At the GO Equipped tentmaking courses, which we have been running since 1997 in over a dozen countries, our focus has been to train Christian businesspeople, professionals, and students in the steps of planting house churches, especially where the name of Jesus is not yet known. All of our teaching sessions were designed to point to this end result.
However, about a decade later, we had heard back from returned tentmakers that planting house churches was hit-and-miss; mostly, it just wasn’t happening. This led to personal discouragement and a feeling that they had failed.
Review and Revise
As our training program was always evolving to line up with reports from the field, we realized a change of focus was needed.
I have never been more proud of our international training teams than when they were able to shift the focus to making disciples that make disciples.
Thus our training program became all about teaching regular, everyday Christians about sharing their faith and making disciples who themselves would make disciples, even long after the tentmakers had returned home from their job contract abroad.
“Intentional discipling of disciplers leads to self-multiplying house churches.”
From CPM to DMM
We were excited to notice that this focus led to house groups being born, almost as an automatic result of intentional discipleship of fellow workers and neighbors.
Do you want to learn how to make disciples where you are planted, whether abroad or at home? Let us help you get started by attending one of our upcoming tentmaking courses. Contact info@intent.org.
By Ari Rocklin
I believe you discovered something that is a roadblock to much of our efforts to do kingdom work. It’s pretty obvious in Scripture that Jesus’ command is to make disciples. But we’ve confused that with a “meeting” in a particular venue, whatever shape or form it takes.
In our local church, we’ve been struggling on how to get the focus off of the Sunday morning meeting. The discussion took a year but we’ve come up with a vision of “a growing community of households of faith that are experiencing the good news of Jesus.” Our mission is to strengthen and multiply households of faith.” This “households” theme is providing a framework for a host of conversations starting with “what does the Lordship of Jesus in our home look like?” Discipleship is acting on the teaching and commands of Jesus. The real action happens in the households, not in the meeting. It is also challenging us to see that time a one of equipping rather than “worship,” with whatever spin we’ve put on that concept (Rom. 12:1-3).
The next step in our journey is to profile what a household of faith looks like. We know it is centered on relationships–self/God/others–and that should lead us to markers. We suspect it’s going to involve our household blessing other households.
Thank you Jonathan for adding to this article. Your comments are appreciated and informative.