ChurchPulse Weekly Conversations: Lisa Bevere on Discipleship Patterns

In a recent ChurchPulse Weekly episode, Lisa Bevere (speaker and author) joins Carey Nieuwhof to talk about what has changed in discipleship over the past five years, how to activate the contributions of women in the church and learning the balance for younger generations between deconstructing and destroying.

Key themes from the episode:

• Only one third of Christians (36%) believe 1-on-1 discipleship relationships are very important for spiritual growth (3:06)
• About half of Christians (56%) consider their spiritual life to be entirely private (3:44)
• Forty-seven percent of Christian women say that they often get distracted when trying to spend time with God, versus 40 percent of men) (5:40)
• Seven in 10 of Christian women (73%) say they have been hurt by someone who they deeply trusted compared to 56 percent of men (6:01)
• The Church has a crisis in discipleship (11:09)
• Women want to know what it looks like to live out Christ in their everyday life (13:33)
• There are things that need to be deconstructed but not destroyed within the Western Church (15:20)
• It is important and essential to have sacred spaces in one’s life (19:20)
• Discipleship patterns have shifted from five years ago to now (24:42)
• Digital discipleship should be an entrance, not an end place for people to grow in their walk with Christ (27:53)
• Women face both opportunities and challenges in the Church (31:50)
• Pastors can share a message of a fiercely loving God to the people they are teaching (35:28)

Key quotes from the episode:

• “We’ve adopted the wrong [discipleship] pattern. The pastor says, ‘Come to church and I’ll disciple you.’ We didn’t necessarily let people in the church disciple others. … This really limits our ability to reach people on a widespread level” —Lisa Bevere (11:20)
• “The next generation knows that God has his hand on their life for something, but they don’t know what that thing is. They’re so busy looking at what everybody else’s thing is that they’re becoming critics instead of constructors. … A generation anointed to prophecy—which means to speak under divine inspiration—have settled for criticizing. It doesn’t take a whole lot of skill to take something apart, but to invent it and to be able to put it back together young, the male and the female, the visions and the dreams.” —Lisa Bevere (16:17)
• “I think there’s been a huge breakdown between what we say and how we live. The truth is, my children do not follow what I say, they follow what I model.” —Lisa Bevere (21:40)
• “The greatest platform you and I will ever live on is our lives. So how I love my husband, how I love my children, how I receive correction, how I am accountable to other people—people that know me, people that have my phone number, people that ask me the questions that I don’t want to answer and tell me the things I don’t want to hear—that is discipleship.” —Lisa Bevere (23:36) 

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