One of the first books we read was the most helpful. It was a book called Simple Church by Eric Geiger and Thom Rainer.

The book’s premise is that for a church to effectively make disciples it needs to be as simple as possible. To do this its values need to be its discipleship making strategy and its discipleship making strategy is all it does. Everything that church does fit the strategy – makes disciples – or doesn’t happen.

Reading this book at the start of our thinking was invaluable. The authors didn’t require any certain values or approach or model, all they did was advocate for simple. The more simple you can be the more passionate people can become, the more focussed your efforts and the more fruit you will see. The fruit being disciples, who go and make disciples.

As we began to nut things out we were feeling led to pastor a church that developed disciples who lived in Jesus, with Jesus and were sent out by Jesus. So our three words – our values and strategy – were IN, WITH and BY. Only they are awful words to create a strategy around and in and of themselves aren’t values.

We pushed deeper.

To be IN Jesus was to be transformed in Jesus. It was to have Jesus so radically change a person’s life that it was transformed. Without this facet a church cannot be a church, it might be an effective community group, but not a church.

To be WITH Jesus was all about belonging with Jesus and with others. We desperately wanted people to belong to Jesus and to belong to each other. In fact, belonging was essential to being a disciple. If we were going to make disciples who made up Christ’s body, then everyone had to belong.

To be sent BY Jesus is what so many churches dilute and take the foot off the accelerator on. This is the unsafe part of being a Christian and what we so desperately knew would be the make or break of our model.

And our values began to emerge…

TRANSFORMED – BELONG – SENT

That’s what our church was to be about… only that didn’t quite sit well with us. As we thought about our people and leading them it wasn’t about them first being transformed, they already are. And it wasn’t about them belonging, that would happen in due course. The priority for us all constantly needed to be being SENT.

So now we were at:

TRANSFORMED – BELONG – SENT

Which is a beautiful with what Jesus asked his disciples to do when it came to his final words on what they should value: Mat 28:18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, (SENT) baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (TRANSFORMED) And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (BELONG)”

Our next move was to reorder these three pillars of our church to reflect the Biblical charge:

SENT – TRANSFORMED – BELONG

We were pretty stoked with what God led us to and what it means we can now do!