Discipleship at Xenos

Strange Things in Xenos
or Why Xenos will never be a model for other churches

20. Over 50 percent of attendees involved in discipleship pairings - Xenos is an underground indigenous church planting movement. Our approach to ministry assumes qualified leaders constantly are rising up in our midst. We have to generate more than 50 leaders a year just to keep up, and that number continues to rise. When you consider how high our standards are for leadership, you realize this isn't an easy task. But we continue to succeed because we don't depend on the staff to accomplish our leadership development. Instead, every mature Christian in the church sees it as his or her job to help raise up new leaders.

Today, nearly 1,000 adults and students at Xenos have someone they are discipling in private meetings (and many have several). This is in addition to our home churches, cell groups and classes. We find that these one-on-one times are good for building friendships, and that many issues of application and personal character development can only come out in these meetings. Also, nothing is better than a one-on-one meeting for coaching in ministry development.

We are careful to avoid any definition of discipleship that implies the discipler has control over the disciple, like in the so-called "Shepherding Movement." We teach our people that discipling is a facilitating and helping role, not a controlling role. We are optimistic today that leaders will be ready when needed tomorrow because more than 2,000 of our people are actively engaged in personal discipleship.

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