A Discipleship Guide for Lutherans – Overview

Description

What is a disciple?
How would you know if you saw one?
What behaviors would he or she exhibit?

A Discipleship Guide for Lutherans contains 40 lessons covering the 8 dimensions of discipleship. This overview includes one sample guide for your use, so grab a few friends and dig in to discipleship. We are confident you will find A Discipleship Guide for Lutherans a useful study!

Purchasing this downloadable version gives you license to print copies for use in your personal discipling relationships.

Love God. Love People. Make Disciples.

A disciple of Jesus is a reflection of God in the world. As Jesus discipled people, he expected that their discipleship would touch all aspects of their life, relationships, and even society as a whole.

Experiencing God: Intentionally and consistently engaging with God in deeper relationship.

Spiritual Responsiveness: Listening to the Holy Spirit and taking action according to what you are hearing.

Sacrificial Service: Doing good works even when it’s costly, inconvenient or challenging.

Generous Living: Faithfully stewarding what God has given you for the advancement of God’s Reign.

Disciplemaking: Making more and better followers of Christ by living the Great Commission.

Personal Transformation: Changing your attitudes and behaviors because of your relationship with God and others.

Authentic Relationships: Engaging with other people in ways that reflect the heart of God toward them.

Community Transformation: Personal involvement with others to facilitate positive change where you live and beyond.

The eight topics just described flow from our previous book, The Discipleship Difference: Making disciples while growing as disciples. The book lays out our full philosophy of making disciples. This set of 8 discipleship guides then is essentially an expansion of chapter two, where we discuss the qualities of a disciple. What is a disciple? How would you know if you saw one? What behaviors would he or she exhibit? You can then use these guides to grow in holistic discipleship.

A Discipleship Guide for Lutherans is organized according to the tree diagram above. Experiencing God, at the root of the tree, focuses on the way we interact and dialogue with God, the way we become increasingly aware of his presence, and how we continue to form a more personal relationship with him. This root is necessary for all of the other areas, as they flow out of our experience of God.

Spiritual Responsiveness then builds on those roots as we seek to listen to God and respond to the voice of his Spirit in obedience. From there, the branches can be worked through in any order, according to what you are hearing from God.

The end result will be transformation– not of ourselves only– but of others and the whole of the community around us.