In Diaspora, our Core Team had a great year of coaching with a dynamic group called 100 Movements last year. We got to interact both face-to-face and digitally with inspiring leaders including Alan Hirsch, Neil Cole, Jessie Cruickshank, Dave Rhodes, Eric and Kandi Pfeiffer throughout the year. Yeah, it seriously rocked and we are so grateful for the investment of those leaders in our fledgling church movement.
In that time we were able to work through some of our stuff and grow in vision in many ways. One of the tasks they set for us was to come up with 6 to 10 marks of a disciple in Diaspora. What were we working, praying and leading people toward as disciples of Jesus drawn together (and scattered) through Diaspora?
These aren’t goals for people to work on like New Year’s resolutions or self help goals. We don’t give out report cards on how people are doing. But we believe that these are marks of disciples of Jesus that we as a disciplemaking community should see in us all. We are all at different points in our journeys and we will see these in varying degrees in each of us. But they should all show up when we ask,
“Am I exhibiting these radical minimum values of disciples?”
These aren’t standards for leaders or board members or staff. Although they should all exhibit these values or marks. They are values for any disciple of Jesus. Sometimes in the church, probably following business or other organizational models, we emphasize developing leaders and forget to develop disciples.
We need to disciple disciples!
And so here are the radical minimum values we came up with.
Each disciple of Jesus regularly:
1. participates with the Church
2. talks and listens to God
3. responds obediently to God
4. engages with the Word individually and corporately
5. engages in worship individually and corporately
6. shares their story and/or what they’re learning with someone
7. serves those in need
The above includes Word, worship, fellowship and prayer right from Acts 2:42.
It also encompasses the biblical job description of a disciple:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbour as yourself.
SMART goal people I love you. But if you’re looking at these radical minimum standards you’re probably starting to twitch. They aren’t smart goals (gasp)!
Oh well. There are times for smart goals and there are times for values/standards/marks that aren’t measured. Even as we look at Jesus’ description of a disciple listed above from Matthew 22 it doesn’t fit the SMART goal paradigm does it?
And really when we as disciples examine ourselves that’s when we can say, “How am I doing on each of these values?” And that’s where we could develop a SMART goal based on each value because we probably want to grow in them.
But we also have to recognize that we will do better in certain areas at certain times and that’s part of the dynamic of living as a disciple of Jesus.
And really the only true measure of a disciple SMART, value, mark or whatever is to compare us to our Lord. We are His disciples who make disciples.
