How our church rediscovered real discipleship

Each time, the content was solid. But if I’m brutally honest, it rarely led to long-term change. People seemed enthusiastic. They enjoyed the material. They gave positive feedback. Yet when I looked for genuine transformation – deeper love for Jesus, character shaped over time – the results were inconsistent at best.

I’d more or less resigned myself to it. Maybe real discipleship was a beautiful idea that never quite worked in practice. And then I stumbled on a slower, simpler, far more transformative way.

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Declining attendance

At LifeChurch Eccles, our mid-week groups were fading fast. We were doing what many churches do:

1. Read a Bible passage.
2. Discuss what it means.
3. Challenge each other to apply it.
4. Pray.

It was fine. But it wasn’t changing lives. Week by week, attendance drifted down. Conversations stayed safe. Everyone agreed with the content, but few were actually living it. Something radical had to change.

A desperate experiment

As leaders, we longed for depth – for ourselves as much as anyone else. We’d been hearing about Practicing the Way, an approach that focuses on spiritual formation through the practices of Jesus – solitude, sabbath, fasting and generosity,

A four-week course that felt too intense for our community. So we stretched the rhythm, simplified it, and grounded it locally. Instead of talking about following Jesus, we decided to practise it together, one discipline at a time.

For two months, we focused on one practice. We alternated weeks: one with structured study and discussion, the next with a relaxed meal and open sharing about how we were doing.

The Sunday that changed everything

A few weeks in, something happened that stopped me in my tracks. After a Sunday service, I was sipping coffee and overheard three separate conversations about someone’s spiritual practice:

• “How’s Sabbath going for you?”
• “I’m still wrestling with my phone – I’m addicted!”
• “I slowed down for the whole day. It felt incredible.”

No one had been told to discuss it. It just happened. People were talking about obedience, failure, progress and desire – the very ingredients of New Testament discipleship. There was confession without shame, accountability without control and joy in the struggle.

For the first time in years, I thought: This is it. This was what we’d been trying to create through all those programmes. And it was happening naturally.

Why most discipleship fails (and what we missed)

As I reflected, I realised our old approaches had been falling into three common traps.

1. The content trap

We’ve come to believe that if we just teach people enough, they’ll change. We pour information over them: sermons, podcasts, Bible studies. It’s the ​“fire-hose” problem. Learning feels like progress because it stimulates us. But learning without doing creates an illusion of growth.

Most churches (including ours) give people ten times more content than they can live out. Real transformation, we’re discovering, happens when you slow down and sit with one practice long enough for it to soak in. For us, that means one simple focus for two months.

2. The individual trap

Our culture is obsessed with self-improvement. Habit trackers, productivity apps, morning routines – it’s all about me. Even the church can baptise that individualism. One-to-one mentoring and private response have value, but they can detach us from the communal nature of following Jesus. When we practise together, everything shifts. I see your struggles, you see mine, and grace grows between us.

Confession and accountability don’t need to be intense or burdensome. Just quiet honesty and shared progress.

3. The change trap

We either underestimate or overestimate our ability to change. Many long-term Christians have lost hope they can change. Others are overloaded with new directions every week: pray more, conquer temptation, fix your identity crisis. It’s exhausting.

We’ve found discipleship is slow. It happens over years and decades, not weeks and months. James Clear’s ​“1% rule” from his book Atomic Habits captures it perfectly: small, consistent progress compounds over time.

Not much happens in two months – maybe a small shift in one practice. But that’s six changes a year. Imagine being a Christian for ten years and making sixty small changes. Wouldn’t that change the world?

What happens when people practise together

A few months in, several themes have emerged – lessons we wish we’d known sooner.

• People carry a lot of guilt. Give them a practice and they’ll try to perfect it. Miss a day and they feel like failures. We keep reminding one another: focus on progress, not perfection.
• Change is slow. Many weeks, someone admits, ​“I just forgot.” That’s okay. The important thing is we keep turning up.
• Culture disciples us too. We’re constantly shaped by busyness, productivity and comparison. True discipleship must critique those forces, not just coexist with them.
• Spiritual warfare is real. Every time we step toward obedience, resistance surfaces. Recognising that struggle as spiritual – not merely psychological – has been crucial.
• Community is essential. This journey can’t be done alone.

The danger – and gift – of community

Community can heal, but it can also harm. When group life becomes controlling or performance-driven, it stifles grace. That’s why our mantra has become ​“high support, high challenge.”

Everyone’s walking in the same direction – toward Jesus – but everyone’s pace is different. We offer strong encouragement and honest accountability, always undergirded by acceptance and grace.

When people share not only their successes but their failures, it creates space for authenticity. You realise you’re not the only one struggling to pray, rest or forgive. That honesty fuels growth.

In our group, we now celebrate both progress and perseverance. Someone who admits, ​“I tried and failed again this week” receives just as much encouragement as the one who had a breakthrough.

That balance of grace and grit keeps the atmosphere free of shame and full of hope.

Why it works

Looking back, I think this approach works because it’s both ancient and human-sized. Ancient, because it recovers something the early church took for granted: formation through shared rhythms of life. Human-sized, because it acknowledges how we actually grow – gradually, relationally, with a lot of stumbling along the way.

We’ve discovered that one small, shared practice can reshape a community far more than a year’s worth of studies. Our latest round has been on Sabbath. At first, people worried about ​“doing it wrong”. But as weeks passed, conversations deepened. One couple talked about closing their laptops at 6pm on Friday. Another said they’d stopped grocery shopping on their day off to make space for rest. Another admitted they hadn’t managed it yet but were learning to long for it.

That’s discipleship in motion: small steps, honest reflection, shared grace. What we’ve stumbled into isn’t flashy. But people are slowly changing. They’re talking differently, praying differently, living differently. And I’m changing too. I’m learning to let go of perfection, to trust the slow work of God, and to celebrate the tiny steps of faith that, over time, lead to transformation.

What any church can do

If you want to experiment with this in your own context, here are three simple starting points:

1. Pick one practice – Sabbath, silence, simplicity, hospitality – and focus on it for eight weeks.
2. Practise together. Share stories each week, not to compare but to encourage.
3. Go slow. Don’t rush to the next thing. Let the practice sink in before moving on. Mix focused study with relaxed conversation.

You don’t need special resources or expert teachers. Just a willingness to obey Jesus together, one small step at a time. I used to believe discipleship was about finding the perfect structure or the right study guide. Now I believe it’s about the direction we’re walking in and who we’re walking with. We used to think transformation came through pressure. Now we know it comes through presence – God’s and each other’s.

Our little church in Eccles hasn’t cracked the code. But we’ve stumbled on something that’s quietly transforming us from the inside out.