, or if if if your people lose your programming, will they own the mission? And they missed it. They they've by and large, they failed that, right? The second half of that, though, is connects to discipleship pathways, strategies, and being effective. During COVID, what a lot of people figured out was that there it when you took away that program, they know what to do. Even the people that were always in your church building every time the doors were opened didn't know once they couldn't. And so I hear all the time like deacons who aren't reading their Bible and people who were always at every event, but like they don't really know how to grow in their faith for their own self. Here's the thing that happened when it came to developing church strategies. Is that we were we were using program engagement to determine success. And the thing is, program engagement is a byproduct of your strategy, but it's not the purpose behind your strategy. And here's what I mean: is that the purpose of it is so that they may become a disciple maker, that they begin to live a disciple making lifestyle as they go through steps of your pathway. they will become, they will get more engaged in your small groups, more in your volunteer teams. But what we did is we looked and made the deeper engagement the metric of success and made deeper engagement in our church the goal. And what happened that COVID did is it exposed it said that actually if you don't have the dream disciple, if you're not talking about a disciple making lifestyle, that actually you're a fully engaged church member can be fool's gold. You can think you're winning, but it's actually falling short of the mission. And so what makes an effective pathway is we actually use a different end goal for our pathway. The end goal is not that they're serving or doing more in the church, but it's are they reaching their kingdom circle? We've talked a lot about that, but just for the language, in case somebody hasn't heard it. The kingdom circle, what that is, is that every person in your church has a circle of influence that they're called to bring the kingdom of God into. And so your pathway, what makes it success is how how many people is it helping send out to reach their kingdom circle? And that metric actually helps us hold to a disciple making lifestyle, not just are they attending our church service more?
Jeremy Smith: I remember seeing that flip happen real time with the guys in my very first D group. I there there are two guys in particular sort of plateaued in their faith and they they were coming to me asking me what they should do. And I I kept talking to them about this thing or that thing, trying to plug them into the programs of our church and and they were still sort of in the same place. And so I said, Hey, why don't you try to do this group with me where we learn how to what it means to be a disciple? Now, we were still using the marks of a disciple that replicate gives at that point. We didn't have which
Vick Green: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: By the way, high highly recommend. I don't know how we didn't say that in the last episode. If you don't have your dream disciple yet, there there are some sort of standard templates you can use in the meantime to to help people. But we were still using that. And I said, Hey, why don't you jump in understanding what it means to be a disciple and me discipling them and us doing that together? And then here's what happened: they caught fire for Jesus and they started doing all the things that I'd wanted them to do.
Vick Green: Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: The whole time they started engaging in the programs, exactly what you're saying. They started attending and giving and serving and doing all that more when they were engaged in understanding what it means to be a disciple and in that relationship with the Lord.
Vick Green: That's right. That's true. Yeah, absolutely. And it's and I think because you're aligning it to people's purpose, like you're helping them, especially with Kingdom Circle, you're helping them figure out how to make a difference in their unique way with the people in their life. And it ends up always coming back to also help the church in that and all and step into all those other spaces as well. Okay, so that's that's what a pathway is. That's what makes one effective. Let's go back, golly, now like five years ago, or so, four years ago. I don't know how many it was, but we started working on the pathway at Cross Point, which for the record, doing it with six sites and as large a church as you guys, I mean, got pretty simple, right? And so not not a lot of opinions and and unique expressions to to navigate. So
Jeremy Smith: Right.
Vick Green: We start doing the pathway with you guys. What do you remember as you went through that process? What what do you remember to be in some of the challenges of developing your pathway?
Jeremy Smith: I I think one challenge was like a a philosophical challenge and the and and and then we had a manifestation of that in in one part of the pathway in particular. I think the philosophical obstacle that some of us, including me, had to get over was we had to we have to create the perfect pathway. Like, you know, like it has to it has to be exactly it's gonna move people and this is this is You know, if they just do these things, it's gonna create the the perfect kind of disciples we're trying to create. And just just coming to the understanding that there's no such thing as a a perfect pathway. And we know disciple making is not and making disciples is not linear, you know, it's here, there, it's everywhere, and then you kinda three steps forward, two steps back. So that was a little bit of a philosop philosophical obstacle that we're not gonna get this perfect, we're just gonna try to help people move, like understanding the real reason for this to become these kind of disciples and be deployed in their unique role of of leadership. that manifested itself in the middle step for us. So our pathway is connect with Christ, develop in community and deploy on mission, which is a total flip from come, meet, grow, serve, which kind of what it was before, I've talked about that before. That serve became serve the church. We didn't mean for it to become that, but that's totally what it became. So having the end of our pathway be deploy on mission is so freeing. Because again, it's you're not trying to sell people on we need more volunteers. You really need to be a part, you need to be coming more, you need to be giving more, you need to be volunteering more. What we're trying to help them find is like, here's who, here's the people you're called to reach, and how you can go reach those people and be the disciple God's called you to be. So that when you stand in front of Jesus, you can say, I did what you asked me to do. I went.
Vick Green: Yes.
Jeremy Smith: And made disciples. so connect, develop, deploy. Well, in that develop phase, we have little triangles that help you move forward. they we thought it looked like a fast forward button, but our our staff thought it looked like three Doritos. So that's what it's become for us. But
Vick Green: It that's what it is for every church that I work with because I show your diagram and I'm like, what does this look like? And I'm like, they thought it looked like Doritos. And after that everybody's like, totally Doritos.
Jeremy Smith: The three Doritos. That's what ours is. That's an amazing pathway. It fits perfect in our culture. but in that developing community, we had like a a two-day, you had to come back another month in order to help settle this debate between whether we were gonna do groups and serve teams, or we were gonna do groups or serve teams and try to
Vick Green: Ha ha.
Jeremy Smith: as we try to help people move along the pathway. And we ended up going with or understanding that people will do whatever they want to do. But we were gonna try to we were gonna we only got a certain amount of time with them and two or three hours a week. And so we wanted them to try to pick one to develop in community. So I remember that was a huge battle that we had in our in our room and and really exposed kind of a shift we had to make.
Vick Green: Yeah. I I remember that one because I think what's and and I think a lot of churches struggle with this of if we're not careful like our pathway, like I've seen it sometimes, and it's like if we run the time slot test on this thing, it's like you expect one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours of your people, you know, and it just keeps compounding. And that means that we are expecting five hours. And hey, before we ever started on this, like we weren't making disciples anyway. So like we've got to now add six, seven, eight hours. And it's like, what the the challenge that feels impossible in the moment is that we are trying to get more from our people than we've ever gotten when they're giving us less time than they've ever given us. And it feels like an impossible game to win in the pathway and strategy.
Jeremy Smith: Yeah.
Vick Green: We know that we need to better develop disciple makers. We need them to grow in maturity and multiply themselves. And we know that they're not giving us the time they're used to. So how do we do that? And I think that's always the challenging game of man, how do we and what it means is we can't just keep running ministry the same way that we've always run it. And I think sometimes what we do is we just keep running all the same programs, all the same ministries. I I'm I'm sure there are many people in here that even in the last two years, you probably did pathway work. You got clear language. You relabeled some things. You started calling Sunday school and life groups small groups, just some that meet on Sunday and some that meet during the week. And you started doing things that you may have changed language and gave the appearance of simplifying, but behind the scenes, everything stayed the same. And I think ultimately that that it doesn't help us. The pathway, what it needs to do, it doesn't mean that we have to blow everything up or cut everything, but we do have to look and say, how do we be more efficient in the box, in the ministries of the church, so that we can better empower people to go and reach their circle where they're making disciples, where they live, work and play. And so we've got to be more efficient so we can be more effective. And I think that was one of those moments for you guys. Like I think kudos for you is you wrestled all over it. And what I would say holds true is there's a connection between churches that actually bog down the most in pathway conversations and who are most successful. Churches that just go through the pathway section and they make quick changes, no problem, don't lean into conflict, they don't actually understand what they did. They just relabeled some stuff and they continue on. The churches that struggle the most actually are understanding the implications and are trying to create a new way of doing something, not just make it look different. And when they do that, they end up having stronger conviction behind it and are more committed to actually doing it for the
Jeremy Smith: Wow. That that's hopeful, a little counter little counterintuitive from what you'd normally think, but I can see that you're you're actually considering the implications.
Vick Green: Ha.
Making Disciples with Replicate: Hey church leader, I hope these podcast episodes and the Movement Ready Church book that Robbie and I have written are helping you get disciple making started in your church. What I'm excited for in the next season is that we're taking the Movement Ready Church book to your church. We're doing one day workshops where myself or one of the navigators on our replicate team come on site to your church and work with your staff and leaders to take the principles of this book and to put it into action. What I love about this workshop is that we're not going to do just trainings from the book, but we are actually going to help you create something personal for your church. We're going to give every one of your leaders some essential training to grow as disciple makers and to be a developer of leaders. Secondly, we're going to give you a personalized assessment of your disciple making culture. And then thirdly, we're going to create a one year focus and a first step to get started so that you can see your movement begin. So all you have to do is go to movementreadytraining.com to get more information and to get started. You'll see it's pretty simple. Let's jump on a call together. Let's create a personalized training day for your church and then let's our team take care of the rest and we will bring the Movement Ready Church to your church. So just go to MovementReadyChurchTraining.com and let's get your movement started. Now let's get back to our conversation together.
Jeremy Smith: Speaking of your experience with churches, what themes, as you've I don't know how many times you've done this now and seen people argue over and or or or whatever it is, but what themes do you see when it comes to
Vick Green: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Smith: actually getting that clarity that we're looking for. Cause I love what you said. Like it clarifies things for the staff. It clarifies things for people about what's most important. What themes do you see when the most when it comes to getting that clarity on the pathway?
Vick Green: Yeah. You named one earlier that I thought was really good, the idea of like the philosophical shift. I think so many churches they want perfect clarity and it actually prevents them from just getting clearer. And I a lot of times I'm just like, Hey, is it clear right now? Like, no, we don't have any pathway. And then they like push back on it because they're like, Are people? I mean, that's not totally true. And what about this person? And I'm like, we have got to create
Jeremy Smith: Yeah.
Vick Green: An ideal path of some sort. Is that how everybody's gonna go through the path? No, that's not the purpose. Clarity is the purpose. And so, how do we get more clear in it? And so I think so many times, and and I think that kind of leans into probably a second thing that I see. I think we try to get clarity with people who have already been through our pathway, and we miss getting clarity for the next person that's trying to come through our pathway.
Jeremy Smith: Mm. That's really good. I think you've developed that since since you led us through the process. I didn't I don't remember hearing that way.
Vick Green: And and and Sorry, I made you I made you all figure that one out on your own. Well, but but I I think if you get into it when conversations start, you start thinking when you didn't have a pathway or when you didn't have clarity, your all stars of the of the church found their way through your programming and got to a level maturity. And then everybody uses because there was no one way, there was all these different ways that it happened, everyone uses them as case studies to do to to make their pitch for how the pathway should go. And the truth is we're really trying to provide structure for the person who most needs it. For the new person that's like, I don't really know what church looks like. I don't really know what my first step is. And so often we use all these case studies of how other people got connected are man, this person loves women's ministry or men's ministry or this class. If we get rid of it, then or if it's not on the pathway, then what? And they get so stuck in the people who are already at the end of the pathway that they never give the first steps for the people who are just stepping into it. And so a lot of times I'm just like, hey, think about the person who comes to your church next week. Let's create the pathway for them. We can figure out how to have leadership transition conversations with the people who are already bought into our mission. But if we can't get clear on to the new person where do they even start, we're never gonna see this movement go to the next season. You're nodding your head. Tell but tell does that it resonate as you think through the pathway conversations?
Jeremy Smith: Well, one of the main conversations I have with people in in my tribe, the Global Methodist Church, is about Sunday school and what do we do with people in Sunday school and what do we do with, you know, so or what do we do with this and that? And I that's the and or conversation that we had is we have this one way of thinking about things but it's a total insider way. And that that's a great observation that we've designed it. We're designing it or we want to design it. First off to include everybody so we don't hurt anybody's feelings.
Vick Green: Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Smith: I think that's one of the biggest challenges that we continue to face even three years in is first off, implementation. I thought it was gonna get easier. It I don't it's like the dream disciple. I don't know that it ever gets easier. You're never done with implementing pathway because you you have to constantly keep people focused on it and there's constant creep to want to add more to it or to emphasize different things. I I will say at our at our best, our staff will go.
Vick Green: Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: How does this apply to the pathway? And and it and it does help us kind of baseline all that. so just just your whole like there's no perfect pathway and design it for the people who aren't on it yet, but they will become the kind of disciples that you're trying to create. and again, I want to connect the importance of dream disciple to pathway because I I used to think vision and then method.
Vick Green: Mm. Yeah.
Jeremy Smith: And then, you know, motivation was probably mixed in there somewhere. And but we're trying to create these kind of disciples, not just trying to get somewhere else down the road.
Vick Green: That's right. And I think one other final thing I would probably add too in that your theme, maybe theme question maybe think about it is this is probably oversimplification, but dad gummit, it reads a lot of mail for people when I first share it. most pathways is the connection step of the pathway is crowded. The coaching step of the pathway is missing. And the commissioning or the leadership. Step of the church is fuzzy. Connection is crowded, coaching is missing, and commissioning and leadership is fuzzy. And so there's usually small groups, Sunday school, men's group, women's group, support groups, you know, whatever other group and another group and volunteer teams, and all of that is crowded. There's usually not a place where we're developing the skills for disciple making. And then when we talk about leadership, every ministry has their own definition, has their own leadership structure. And we don't necessarily know who a leader is and how we partner with them. And so I think getting clear on that of is is huge in your pathway. All right. So if that's the design stuff, though, I think one of the things that's a great privilege, Jeremy, for you is like you are now four years down the road. I feel like the number one thing that I always have to tell people is like with your pathway, you can design it in day, you can communicate it over the next couple of months, but it will take years for you to live into it. And I don't and and it is never perfect. It's never arrived. It's never easy. And I think that's always I think that's a sigh of relief sometimes. And I think people are like, gosh, okay. You are in year three or four. What tell us a little bit, what does it look like to lead your pathway now year three and four, maybe some of the difficulties and maybe some of the successes that you're seeing with?
Jeremy Smith: Like I said, the the main difficulty is keeping people focused on it and not adding not trying to add to it. and and keeping focused on it yourself. Or I I think what I've had to do, and this is difficult for me, I don't know, maybe it's not for some lead pastors, is let go of control of the pathway and how we're moving people along it to people who are actually gifted at that kind of administrative organizational leadership stuff. And so I don't lead implementing the pathway across six campuses in all our ministries. We're just now getting it all implemented in the family ministry. We we still are implementing in different ministries how do we bring this pathway? How do they apply to the pathway? So that I'm gonna tell you that implementation is gonna take longer than you think. Vic told me that and I'm like, I don't we got it. We can do this. And And you got to hand it off to the people who are most gifted to do it. So I don't lead those meetings. I don't lead those processes. Jagger, who we this podcast has has introduced, he leads all that for he's better at that than me. So I think releasing that, keeping focused on the reason why we're doing it, keeping it in front of people and not not letting things creep into it. I remember it was like, I don't know, in between year one and two, I was like, I don't think the pathway's working like we want. We need to redesign it. And we brought you in to kind of help us with that. And what did you talk to us about?
Vick Green: Mm-hmm. Here's the million dollar question is when you think about the problems you're facing, you just ask, is the issue that we're facing a design, a communication, or an implementation issue? Design, communication, or implementation. So you guys were like, we made a change. I was like, cool, like we're totally up for tweaking it. I think in pathway, you learn stuff. I mean, the goal is not you don't have a finished product that you never touch for seven years. What we're trying to do is to refine, not just like recreate something. And so we put up with your team. I think I was like, give me all the problems we're facing. Just fill this chart, guys, and get probably 15 to 20 of them. And I was like, Okay, is it a design issue, a communication issue, or an implementation issue? And I I think of the 15, I think there was 13 I's and two C's and no design issues. And I was like, So guys, what do we want to do? And they were like, I think we just need to execute better. I was like, all right, let's have that conversation. And I but and I and I again commend you guys because I think you y'all did not just go back and redesign. Redesigning is great because we we love the idea of creating something new and we can avoid being held accountable to just continuing to run and do the hard work of what is ahead of us. And I think you guys have done a good job of s holding yourselves accountable and continuing on it.
Jeremy Smith: one huge key to that has been first off the personal conviction that all of us have about disciple making, about D groups, about helping people get to the the place of learning what it means to actually be a disciple and go make other disciples and be deployed on mission, go through Kingdom Circle, that sort of things and find that for themselves. But but secondly, we meet monthly as a team and we have goals every semester. You you've helped us lead through some through a lot of that and design Brad and design that process. But that monthly meeting where we're talking about goals and implementation and how we're helping people move along this has been so helpful.
Vick Green: And and and we're talking all about the challenges. People are like, you know, like the tone's so different. I do think I'm I am big on like, hey, let's have sober expectations of what the pathway is and what it's not, what's what what's called for it. But I mean, share just a little what's the impact that it's had. Because I think those are the difficulties. But when you look at people deployed on mission, knowing their unique role, share just a little of what impact that the pathway has had and created.
Jeremy Smith: It's the same freedom for me that I've talked about many times of being able to say to people, we don't want something from you, we want something for you. And here's the process we have designed to use to help you become this kind of disciple and help you, again, what I said earlier, be able to stand in front of Jesus one day and say, I did what you asked me to do. I didn't just read the Bible a lot and pray a lot or go to worship services. I actually know my unique role and how I make disciples and I'm able to go do that. And we have multiple. examples of of people working through that. It's not perfect, but going through a life group or a multiply group, D group, and then going to disciples story or kingdom circle and and and beginning to live into the ministry plan that that they've designed. So being able to say that and then watching people do it. And then even now we're sort of redesigning our connections team, how how we help people get connected to the life of the church. It's been super helpful. We don't have to come up with some new connections process. Like we have a connections process. We have the pathway right here. And so it's clarifying in that way. It clarifies things for our ministry areas. so so many the so many advantages like that.
Vick Green: And and y'all how many how many people have named their unique role and stepped into their mission? Is it five man, five so five hundred people being able to reach their kingdom circle, which again, it's like what you don't get there without a pathway. And it's and and and I would say you don't get there waiting for the perfect pathway either. And so you get there by putting a pathway out there and doing the work of it. I think you guys done it super well.
Jeremy Smith: Right at five hundred, yeah.
Vick Green: here's here's what I want to do in the leader notes. We've been talking about all about pathway stuff. We talk about it in Movement Ready Church. So you can get the book, you can walk through that section there. but also in the leader notes, we have a pathway test that we do. It's five questions that you have to answer to create a pathway that develops disciple makers. And so it's gonna hit all of these principles, but also it's gonna make sure that you don't fall in the trap of creating a pathway that gets you program engagement, but not disciple makers. So if you want to grab that our pathway test, just get the leader notes and it'll be included in there as well. And as always, if maybe yours, you're talking about it, you're saying, man, my team needs to talk work on pathway. We need to do a process like share this with your team, jump on a phone call with our team. We would love to talk with you about how we can help you not just get a dream disciple, but a pathway to get there. As always, subscribe, share, and we'll be with you next time.
