The family of churches and leaders that I am privileged to serve has as its mission statement: “To glorify God by making disciples everywhere by proclaiming and practicing the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Clearly when you state right up front that you will glorify God by making disciples, you have one of three choices. You can totally ignore it; you can give lip service to it with regular pronouncements of guilt for failing to achieve it; or you can take it seriously and have that mission guide your corporate passion, strategies and activities. I would say we are somewhere between the second and third options -- passionately seeking to engage disciple-making in a consistent manner with regular doses of guilt thrown in when we fall short!

Since we understand that making disciples is an overarching mandate for all we do, we are seeking to apply the disciple-making ethos to all of our missional activities both in Canada and internationally. The strategic process that our General Executive has commissioned calls for the development of clear definitions and strategies regarding disciples and being a disciple-making fellowship. One of our departments, Mission Canada, continues to be the custodian of our efforts to understand how as local churches or through our diverse ministries we would know if disciples actually are being made. These identifying markers provide a basis for our national, provincial and local leaders to interact regarding our effectiveness in achieving our mission in our various contexts.

We have sought to do several practical things to keep our mission on the front burner. This includes drawing on input from men like Ed Stetzer and Dave Buehring, making it the focus of district leadership events, identifying key resources and emphasizing core spiritual disciplines.

Please know, we are not exercising false humility when we say we have a long ways to go to cultivate a disciple-making family of churches. But hey, we’ve at least taken some steps in the right direction which as we say up here in Canada is pretty good, eh?