This is your second meeting and you might start feeling a little pressure to be teaching the person you are discipling the really “deep things” of God. I want to encourage you to be secure in Christ and trust the process of caring for someone. Don’t put undue expectations on youself or the relationship from the start. Let the relationship develop with time and consistency.
With that said, we propose you do the following:
- Print out our foundations binder on our resource page and give it to them. You might want to make sure you put it in a binder and make a cover page for the binder in order to personalize it.
- Spend the first 30 minutes or so asking questions about your disciple. It is so important in the beginning stages to get to know your disciple. Ask questions from the perspective of their past, their parents, upbringing, likes and dislikes. Don’t be fake either, ask with the intent of truly wanting to know about your disciples journey. As you are learning about the person you are building your wisdom pool in order to have discernment on what needs this person has in order to see them grow well in Christ. While asking questions consider what strengths you are seeing in the person. Where do their passions lie? What are lies they may believe? Are there huge blind spots in their life? What are some of their character flaws etc? Never hesitate to spend time getting to know your disciple.
- Be a model. Tell your disciple that you would like to tell them a little about yourself and then give your testimony.
- Ask them to give you their testimony. If they don’t know what you mean, explain briefly that you want them to explain to you how they became a Christian. After they have finished, ask them if they think testimonies are just something Christians do today or is there a historical premise behind christian testimonies? There are many places in the bibles where you can show your disciple a record of a testimony, one of my favorites is found in Acts 26. Read the chapter together and then ask, “If you were to divide Paul’s testimony into time segments, what would they be?” There is a lot of good insight that can come from that discussion, however make sure that they realize the most basic partitions are:
What happened in Paul’s life before Christ V. 1-12?
What happened in Paul’s life during his time of conversion V. 12-18?
What happened in Paul’s life after he became a Christian V. 19-32?
- Reiterate Training. Encourage them to go home, read through the passage again and write out their testimony based on the partitions described in Paul’s historical account. Remind them it doesn’t have to be perfect but make sure of the following:
It is honest
The gospel is shared during the conversion
It is Christ centered
Eventually, you want to train them to be conversant and comfortable with their story. You also want them to be able to share their testimony in three minutes or less. Shortening their story will allow them to seize opportunities to share the gospel when you minister to others in the future.
- Pray for each other. Ask specifically how you can pray for them. Make sure you tell them how they can pray for you as well. Please model being vulnerable first because prayer is intimate and it might be new for them to share sensitive things. Discipleship is caught no only taught.
