The Same Page & the Same Play

Every church should be on mission to go and make disciples. This is something we can all agree on I am sure. However I have found that when meeting with a church or a group of individuals, the definition of disciple is far less universal. Hence, while the mission is agreed upon, the actual objectives indicating the mission has been achieved are not. This failure to define a common outcome in discipleship is one of the things holding many churches back in their mission.

I have been using an illustration for a few months now regarding discipleship strategy. It comes from the world of football. Hang in there with me for a minute if you aren’t a sports fan. Back in 2016, Washington State lost to Eastern Washington in their first game of the season. It was an upset to be sure, and a couple of years after the fact Gerard Wicks, a WSU running back, shed some light on at least one of the reasons why.

One thing the fans don’t know is our defense had on different wristbands, so we had half the team on defense with a different wristbands. Say if they would call ‘Play 4,’ one side of the defense would be running Cover 3 while the other side would be blitzing. It was something crazy and we were wondering how was Cooper Kupp getting so wide open. He’s a great player, he’s outstanding, but he was wide open. It came to halftime and we figured out half the defense had on white wristbands and the other had on black wristbands, so everybody wasn’t on the same page. We blew the coverages a lot in the first half 

emphasis added

One of the reasons discipleship can be confusing or hard to pass on in a church is because we aren’t always on the same page. If we want to make disciples and be able to pass on the process to others to continue to make disciples, then the people in your church need to be speaking the same language. Find a model and a way to communicate it that the people in your church can understand, remember, and will use to make disciples of Jesus. You can see a good example of one in last week’s podcastpost or look for others in our resource page. We have provided a template to help with the process of creating your own version for your church to use to start calling the same play from the same page.