The Vine Project: A Review
Does church make you tired? By this I don’t mean do the sermons make you sleepy. But are the programs, events, and demands too many, and the laborers too few? From my experience, many pastors, deacons, and laymen feel this way. They’re overworked, underequipped, and a bit distressed by the seeming lack of success that their church is experiencing. The problem may be that twenty percent of the members are doing eighty percent of the work. Or, and this is a big or, your church may be continuing to run programs that are no longer effective, necessary, and most importantly, don’t aid the church in its primary mission of making disciples.
You might have noticed that I’ve assumed that making disciples is the primary mission of the church. This is also what the authors of The Vine Project, Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, take as part of their central argument: that disciple-making is the central mission of the Church.[1] By this, Payne and Marshall mean that the primary purpose of the Church is to engage with people, share the Gospel with them, establish them in the faith, and equip them to engage, evangelize, establish, and equip others.
We should, however, make a few remarks about the history, and somewhat obscure title, of this book.
The Vine Project is something of a sequel to an earlier work entitled The Trellis and the Vine[2] by the same authors.[3] In that work, Marshall and Payne contended that churches were spending too much time on the trellis (e.g., programs, structures, and facilities) and not enough time on the vine (e.g., people). In other words, churches spend too much time and energy maintaining programs and practices that may no longer be helpful, or the people who were gifted to lead those specific ministries may no longer be in the church. Instead, they hold, churches should focus on making disciples of the people who were either connected to the church or already members. More concisely, churches should refocus on their people and their spiritual development rather than their programs.
The Vine Project makes the same argument, but attempts to provide even more detailed application and clearer action steps for how church leaders can shape their ministry culture around disciple-making.
The Five Phases of the Vine Project
The Vine Project expands on what was minimal in The Trellis and the Vine: clear action steps to reforming your local church culture. Those action steps appear in five phases and comprise the majority of the book.
Phase One: Clarify and Sharpen Your Convictions
Why make disciples? What is a disciple? How are disciples made? Who makes the disciples? Where to make disciples? The answers to these questions make up the five major convictions of Phase One.
According to Marshall and Payne, disciple-making is a clear scriptural command. Furthermore, a disciple is someone who learns Christ, His ways and His commands, and follows them.[4] Since the ways and commands of Christ are found in Scripture, it serves as the basis for disciple-making. Finally, disciple-making should be the joyous work of every church and every believer. No one is exempt from making disciples, and everything we (the Church and individual believers) do must further accomplish this task.
Phase Two: Reform Your Own Personal Culture to Express These Convictions
This is a step or phase in reforming a local church culture that might be tempting to skip. Pastors may want to jump directly from their convictions to a sermon series on disciple-making or implement a new disciple-making program. But Marshall and Payne make clear that pastors and other local church leaders must serve as the prototype for change.[5] Marshall and Payne helpfully explain:
This of course makes most of us feel uncomfortable and inadequate. We are painfully aware of our sins and failures, and how short we fall in keeping Jesus’ commandments. We feel that our lives are a constant cycle of failure and forgiveness; of striving for holiness and repenting when we fail to reach it. How can we ever be good enough to function as a model for others? And yet this is precisely the example we are to set to those around us….The example we give is of someone who is learning to keep the commandments of Jesus, who is seeking to grow and make progress and be transformed and bring forth the fruit of the Spirit.[6]
We cannot begin to lead this sort of change in the church until church leaders begin striving for real change in their own lives. They are then able to lead as practitioners rather than armchair experts.
Phase Three: Loving, Honest Evaluation
Church leaders need prayerfully to assess and evaluate the spiritual progress of each member and non-member connected with the church in order to identify best where people are in their spiritual development. As the heading suggests, this will require honest evaluation with a loving and gentle spirit that refuses to partake in unnecessary critique or gossip. Furthermore, any church program or element of services that doesn’t aid in making disciples will either need to be reformed or eliminated.
No doubt this phase will be one of the most difficult for most churches. However, by assessing where the people are spiritually under our church’s care, and by asking if our programs and the elements of our worship services are aiding us in making disciples, we are able more clearly to structure our churches around disciple-making.
Phase Four: Innovate and Implement
This phase is the point when things in your church actually being to change—where existing structures are tweaked or ended and new practices begin. Certainly this may, as the authors make very clear, create some friction. The hope, however, is that your church has already accepted the core convictions in Phase One, and that leaders have begun to embody this change (Phase Two) by seeking to grow in Christ and focus their lives around disciple-making.
In this massive section, Payne and Marshall focus on how one’s church can be reshaped into a disciple-making culture. That begins with the Sunday church gathering(s), which “sets the tone for everything” we “do as a church community.” Sunday must embody the conviction that disciple-making, or “transformative learning” (learning and obeying the ways and commands of Jesus), is central. This requires that Sunday be a time of evangelizing non-believers, establishing new believers, and equipping seasoned believers. As Sunday sets the tone, so every other ministry of the church must be aimed at engaging, evangelizing, establishing, and equipping. Payne and Marshall provide extensive practical application of these principles and examples of others who are applying them.
Phase Five: Maintain Momentum
Maintaining momentum can be difficult. So, Marshall and Payne explore the obstacles, pressures, and strategic issues that might hinder momentum in shaping your ministry culture around disciple-making. Central to the process of disciple-making is a biblical understanding of the effects of sin and the necessity of “repentance towards Christlikeness.”[7] This is central to cultural change as well. People may resist even biblical change because of “a lack of trust in the word of God, a lack of dependence on the Spirit of God, a lack of Christlike love for those around us, a lack of hope in the eternal kingdom of Christ that is our true home, and so on.”[8] This will be an obstacle.
Furthermore, tremendous pressure is placed upon pastors and the people within their churches due to the pressures of life. This means that the goals set for shifting towards a culture of disciple-making (e.g., number of people engaged, evangelized, established) and the work that goes along with it will need to be appropriate for your church. Goals need to be high, but also attainable, exciting, clear, applicable, regularly assessed, and flexible.
Should I Read the Book?
I could not more highly recommend this book. If you’re involved in any sort of local church ministry (Sunday school teacher, pastor, worship leader), you should read this. I scroll through social media and read blogs that are constantly telling me that this new resource is a must-have or a must-read. While you may be numb to this sort of recommendation, I want to say unabashedly that this book is essential reading. It’s essential reading because it’s a clear call to New Testament Christianity and forces us to refocus our efforts on seeing people come to know Jesus and become increasingly like Him. The book reminds us in an age of distraction, confusion, and slick marketing that Christ has called His Church to center on making disciples. And that the preaching, teaching, singing, discussing, and living out His Word are enough to establish and build His Church.
This is no quick fix or silver bullet. But it is biblical, enduring, and achievable through God’s help and faithful application.
Note: To further aid you in the process of shaping your ministry culture around disciple-making, TheVineProject.com has been established to provide further resources and discussion.
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[1] Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Vine Project: Shaping Your Ministry Culture Around Disciple-Making (Sydney, Australia: Matthias Media, 2016).
[2] Colin Marshall and Tony Payne, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift That Changes Everything (Sydney, Australia: Matthias Media, 2010).
[3] Marshall and Payne, The Vine Project, 341.
[4] Ibid., 83.
[5] Ibid., 160.
[6] Ibid., 159.
[7] Ibid., 317.
[8] Ibid.
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