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Strategic Discipleship Team
 Please note: These job descriptions were composed for medium to large sized outreaches with Impact World Tour. For smaller events not all positions or simplified procedures might be required, please apply common sense in determining the needs for your community.
The focus of the Strategic Discipleship Team is put together an overall plan for the discipleship of the inquirers. This plan will incorporate several strategies:
- Church Discipleship Small Groups (recruitment & training of leaders)
- Advanced Discipleship (additional discipleship in geographic regions and/or niche groups)
Who will respond at the campaign events?
In planning a discipleship strategy, it is important to look at the demographics of those responding to altar calls in general as well as specifically with IWT. It used to be that 70% of those responding would be under the age of 25. Now 87% are between 6 and 18 years old. Young people are maturing faster than ever before; they are being exposed to adult information and experiences at a much younger age. Many young children are exposed to unstable family situations, inappropriate sexual behavior and violence, movies full of violence, sex, drugs etc… They have to make adult life decisions whilst still young teenagers.
In IWT the percentage of younger decisions is often even higher. In the New Zealand example below, 89% of those responding were under the age of 18, with the greatest response from those between 9 and 14 years of age.
New Zealand Responses
 
Where we are not – Researching our Community
Our challenge lies in the areas where “we” are not. In some regions and for some demographic groups there is no relevant discipleship available. For these areas, additional plans must be made to begin relevant small groups. However – to get to this point – we must know where we are. There are several ways we can understand our community:
- Study of Demographics – who are the people in our community?
- (Ethnicity, Religion, Age, Family Status, Income/Economic situation etc…)
- Schools & their Locations – which have discipleship groups?
- Communities – where is the center of each neighborhood in a larger city?
Study of the Church – where are the churches? Do they have discipleship for each age group, ready to take in inquirers?
- Christians – where are they living? Are they willing to disciple their neighbors?
If this information is plotted on a map – we can see where we need to fill in the gaps, and an appropriate strategy can be developed.
We need as many layers of discipleship as possible:
Local Links discipling their inquirers,
- Chaplains/Christian Groups in Schools (Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Young Life, Local Youth Pastors, Christian Fellowship etc…),
- Moms discipling neighborhood children,
- Church Youth Groups,
- After School Kids Clubs…
The list could go on forever – there are many ways of discipling the inquirers – but the key is to coordinate it so that no one falls through the gaps. It takes work and effort by all of us together.
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