No Silver Bullets: Five Small Shifts that will Transform Your Ministry

by Daniel Im

God is more concerned with your faithfulness than your fame. Ministry to the few is as important as ministry to the many. While these two phrases might

“and they were all amazed.”

Discipling others while being discipled is actually one of the best ways to get discipled! We see this in the way that Jesus interacted with his disciples. After all, he did not wait for his death and resurrection to send the disciples out for ministry. He did this early on; in fact, shortly after the disciples saw the Gerasenes demoniac set free, Jesus sent them out in pairs for ministry (Mark 6:6–12).

While there’s no silver bullet when it comes to maturity in Christ—especially based on our discussion above from 1 Corinthians 3 and the difference between faithfulness and fruitfulness—we do have the results of the TDA research! And believe it or not, there are a few input goals that consistently predicted a higher score across all eight discipleship attribute output goals. Here are three of them: Reading the Bible Attending a worship service at your church Attending small classes or groups for adults from church, such as Sunday school, Bible study, small groups, Adult Bible Fellowships, etc. Reading the Bible When it comes to reading the Bible, hands down, this is the input goal that has a direct impact on the total score of all the output goals, or discipleship attributes, in the TDA. As you can see in Figure 2.9, when asked, “How often, if at all, do you personally read the Bible,” individuals who read it every day had a significantly higher overall score in the TDA than those who rarely or never did. Read the Bible Average Total Score Once a Month 63.90 A Few Times a Month 69.13 Once a Week 72.87 Every Day 82.60 Figure 2.9: About how often, if at all, do you personally read the Bible? It’s important to understand here that this question was not measuring whether or not an individual studied the Bible thoroughly or memorized Scripture. While those two were definitely important factors that predicted a higher score for the Bible Engagement output goal, this is not what ...