Project: Disciple Making Lab
Leader: Doug Paul
Website: www.wearecatapult.org
Purpose
The Disciple making Lab is led by Catapult and it helps a church create a unique discipleship model built on that church’s DNA for rapid reproduction.
Project Categories
- Disciple Making and Church Engagement
- Methods and Models for Mobilizing Everyday Missionaries
- Micro Models and Expressions
Big Idea and Overview
This 12-month process exists to help churches and leadership teams create and activate a discipleship plan that is custom built from their church’s unique DNA: their theology, vision, mission, convictions, calling, and context. The model is built on the principles of deep spiritual transformation and sustainable multiplication, positioning a church to be a catalyst for a 5th generation discipleship movement. How does this directly tie to church planting? Increasingly as churches plant new churches, they need to create a farm system that takes people from the harvest, disciple them, and work them through a leadership pipeline that develops many of them into church planters (rather than cherry-picking leaders from other ministries, as the well is almost dry for this). We first started a beta for the Innovation Lab in 2017, began scaling it in 2020, and are now looking to broaden that investment.
Customer / Mission Field Context
Our primary “customers” are pioneering leaders who want to see reproduction happen at every level: Disciple, Leader, Pastor, Planter, Movement.
Goals and Desired Outcomes
Use the principles often found in disciple-making movements in the developing world and honing them for the North American context.
Create a fully integrated farm system that takes someone in a local church who is new to faith and catapults them into a church planter.
Share the learning and models we discover for the wider North American church so they can lean into the practices for “reproduction at every level.”
Results and
Impact
With the first beta we ran in 2017, the church is now at 4th generation disciple- makers and we anticipate them crossing into 5th generation in the next 12-18 months. The other churches we have worked with began their process during COVID and will begin operationalizing their models in the next 6 months.
