Start with inquiry, not a score.
Before choosing a new discipleship program, give your leadership team space to ask what it needs to understand. A framework connects theological purpose with leadership, relationships, practices, and systems. These questions help make those connections available for discussion.
Use them with a particular part of church life in mind: a group ministry, a set of service roles, or the way teaching connects to ordinary experience. Invite more than one perspective. A leadership team’s intentions matter, but so does the experience of people participating.
This is a discussion resource, not a validated assessment. There is no maturity score to calculate. The useful result is a clearer question and a next step for inquiry.
1. What do we mean by becoming like Christ?
Terms such as discipleship, growth, and maturity can carry different meanings within the same church. Begin by making the theological purpose explicit. What does participation in Christ’s life mean for the ways people love, worship, forgive, serve, and carry responsibility?
To be a disciple is to engage in the practices and shared life through which the Holy Spirit unites us with God through Christ, makes us a new creation, and forms us into Christlikeness. Repentance, worship, spiritual disciplines, faithful obedience, and love of God and neighbor belong within this life. A shared account of discipleship helps leaders consider whether the invitations they make are coherent.
Discuss: If someone joined one of our groups, what would they hear us say formation is for? What practices would help them understand what we mean?
Notice differences in the answers without rushing to resolve them. A more precise shared purpose may be needed before changing programming.
2. How are leaders prepared to accompany adult growth?
Leading a discussion involves more than knowing the material. Adults bring questions about identity, commitments, authority, and responsibility. A leader may need to help people reflect on assumptions, hold a difficult question open, or connect a teaching to lived experience.
Adult development draws attention to how people organize meaning, alongside what they know. Leaders also participate in this learning. They need opportunities to receive feedback and consider how their own responses shape the environment they lead.
Discuss: Think of a recent moment when a participant’s question challenged the planned conversation. How was the leader prepared and supported to respond?
Consider what training, accompaniment, or clearer boundaries would help. Avoid interpreting every difficult interaction as a developmental deficit.
3. What do our systems teach about responsibility and voice?
A church’s formal teaching is accompanied by the lessons people receive through everyday arrangements. Who can make a decision? Where does a concern go? What happens when someone disagrees? How is responsibility matched with authority and support?
These are formational questions as well as organizational ones. A volunteer may be encouraged to take initiative but still need approval for every decision. A congregation may be invited to give feedback without a clear way for that feedback to be heard and answered.
Discuss: Choose one real ministry role. What is the person responsible for, what can they decide, and who helps them learn from the work?
Compare the written role with experience. Differences may reveal a simple clarification or a deeper pattern worth investigating.
4. How do our programs connect Scripture and lived practice?
A program can offer good content without making clear how participants might carry it into their lives. Ask how Scripture, relationships, reflection, and practice are connected. Ordinary responsibilities at work, home, and in the community are part of the context of discipleship.
A useful rhythm might include learning together, identifying an appropriate practice, trying it, and reflecting with support. The design should respect boundaries and different circumstances. It should not depend on people disclosing private experiences to demonstrate participation.
Discuss: Take one recent teaching theme. Where did participants have room to consider its implications, practice a response, and return with questions?
Look for connections already working well. Strengthening one connection may be more useful than adding a separate activity.
5. What helps us understand the experience of our people?
Leaders need feedback about how invitations are actually experienced. Attendance can tell you something about participation, but not whether people are finding support, exercising responsibility, or connecting faith with ordinary life. A policy change also does not establish that a lived practice has changed.
Consider whose experience is visible and whose is missing. A carefully chosen conversation, a review of an actual decision, or feedback from a pilot may illuminate a question. Keep voluntary accounts of Christian practice distinct from formal developmental evaluation.
Discuss: What is one assumption we are making about participant experience? Who could help us understand it, and how could we listen without directing the answer?
Gather only what is needed and agree how information will be used. Individual assessment or pastoral details require particular care.
Choose one question to investigate.
End by selecting the question your team most needs to understand. Write down what you currently think, what evidence supports it, what remains uncertain, and whose perspective could help. Name a person to coordinate the inquiry and a time to return to the discussion.
Resist turning the conversation into an immediate list of new programs. The next step may be to clarify a theological purpose, listen to participants, review a role, or help a leader develop a practice. Leadership learning and systems inquiry often need to happen together.
7Mile begins with those two streams and brings their findings into a development pathway. See how we work or request a conversation about your church’s starting point.
Further foundations
This original discussion resource draws on the planning’s theological and practical synthesis. See Research and Theology for Sam Osborn’s research summary and selected foundations in adult faith formation and systems thinking. These questions have not been validated as a diagnostic instrument.