Discipleship: Mentoring, Tutoring, or something else?

Our men's group just finished reading and discussing the book Transforming Discipleship and I have reached a few conclusions based on that discussion and the book. Things I like in the book include the description of a disciple as 'a self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted follower of Christ' and the diagnosis of some of the reasons why there is so little discipleship within the church, which has mostly to do with both pastors and the congregation not seeing making disciples as a primary reason for the existence of the church. Most act as if the Great Commission in Matt 28:18-20 says 'go and do church' instead of 'go and make disciples of all nations'.

As the book reaches its recommended course of action, though, the recommendations seemed to me to be pretty much the same as what happens on a college campus: commit to a one year small group, commit something like 5 hours a week to the overall effort (that includes group time, preparation, going and doing ministry), commit to the relationships and the risk of being transparent in the group, and committing to at least seriously consider leading a group the next year. This is to me a key issue: most folks with careers, mortgages, kids and some other basic commitments at church already don't have that time even if they are interested.

I had commented before on how discipling ministries seem to be effective on college campuses but much less so in local churches, and so here are some conclusions about what I think it would take for discipling to work within the local church:

• First it needs integration within the church program. At least in evangelical churches there is already a lot of 'content' on offer through Sunday School classes, sermons, other bible studies, etc. Adding more content is not needed: making the current content more relevant would be much better than yet another, separate time of study.
• I have commented elsewhere that I see discipling as different from mentoring. Mentoring is more about offering advice and sponsorship, less about training and doing things jointly. Discipling is more a group activity, less of a leader:follower activity. In that regard, a blog I saw today titled 'Mentoring is Overrated:Try Tutoring Instead' by Michael Schrage at Harvardbusiness.org made me think: maybe tutoring is a good paradigm for discipling in a church. If sermons and sunday bible study is the 'classroom', then the small discipleship group is more like a peer tutoring session (working on the difficult areas, asking the questions you can't ask in class) and peer tutors are not nearly so intimidating as a professor or a pastor.
• The time commitment has to be manageable: integrating the content with sunday school can certainly help that. Integrating the 'peer tutoring' with other ministries would do even more. Why isn't the goal of discipling built into all the other church ministries? How does choir build disciples? How does the sports ministry build disciples? How does women's ministry build disciples? Integration will be a must for it to work. The current patchwork of programs that seem to be unrelated to each other and without a common theme should have a common theme of building disciples.
• The content has to have more flexibility than in the book. An effort that takes a canned program of weekly meetings, works through it in a year, then moves those people out to do the same content with others next year is not likely to work for people who are out of school in my opinion. There is such a wide range of backgrounds in a church, folks with totally different gaps regarding how they could become 'self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Christ' that one canned program is going to fit only a few.
• To do all of this the pastoral staff will need to see building disciples as their key calling; not preaching, not worship, not pastoral care. Those others are important parts elements of being a disciple but are not ends in themselves.
• All of this re-confirmed to me what a great window of opportunity are the college years. If those years are missed it is much harder to build disciples in small groups later.