Project: Disciple Making Lab
Leader:
Doug Paul
Website: www.wearecatapult.org

Purpose

The Disciple making Lab is led by Catapult and it helps a church create a unique discipleship model built on that church’s DNA for rapid reproduction.

Project Categories

  • Disciple Making and Church Engagement
  • Methods and Models for Mobilizing Everyday Missionaries
  • Micro Models and Expressions

Big Idea and Overview

This 12-month process exists to help churches and leadership teams create and activate a discipleship plan that is custom built from their church’s unique DNA: their theology, vision, mission, convictions, calling, and context. The model is built on the principles of deep spiritual transformation and sustainable multiplication, positioning a church to be a catalyst for a 5th generation discipleship movement. How does this directly tie to church planting? Increasingly as churches plant new churches, they need to create a farm system that takes people from the harvest, disciple them, and work them through a leadership pipeline that develops many of them into church planters (rather than cherry-picking leaders from other ministries, as the well is almost dry for this). We first started a beta for the Innovation Lab in 2017, began scaling it in 2020, and are now looking to broaden that investment.

Customer / Mission Field Context

Our primary “customers” are pioneering leaders who want to see reproduction happen at every level: Disciple, Leader, Pastor, Planter, Movement.

Goals and Desired Outcomes

  1. Use the principles often found in disciple-making movements in the developing world and honing them for the North American context.

  2. Create a fully integrated farm system that takes someone in a local church who is new to faith and catapults them into a church planter.

  3. Share the learning and models we discover for the wider North American church so they can lean into the practices for “reproduction at every level.”

Results and
Impact

With the first beta we ran in 2017, the church is now at 4th generation disciple- makers and we anticipate them crossing into 5th generation in the next 12-18 months. The other churches we have worked with began their process during COVID and will begin operationalizing their models in the next 6 months.

Media Assets

KC Underground

Exponential's Future Church Podcast

Love Clan

Outreach Magazine Article