Creating a Customized Discipleship Plan : Robby Angle

Full-Text Transcript

How can we overcome some of the concerns and frustrations surrounding discipleship and ensure that we are effectively developing disciples of Jesus in our local churches?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Robby Angle. Robby is the president and CEO of Trueface. Prior to joining Trueface, Robby served for over seven years at North Point Community Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Together, Robby and I explore some of the disappointments that we might feel when we try to adopt or adapt discipleship models into our local churches. Robby shares some powerful insights on how you and the leaders in your local church can help create a discipleship plan that is authentic to the unique culture and context of your church. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another insightful episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye, and each and every week, I have the privilege and honor of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and we dive into a topic all in an effort to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you embrace healthy, sustainable rhythms so you can flourish in both life and leadership. I’m super excited about today’s show. We are proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. Not only do we have a conversation every week, but our team creates an entire toolkit that compliments the conversation we’re having, and you can find that at PastorServe.org/network. For this episode and every episode, in that toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including a Ministry Leader’s Growth Guide. Now, in this growth guide, you’ll find insights pulled out of this conversation, you’ll find questions that you can reflect on personally and that you and your ministry team at your local church can process through together to see how you can contextualize some of the things we’re learning in this conversation to your local ministry setting. So please be sure to check out PastorServe.org/network and get the toolkit for this episode. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside pastors and ministry leaders, and if you would like to learn more about how one of our trusted ministry coaches can walk alongside you, we’re offering a complimentary coaching session. You can learn details about that at PastorServe.org/freesession, so be sure to check that out as well. Then, if you’re joining us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We love getting to know our audience better, and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry. Also, whether you’re on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please be sure to subscribe or follow so you do not miss out on any of these great episodes. As I said, I’m excited about today’s conversation. At this time, I’d like to welcome Robby Angle to the show. Robby, welcome, brother.

Robby Angle
What’s up, man, I finally made it onto the podcast. I feel like I’ve arrived.

Jason Daye
I don’t know about that. Brother, I’m excited to have you. Obviously, I love the work that you’re doing at Trueface and the heart behind all that you do. Robby, what you invest your life into, what you think about, what you process through, and what you pray through all kind of revolves around this idea of our spiritual formation. Disciple making. What does it mean to be a follower of Jesus? You’ve invested a lot of time and energy into that, and we could talk about some of those things, but what I’d like to get to is one of the pressing questions I think all of us in ministry have. All of us who’ve pastored at the local church level, we all feel called to make disciples. We all feel called to help people grow in Christ-likeness. That entire journey of the disciple. We all hope that the work that we’re doing in our local churches is effective. That it’s making a difference. That’s our hope. That’s our prayer. That’s what we’re kind of giving our lives to. Yet, so many of us, I know I’ve been in this position, and I’ve talked to many, many other pastors and ministry leaders who have been in the same position and are so passionate about that idea, and yet, really sitting back and wondering, is what we’re doing really moving the needle? Is it working, and what does that look like? Can we be more effective, and what does that mean? So, Robby, I want to kind of just start here. Talk to us a little bit, if you could, about those questions that pastors are wrestling with when it comes to the idea of making disciples and this discipleship journey.

Robby Angle
Yeah, I mean, let me start with myself first because the question that, Jason, I just heard you ask is the question that in ministry, out of ministry, but particularly for ministry leaders, we ask this question, do we have an effective plan for discipling the adults in our church? That means we have a plan, and it’s working. There’s usually a secondary question to that, which is, do I have the quality and quantity of volunteer leaders to help make that happen? Because we know the intangible is a quality leader that’s conducive for any relationship environment that’s the greatest denominator or variable of whether a group is transformational. Most of us take anybody with a heartbeat who raises their hand and says they’ll lead because we just need it. So, those questions, do I have an effective plan for discipling the adults in my church, and do I have the quality and quantity of leaders to make it happen? Those are so simple in some ways and so complex to figure out the systems, the processes, the scale, and the consistency so that the outcomes of those environments, whatever they are, Sunday school, life group, D group, cell group, or whatever. What I mean by that is that I go whenever people connect relationally with the hope that they grow spiritually, which is these environments we create as ministry leaders are people actually growing, maturing, and forming into the likeness of Christ. Which is discipleship, formation, growth, synonymous usage of those words here. Is that happening as a norm or an exception? Gosh, it’s hard. It’s slow, it’s messy, and if you try to systematize it for excellence, you’ve lost some of the secret sauce. So it’s not about that. If you swing the other side and just go, oh, well, people are hanging out, so that means they’re growing. We know that’s not the case either. So welcome to the messy, inefficient, slow work of relational discipleship, and thank you, thank you, thank you. The fact that you are a ministry leader means that you have this passion to say, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and your passion and your focus is aligned with that. You’re listening to a podcast about that. So that alone is just amazing. On one hand, you’re doing better than you probably think because you’re just loving people. At least, that’s my assumption of the amazing men and women listening to the FrontStage BackStage podcast. But I want to back that up and just add one more point to this. As you were doing that intro, I was thinking, this is hard for me. Okay, I’m 42, next week, year-old. By the time airs, a 42-year-old guy who has been saying for 30 years, since I became a Christian, of which 20 years has been like paid to be a Christian, right? For all these years, I’ve been saying things like, it’s not a religion, it’s a relationship, right? These things I was taught to say as a Young Life leader and these different things in high school and college ministry. But if I’m honest, it’s been way more of a religion than a relationship in my own experience for most of my life. I’m trying to figure out what it means to mature and to grow. Most days, I feel stuck. I’m trying to figure out how to do this life of intimacy and experience of abiding with a god I can’t see, and I don’t hear from audibly. Some people might, but I have not. I don’t hear the audible or see the physical. He knew that, and I know he’s infused the Holy Spirit into my life. I know he’s given me you as a brother, that I get to reflect Christ in you to me. I know these dynamics, but most days, I mean, I’m asking these questions, trying to figure it out. So how in the world do we not give ourselves more grace for our environments where we now feel like we have this responsibility to create these environments that correlate to spiritual growth in the members’ lives every day and every meeting when we don’t? Do you grow every meeting? So we have to kind of zoom out, think differently, and not abdicate responsibility but not err on the side of fear and control in this. I hope that, as we have this conversation, which I love you for having me on here, to have this conversation, Jason, but I hope that you and I can wrestle with this and, in turn, bring a bunch of our friends into this conversation where we can go let’s brainstorm perspective or principles. What are we even talking about? What is discipleship? Maybe we go there next. What do we even mean? Because that’s such a nebulous word in the church today. Then what do you even do about it? So where you want to go, man? I’m excited.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that, and thank you, Robby, for giving us all kind of permission to say, hey, we don’t have this all dialed in for ourselves and our personal relationships. So the pressure we’re putting on our shoulders to get it all dialed in for everybody else that God’s entrusted to us is a bit much, and we need to hear that, we need to be able to step back, and we need to be able to take a deep breath and say, Okay, God. Really, I think the question for us is kind of, what’s next, God? What’s next? Like, if this is on our heart and we’re trying to process through this, what is next for us? What is next for our people? So Robby, let’s kind of move into that because one of the things that you share, which I love, is this idea that before we jump into kind of the systems and ideas, and that’s a place that a lot of us like to go. We’re planners, right? We’re trying to think, Okay, we hear a kind of a new strategy, let’s say, or we go to a conference or something, and we say, Oh, this is how they’re doing small groups. So we’re wanting to kind of plug that in. But before we go there, which is our tendency, Robby, you talk about how there’s something that has to happen underneath all of this, when we’re thinking about discipleship. So I’d love for you to kind of unpack that for us because I think this is so key and so critical when we’re thinking about what this looks like and how can we move into greater effectiveness in our calling.

Robby Angle
So this is for those of you who were about to nerd out on some stuff. I want to provide a framework, pun intended, with establishment framework, or a mental model for what we’re talking about because I think this stuff helps us because it’s complicated and simple. I think if y’all track with me, you know this is complicated and simple, and that’s why we do what we do. But part of that, Jason, and what you alluded to, is what we do is we want to create discipleship environments, which is an environment that helps people grow and mature as disciples. We know that God has designed us to grow through the context of relationships. It’s innate in us. It is all throughout Scripture. Jesus defines discipleship in this way, and I mean the great commandment is to love God and love others. Then in John 13:35, Jesus says, By this, they’ll know that you’re my disciples, the way you love one another. There’s a one-another component of love which is evidence of formation, growth, and discipleship, which is our hope for the outcomes of the people in our churches, right? We’re at 30,000 feet here, everybody. So I like to define discipleship, again, a nebulous word, as the process of growing in love of God and others. One of the principles of that is that it’s relational. It is a relational dynamic that is conducive. That’s why, when I say discipleship, I always say relational because that’s innate capturing that principle. We’re designed to grow through relationships and discipleship is the process of growing in love of God and others. So that is the outcome. That’s the hope of what we’re talking about, of the tension of, do we have a plan? So the outcome is like, how do we know? Think about that just for one minute. Outcomes. What are we building towards? I was leading the men’s and then all the adult ministries at a really big church. So I had 800 small groups, and it was like, Hey, this is where discipleship happens. I’m like, How do I know? Is it happening at 10%? 50%? How do I know? What are the correlations and how do we measure them? You can measure it in all kinds of ways. Again, we’re talking outcomes here, and I’ll reverse engineer this into a mental model to think about discipleship and frame our conversation. But outcomes you could say, are they giving? Are they serving? Are they engaging in group? Do they continue? Do they lead? Are they more consistent at church? Those are some outcomes you can measure. But really, per the definition I talked about is, are they growing in love of God and others? So how does growth happen? I believe simply when we see God in ourselves in a different way, when we replace lies with truth, move from dark to light, when we see God in ourselves theology and identity in a new way, the result of that is we love others in a noticeably different way around us. That is transformation. That is the hope of the gospel. That is what Jesus and Jesus alone makes possible because he is the core of a new, renewed view of God, ourselves, and our identity because of what he did on the cross. We can unpack that, but that is transformation, and it’s evidenced by loving others around us in a noticeably different way. So the thing we measured when I was over all the men’s groups at the church, we had like 180 men’s groups. What we tracked is we asked their wives, we said, as a result of being engaged in this experience, do you notice a difference in your husband? If so, what? That was our measure of whether we were effective or not in the discipleship, which is relational discipleship, they were in some kind of group. Again, groups don’t lead to growth. Relationships lead to growth. So, life group, cell group, we’ll talk about that, too. But that’s an outcome. So if we agree on the outcome, then we reverse engineer as ministry leaders, okay, what do I need to do to achieve that outcome? So we focus on the environment, the strategy, the system, the model, and we go, okay, our outcomes aren’t working. We need a new model. So we read a book or go to a conference. Say groups don’t work. Whatever. Small groups like Sunday school. My model is not working. I need a new model. I focus on the ministry environment, which is the model and the culture of it. So I plug and play a new model. I go to Jason. I go, Jason, what are you doing to your church? You go, it’s amazing, and I plug and play it into my church. It withers and dies. I plant your beautiful plant in my ecosystem, it dies after two years, and I rinse and repeat, right? That is so common. That’s what I did. I went to all the conferences, read all the books, and I’ve done consulting with enough churches that I will tell the listeners, that is not the problem. I have seen just about every model work and not work. I’ve seen them all work and not work, but that’s the environment, the strategy, the structure, in hope for an outcome, and it’s not there that is is not the problem because I’ve seen them all work. So for the past two years, I became friends with Brian Mosley, the president of Right Now Media, and they have resourced 1000s of churches. We struck up a friendship and we have a shared passion for partnering with churches to help them have thriving cultures of discipleship. He said I want to move from resourcing discipleship to being a partner ally in discipleship. I know you do that too, Robby, what do you think? And I go, What do you think? We started brainstorming and that’s where environments lead to outcomes, and where most of the resources and teaching stuff focuses. That symptom is not the source. That’s what you do, but the precursor to that is how you view discipleship informs what you do. We rarely talk about, what we mean by how we view and there are two parts to that. I’m going. You got me spun up, Jason.

Jason Daye
This is good. This is exactly what I want. This is exactly what I was hoping for, brother.

Robby Angle
All right, so think mental model. You got outcomes. Then go one left, that’s environment, that’s strategy, model, structure, and that’s where we all focus. That’s both do component. You go one left, that’s view, and that’s your ministry philosophy. The ministry philosophy is your thoughts on how people mature or grow spiritually. That’s your change theory. You have a ministry philosophy, whether you know it or not, and that is informing and shaping your leader development, your leader equipping, your resourcing, the culture, the strategy, and the model, which is then producing the outcomes it’s designed to produce. It does that look like love or not love. Ministry philosophy, a quick example of this is like, the old Mike Leach is like the football player, the football coach. That’s like air raid. High passes. His philosophy is run up the score, big plays, and long passes. So that’s his ministry philosophy, how he thinks he can win as a football coach. But was it Sitka or the old-school coaches? Some coaches have that ground-and-pound running game for football. It’s like we’re going to wear out the defense, we’re going to own the clock, and we’re just going to grind it out three yards at a time. That’s your philosophy on how to win in football. So you design your environments, your practices, your games, your team, and your recruiting around your philosophy of how you think you can win, and then that produces the results of either having a team that executes the ground and pound or the air raid offense, right? So if something’s broken, it might be you’re not recruiting the team. I mean, if you got a bunch of skinny guys on the line who are like pass blockers versus run blockers, you know, that’s your environment. But you might have a wrong philosophy and it takes a lot more humility to step back as a ministry leader and go, do I believe transformation is possible? What does transformation look like? How do people grow? How do I grow? How have I experienced transformation and growth? What’s possible with God, experientially, with Christ in me, and with others? This is all your ministry philosophy. Now that’s not where you start, though. You have to evaluate your beliefs which inform your ministry philosophy, and so that’s how you view discipleship. Your beliefs inform your ministry philosophy. I can double-click on that if you want, but that is a mental model to think differently and why we deal with symptoms and what we do, when really the environments, the churches that have thriving cultures of discipleship, have clarity and spend the time to wrestle with and process their beliefs, which inform their philosophy, which results in their environments, and then the outcomes.

Jason Daye
Okay, Robby, let’s lean in a little bit. That’s all fantastic stuff and this is exactly where I was hoping we would go. You walking it back, which is beautiful. So let’s lean into this then. If the starting point or the challenge we’ve been having is that we are maybe too quick to get to the how, right? So we’re plug and play, plug and play. The starting point, really, is we lean back into beliefs. This idea of view. How do we view and what is our philosophy of ministry and our philosophy of discipleship? How then do we, Robby, get there? I mean, we pull back there and what are some things that we need to really begin to work through to help us not feel defeated every 18 months to 2 years, when the plant we’ve planted in our environment, as you said, withers, right?

Robby Angle
Yep. With a lot of humility, a lot of difficulty, and starting with ourselves as ministry leaders. Part of the difficulty why we don’t wrestle with how we view and just focus on what we do in environments and outcomes is because we have so much going on. You know, if I’m a parent and I’m disciplining my kids in a certain way and it’s just not working, it’s much easier for me to focus on Well, I just need to be more consistent with time out. I need to spank two times. I need to change my approach or I need to be more hands-off, laissez-faire approach. I need to change and execute better parenting discipline. That’s what I do. It takes so much more humility and time and introspection to go, God, is there something in how I am thinking about developing discipline or affirmation of my kids that needs to change? How I view my change theory on what my kids need, and what my beliefs about myself are doing to inform my change theory of what my kid needs. This is an encouragement. That there’s a reason with all the hats you’re wearing and all the things you’re doing and how complicated this is, to focus on environments and outcomes. In thriving cultures of discipleship, I will say there are really three parts to this. It starts with the person. This is you. Is this a reality? What are your beliefs and are you living out this philosophy in your own life? Because if not, there’s a ceiling of integrity that’s not going to permeate into the culture of your church. So it starts with the person. Then you need a plan because you do have meetings, teams, things to do, and calendars, and that is the discipleship framework, which we can talk about. We build a roadmap. We help leadership teams think differently, view differently, and then do differently in a way that’s not prescriptive, but it helps, as a consultant would, guide you to create a clear, complete, and customized approach. So that’s the plan and then you need a process. You need execution systems in order for that plan to be implemented effectively. So change theory strategy leads to structure, which leads to staffing. This way of discipleship starts with the person, goes to a plan, and then you need processes for the execution of that plan. In starting with the person, that’s the hard work and the humble work. What is real in your life in regards to how you will pursue formation and growth strategy, this is also the same in every one of your small group leader’s lives, and here’s what I mean by that. So let’s start with belief. Let’s say in my belief, a belief the core of a leader, you and I included, listening to this and every one of our small group leaders is rooted in our theology and our identity. How do I see God and how do I see myself? Jason, I wake up pretty much every day and I see God through a lens where I see him as a disappointed dad. My primary shame narrative is that I’m not stewarding what he’s entrusted to me. So my life is not making a difference or matters. That’s what my fear is at 80 to look back. That’s my primary shame lie. Therefore I see myself as a disappointment and a sinner, right? That’s my theology and my belief interconnected. I see God as disappointed Dad and I see myself as behind, a disappointment, and behind where I should be. How do you think I would lead a small group tonight? How I treat others is typically an indicator of how I treat myself. If I see myself as a sinner striving to be a saint, as a framework for a lens of identity, theology, and beliefs, if I see myself as a sinner striving to be a saint, I’m trying to fix myself. I’m focused on sin management and behavior modification. I’m preaching at myself more. But look at the belief from the other lens. If I replace those lies today that God’s disappointed and I’m a disappointment with he’s a good and loving God, and there’s nothing more or less I could do to earn any more of His love, which is the gospel of grace that Jesus redeemed what I could not fix. So I’m his beloved son. There’s nothing more or less I could do. That’s a position of security. That is the new covenant. New creation. You and I are sons and daughters of the King. So I see myself as a saint who occasionally sins, not a sinner, striving to be a saint. If I live out of my identity as a saint, how do I interact with others? I’m walking with them, not fixing them. I’m more patient. I’m more focused on relationships and others-focused. I’m more authentic because I don’t have this shame that’s forcing me to put on a mask and hoping everybody on this podcast thinks I’m really impressive because my security is from Him, He loves me, and he’s delighted in me. Do you see the correlation behind beliefs and then how that affects practically how I would lead a small group? So if a small group leader doesn’t have a foundation of a right view of God and view of themselves, you can tip and trick them all day and onboard them, they cannot. They will live out of their person, just like we will lead out of our person. So no matter how much I want to love somebody, you and I know we don’t love somebody, no matter how much we want to. That is a byproduct of a philosophy of how we do that. So give me one more minute on philosophy. So if I see myself in my belief as a sinner, striving to be a saint, disappointed dad, I see myself, and shame leads to hiddenness, which leads to me being disconnected. Then here’s the equation philosophy that that results in. If that’s my belief, then my ministry philosophy looks like this, know more and do better in order to grow, Robby. So the equation for growth, change theory, my philosophy for growth looks like know more and do better. Jason, I have been a professional Christian since I came out of college, and I, at a young age, I knew I was a sinner. I broke relationship, so I went to the church and said, How do I grow as a Christian? What I, directly and indirectly, have picked up most of my life was that equation philosophy for growth, which was, Robby, know more, hear the truth, read your Bible every day, and do better. Stop sinning. Stop looking at that. Stop thinking that. Stop drinking and do more. Serve more. Give more. That is how you grow. I did that. I’m a high-drive, high-achiever, firstborn son. I was a missionary in Pakistan by the time I was 25. I got some gold stars, y’all. I went for it and it was not the gospel. It was me earning God’s love, which is a philosophy, indirectly, not knowing that looked like knowing plus doing, which is what I picked up. But think about how our beliefs, if we really believe I’m a sinner striving to be a saint, living out of the New Covenant, understanding that Christ is in me, then the equation for growth looks like trusting plus receiving equals how you grow. I trust that God’s a good and loving God. There’s nothing more I could do. Therefore I receive His love. What’s the byproduct of that? The fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, and patience. Not out of effort, but out of John 15. John 15 is when Jesus is like, Hey guys, this is it. I’ll sum it up for you. This is how you mature and grow. This is the equation for discipleship. Abide. Trust and receive Christ in me who he is, and then I want to learn more. I want to sin less. I want to be more intentional. But those are inside-out dynamics, not outside-in dynamics. It changes everything because if I’m trusting and receiving who God says I am, there’s a patience. I walk with people in my small group tonight. I’m not focused on their sin as much as understanding with empathy. I’m not trying to pose because I have a security in my identity. I don’t need them to affirm me so I can be present with them. Doesn’t that sound like the model Jesus set? He walked with, he asked a lot of questions, and that’s why it’s so simple, but it’s so difficult, because every day I wake up wanting to be in control, know more, and do better. Especially for us ministry leaders. This is where it’s like, Jason, I have to remind myself, like, this morning, I’m on a podcast with Jason, and I’m like, okay, I need to do this and that, the pressure, the not light yoke, the not peace, not freedom, and all these things that are promised. It’s a daily practice for me to go, God, I release this to you. I trust you, and I receive that you’re done. You don’t need me to, and I get to go do this with Jason, and all these kinds of things. So that’s really a lot of theology quickly thrown at you to paint or imagine how our daily, our cultural, direct, and indirect teachings on beliefs inform philosophies, and those philosophies have huge impacts on the environments, and therefore outcomes of how people grow in our relational discipleship environments in our churches.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s fantastic, Robby. This is the thing that we miss. We don’t dig beneath because we’re too, as you said, time-constrained. We’re often quick to, you know, we’re trying to fix things as ministry leaders, as pastors, we’re trying to do our best, right? We know that there’s a sense of urgency, right? Eternity is on the line. All these things that we tell ourselves and convince ourselves, we got to work, we got to go, we got to go, we got to go. You’re inviting us to say, Whoa, let’s pull back a little bit and not get so caught up in that activity. But let’s get grounded in who God is, who we are, and that relationship. Because if we don’t get grounded there, then all the activity might bear some fruit, you know what I mean? But it’s just a flurry of activity, right? It’s just reflecting some of the stuff that we haven’t already worked through. So it’s reflecting some unhealth which just causes challenges. So good.

Robby Angle
And it keeps us in our left brain, which is limited knowledge and does not lead to transformation. So it’s like, without getting to the source of what is blocking my relationship with you and with God, there’s a limitation to the ceiling of transformation that our people are experiencing, and that is the nuance of out of their identity. Understanding that they are made right and living into that in the context of community looks a lot more like peace and freedom than fear and control, and that starts with us. Then next it goes to our leaders, and then that leader creates an environment that is either conducive or not for people to be known and loved, which is the maturing process of discipleship. The process of growing in love of God and others. By the way, for anybody who stayed on this podcast this long, I want to honor you by going, please, please, please. This is my plea of like, you can’t get into environment, strategy, or structure, because I’m a nerd when it comes to models, and we built Discipleship Framework to make that easier for you. But if you do that, if you do stuff before changing your viewing, as Jason just said, it will be limited for all kinds of reasons. But again, person, then plan, then process. But there is a plan and a process that helps, not in a prescriptive way, and we built Discipleship Framework. I’ll leave you some nuggets because I do want to if you’ve stayed in this long, I want to leave you some nuggets. A mental model to help you start looking for holes and looking for gaps to practically create better systems in your churches for people. Discipleship Framework, it’s 30 videos and hundreds of documents that we built with Right Now Media, and it’s all on Pastors+. Jason will put the links in there. But there are three parts, how to think differently, how to build a clear, complete, and customized approach, and then how to execute that. So I just talked about how to think differently, right? How to build, I do consulting with churches, and I guide them through a process. Think differently and then build a customized approach. Because, again, it’s not the model. You’ve got to create the principles to help you organize what’s best for your people in your environment. We guide a team through a six-meeting process called the Discipleship Framework Course. So you and a couple of people on your team go through six meetings, and at the end of that, you have a two-page overview that’s clear, complete, and customized for everything you do for adults in a relational discipleship approach. That Discipleship Framework roadmap has five parts to it, and 99% of an adult ministry model fits under these five buckets. The first one is that you clarify your hope. What is your vision that aligns with your view, your beliefs, and your philosophy? Then there are four main parts and these are ordered with intentionality. The first part is, how do you develop leaders? Because the core of a leader, the health of a leader, theology, and identity are about 60% of the equation of whether a group has efficacy in leading to disciple in growth formation as a norm or an exception. So the leader is the key. If you do one thing, focus on developing your leaders, and developing leaders gets to the core of theology and identity. So we help give all kinds of examples and tools for how to do that. You mean like a leader training? No, thank you for asking. Leader training is how you support leaders. So developing leaders is the pipeline to quality and quantity of leaders. So when I say, who wants to lead a small group? I don’t have to say, hey, you love Jesus and you raised your hand. Here we go. I’m perpetuating theocracy, right? I get to go, No, we have frontline pastors in our church who we are confident are going to create and facilitate an environment that’s conducive for you to grow. So you have to have a pipeline, a leader development pipeline, that helps people process their beliefs and philosophy, an experience of authentic community, and a model of leadership. That’s developing leaders. Then, once you have your leaders, how do you support them? You have 20 small group leaders, right? You developed a pipeline. How do you support those leaders? That’s two parts. How do you onboard them? That’s your leader training because the beginning is the key. It sets the precedent. So how do you onboard them with intentionality and how do you provide ongoing care? One-on-ones? Huddles? Are they part of a team? Do you have a coaching model? Those types of questions. How you onboard them, we spent a lot of time looking at what principles differentiate great leaders from lame leaders. There were five things great leaders did and it’s a sailing metaphor. They clarified their destination. They talked as a group. Hey, this is why we’re gonna meet 60 minutes a week for the next couple of years. Let’s honor each other and actually talk about why. You need a destination to figure out if you’re going in the right direction and to verbalize your expectation of why you’re in the group. So they were determining their destination and then they were modeling vulnerability. The great leaders were leading the way with vulnerability. Again, out of their identity of a secure saint. Then the third part is clarifying the culture of the crew on the boat. You’re on a boat heading into a destination. You’re the captain. What’s the crew culture? That’s the spoken and unspoken rules. Are we going to teach at each other or ask questions? Are we going to try to fix each other or walk with each other? Let’s verbalize some of those guardrails and boundaries. Then the next part is, how do you develop your ship to get to where you want to go? You’re going to meet 60 minutes, 90 minutes, every week, or every other week. If your boss at work showed up and was like, hey, what’s up? You’d be like, this isn’t worth my time. But then we expect people to come to group and go, I’m gonna give up 60 minutes a week and just assume I’ll grow. No. Let’s honor people and go, there’s an art to a well-run meeting at work, and there’s an art to a well-run group. There’s one trick in that and it’s that you connect relationally at the beginning. You can either talk about football or you can ask a good, open-ended heart question to connect. Both serve that relational time. But how you steward that is different. That leads into learning. Connect in order to learn. Incorporate truth to replace lies with truth. You talk about the sermon, you bring in a study, you do whatever, and you ask questions. Most people talk about it, stay in their heads, and then go home. But there’s a third part, which is applying that in my life. How do you make that segue from knowledge, I’m talking about the sermon, to applying that in my life? There’s a question that great leaders were asking, and it was, what faith step is God inviting me to take? So according to what we just read in Ephesians 2, what does that mean for me? What faith step is God inviting me to take? What is the lie I get to replace with that truth, and what would that mean in my life? Then it gets into the heart of which we trust each other and can follow up. So that’s a develop your time for transformation and build the ship. The last part is to plan out your route. That’s the fifth component. So instead of showing up going what do you want to do now? Plan out three to four months at a time. Put service on there, put an overnight on there, and put it on your calendar. Get your families together. If you have a hope statement or a destination where you want to do life together, but then your next four months, you don’t have anything on the calendar for you and I’s family to get together, Jason, outside of group, it’s probably not going to happen. So route your calendar to reflect your destination. Those five components, we onboard our leaders, so we have a tool. Train on those leaders, and then for the first five weeks of their group here are some tools to have those conversations. Then six weeks in, you’re like, we’re clear, more aligned, people have got to weigh in in order to buy in. Those are best practices on how to onboard. Then the last two buckets are how to form groups and how to equip groups. So how to get people from Sunday into groups? All kinds of ways, short-term groups, group connections, and all that. Then how do you equip your groups? That’s last. That’s your open, close, men’s, women’s, and couples. What do they study? That’s your strategy and that’s the least important to me in Discipleship Framework. So that’s a really high overview of what to do in a ministry environment, coupled with developing leaders, supporting leaders, forming groups, and equipping groups around a hope statement with an example of some of the tools in Discipleship Framework to help you onboard in supporting leaders. I know that’s a lot, but hopefully, and please hear me as you’re listening to this. There’s a large percentage of you that are like, Oh my gosh, he just fire-hosed us with all these things that sound smart, and I’m not doing any of them. I’m a failure. I give up. Please do not hear that. Please hear and reflectively go, God, I could do all those and spend the next years doing that if I had 50 hours a week or a staff to do this, and I’m a pastor and I have all kinds of other stuff to do. Please hear me and say, I want to share that in a way that you get to reflectively go, God, what’s the one thing out of that that I could do with intentionality? What’s the one thing out of that that I need to hear from my person in this conversation? What’s the one thing in this conversation between Robby and Jason that I could incorporate into my plan for my church? Or is there something that I need to do for the process like, I’m not encouraging my groups pastor enough? I’m not encouraging my small group leaders enough in regards to process. So one thing is amazing in humility, and that is how we grow and mature, which is one day at a time of trusting and reminding ourselves that it’s not me, it is God. I am not a sinner, I am a saint, and it’s through abiding that he’s going to do everything anyway. I’m not producing fruit. It’s coming through me.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love it. I mean, that’s encouraging because, as you said, it’s a lot to process and a lot to think through, especially when you’re going, man, I’ve just been busy thinking about how we’re doing it. But, Robby, you bring up a great point. We need to start thinking about what’s underneath it all. The why. Just even that goes, Oh, man, okay, wait, some things to work on, let alone these best practices and those types of things. Robby, I want to ask one question as we’re wrapping this up. With the Discipleship Framework, my big question for you is, and I’ve peaked a little under the hood, and you and I have talked a little bit. But I think the question that I had initially, I’m sure a lot of people watching and listening might have the same push. The question is, Robby, how is this Discipleship Framework not just another cool idea that someone has about how to do discipleship in the local church? What makes us different than the different plug-and-play things that we’ve heard, read, or whatever? All the other things. So help us with that. I’d love to hear your answer on what differentiates this.

Robby Angle
Yeah, I’m pretty passionate about this, and there are really two differentiators. The past couple of years of going God, what do we do? How do we serve local churches and come alongside them to partner with them in having thriving cultures of discipleship? It’s honoring them enough to provide transferable teaching for them and for their leaders on how to think differently about discipleship. To get to the beliefs and the philosophies and to wrestle with that. I know no church leader wants that. They want the solution, the plan, and the process. It’s different because we spend time and go, Hey, before we get into a plan, how to build something, let’s view it differently. That’s the first thing. The second real differentiator is the framework results in a roadmap. A two-page overview of how you’re going to execute your plan and your processes with specificity, and it is based on those principles and questions to guide you to get clarity around developing leaders, supporting leaders, forming groups, and equipping groups, built on a foundation of a right view of discipleship. But you will build a customized approach. So you will have a two-page overview that looks like your church, for your people, with your passions, and not anybody else’s model. It’s simply a process to go through to help build you that roadmap that’s customized to your church. That’s why I have all kinds of ideas of what I would do if I were you and I will never tell you that. That’s what’s different because this process is designed to come alongside you, to serve you, for you to come up with that, and then all kinds of resources to help you execute that. So regardless of how you want to onboard leaders, here are other examples of how to onboard and support your leaders. Here are five. We have a matrix on Discipleship Framework with, for example, how you support leaders. Here are six different ways with pros, cons, ideas, and things to be aware of. How to form groups. Newcomers class, short-term groups, group link, or online connection. We provide a matrix with all kinds of options for you to look at and go, Ooh, I want to do that one, not that one. Then you put that into your roadmap, you do it, and we support you as best we can because our job is to serve you and guide you to clarify what is your strategy and what is your discipleship roadmap for your people in your church. Not present one. So, I couldn’t find something like that and so I didn’t have that. So my hope is to be behind the scenes, serve the church, and that’s why we exist as a ministry of Trueface. That’s the heart of the leadership team at Right Now Media. If you have a Right Now Media subscription, it’s all on Pastors+. If you don’t have a Right Now Media subscription, you can go to DiscipleshipFramework.com, and all of these resources are for you. There’s a cost to that because we believe you gotta have some skin in the game. I wrestled with giving it away for free. But if you can’t afford it, email me at robby@trueface.org and I’ll get you into it. That’s not a bottleneck. That’s not why we’re doing it. But yeah, so all that, all of this, and more. Let us know how we can serve you because that’s our heart.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that, brother, and I love your heart, knowing you and knowing your heart behind this. I just love the fact that it’s not just another kind of program or another way of doing discipleship that worked at these churches, and now take it and kind of cram it into your church and try to figure out how to make it work. It’s like, no. It’s like having someone, a ministry coach or a ministry consultant who comes, hangs out with you and offers up some questions, not answers, but questions, for your team in your local church context to wrestle with, to process through, to think through, to develop something that is unique for your church, and unique for how God is at work in your church right now.

Robby Angle
Jason, I mean you, me, and Jimmy have a relationship outside of this and with the same heart and passion. I mean your consultants and church leaders, when they see this gap and this tension, our hope is that they would be able to, the Pastor Serve guys would go, Hey, I have this tool, Discipleship Framework. It’s just a process to go through to help you clarify, think differently, and then build something that fits your church. You go, oh, I have an effective plan for discipling adults in my church. I think differently about it, and I have a plan summarized on two pages that captures just about everything and puts me in the 1% of churches that can say, I have a clear, complete, and customized plan for discipling. Denominational leaders, if you want this in your churches, you can white-label it. Call me. We don’t care if more churches have a thriving culture of discipleship. This is the way of Jesus. The master plan of evangelism. It’s slow, it’s unsexy, it’s difficult, and Jesus modeled this thing. He’s like, hey, spend more time with fewer people for greater Kingdom impact. He didn’t even bat 1000 in doing that, but he set a precedent of that is what we get to be a part of. More time fewer people for greater Kingdom impact. That is slow and relational. We’re just helping people gather in groups that are conducive for growth and with a level of intentionality and consistency. That is the building blocks of how he designed us to grow and what Jesus modeled. So all of what we want to do is help you think through how to do that and to serve you and do that well.

Jason Daye
Amen. I love it. Absolutely love it. Robby, thanks for hanging out with us today. For all of you who are watching and listening along, be sure to check out PastorServe.org/network where you can get the toolkit for this episode, which will go into a lot more detail on what Robby has shared and what we discussed. We’ll have links to Trueface and also links to Discipleship Framework on Right Now Media and all those things that Robby was referencing. We’ll have links directly to those so you can check it all out and find out all about it. Brother, it’s always good to hang out. So good to hear your heart and thank you for your love not only God, which is a beautiful thing and it comes through, brother, but your love for local churches, pastors, and ministry leaders and helping to come alongside them. Absolutely love it, brother. Thank you for making time.

Robby Angle
Thank you. See you, Jason.

Jason Daye
Alright, God bless you, brother.

Jason Daye
Now, before you go, I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had. This is the weekly toolkit that we provide. And we understand that it’s one thing to listen or watch an episode, but it’s something entirely different to actually take what you’ve heard, what you’ve watched, what you’ve seen, and apply it to your life and to your ministry. You see, FrontStage BackStage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about ministry leadership, we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in ministry. Every single week, we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that. Now you can find this at PastorServe.org/network. That’s PastorServe.org/network. And there you will find all of our shows, all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits. Now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team. There are resource links to different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation, and several other tools, but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide. Our team pulls key insights and concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests. And then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process, providing space for you to reflect on how that episode’s topic relates to your unique context, at your local church, in your ministry and in your life. Now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders. You can find the weekly toolkit at PastorServe.org/network We encourage you to check out that free resource. Until next time, I’m Jason Daye encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. God bless.