ChosenRebel's Blog

Recently, our church started to rethink how we are forming people in Christ, i.e. discipleship. As a part of that process I ran across one church’s description of 

• The Chair    

• The Row 

• The Circle

I thought it was very helpful but have expanded it for our purposes to

• The Chair

• The Row

• The Circle

• The Table  

• The Shop or the ‘Hood

We call it our “discipling environments” and encourage everyone to be involved in all of them in 12 month cycles. Here’s how we describe them and remind our people of what they are and why they are important.

Environments for Discipleship

At THE SANCTUARY we are serious about following Jesus. That doesn’t mean we are perfect, not even close, but it does mean that we are making progress in learning to live passionately for and like Christ.

One of the discoveries that we have made over the years is that becoming a disciple, a true follower of Christ, happens best when we embrace in a purposeful way five different environments for discipleship. Those five environments are:

• The Row        —     Sunday Worship

• The Circle      —     Home-Groups

• The Chair      —     Personal Devotions 

• The Table       —     One-on-One

• The Shop       —     Where You Live and Work   (or “the Hood”)

Gathering together in Sunday worship in “The Row” is an important discipling environment. In it we learn about the risen Christ; worship our coming Lord, and celebrate the joy of being the family of God. Hebrews 10:25 reminds us that “we should not neglect meeting together” and we have learned that when it is neglected the fire of our passion for God grows dim. COVID has been a challenge to THE ROW, forcing churches to rethink how they can produce this environment in their communities. But the challenge of COVID has also helped to point out its importance.

The Circle environment is our Home-Groups. Meeting together on a weekly basis in smaller fellowship groups around food and Bibles is an important aspect of our life together. In the circle of our homes, we learn to love one-another, and care for one-another as we laugh and cry and pray for one another. For two and a half centuries, the circle, the row, and the “SHOP” (see below)  happened mostly in the same place—someone’s home.

The third aspect is The Chair. The Chair represents our personal devotional life. Each of us alone with God studying His word and receiving His counsel. Developing the discipline of Bible reading, prayer, meditation, journaling, and worship is a key ingredient to hearing the voice of God and the direction we need for daily living. The fire of our love for God has to be cultivated daily if it is to remain hot.

A fourth environment is The Table. The table is our way of expressing the environment of One-to-One discipleship. These often coffee-saturated-times are when two men or two women meet across a table to study the basics of how the Christian life works so that we can learn how to multiply our lives into others. It is an accountability environment where two brothers or two sisters help one another to truly live like Christ and learn the skills of sharing our faith and discipling others. Sometimes, we expand these to include a third and call them LTG’s (Life Transformation Groups–see Neil Cole’s, Cultivating a Life for God).

And finally, The SHOP. The SHOP stands for where we live and work and for the opportunity we have to serve others. Serving people is the “hood” or the shop of our lives. It is movable, sometimes in our homes, our jobs, our backyard, our neighbor’s home or yard. Additionally, our church family is critical to becoming who God wants us to be. The Gospel impacts all areas of life and want to cultivate that thought everywhere we go and work throughout the week.

We encourage all of our people to be consciously engaged in all of these environments in every 12 month cycle of the year. The Chair is an every day environment; The Row, is an every week environment; The Circle is a generally weekly or bi-weekly depending on particular Home-Group. The Table is a yearly environment. We hope that everyone who participates in One-to-One discipleship or in a LTG will train one other person a year in what they have been taught in their one-to-one training. That might take 13-20 weeks. And finally, The SHOP is the 24-7-52-365 environment of our lives where we live under the microscope of the world and seek to make a difference for Christ.

• What are your discipling environments?

• How are you encouraging and helping your people to understand the claim that Christ has on the whole of life?