A Strategic Approach To a Discipleship System and Culture at the Adventist Community Church of Vancouver, Washington
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problem Discipleship is a term that church congregations use to articulate their goal of fulfilling the call of Jesus to make disciples (Matt. 28:19, 20). The Adventist Community Church (ACC) in Vancouver, Washington is no different. With a mission to “Reach Up in Worship, Reach Deep in Discipleship, and Reach Out in Evangelism,” a discipleship culture is key to the church’s mission. A deficiency in the discipleship culture at ACC is evident in the absence of a disciple-making system. The strategy to address this challenge is to invest in an intentional and robust discipleship growth plan. Method A systems-thinking approach was used to improve the discipleship culture at the Adventist Community Church in the spring of 2021 through a focus on discipling classes and the strengthening of small groups. The twelve-week intervention began and ended with a system survey that sought to bring understanding, improvement, and evaluation of discipleship at ACC. Discipleship was promoted through announcements and sermons to the church culminating in small group training. Additionally, the discipling timeline for organized support was substantially extended at ACC. Data was evaluated using a quantitative method, with an additional qualitative survey component for extra emphasis. Results The self-assessment by local church leaders revealed a church in need of discipleship improvement. This included a lack of communication and organization in discipling classes and small groups. Through the systems-thinking process and intervention, those who participated expressed the need to improve a systems approach to strengthening a discipleship culture. Conclusion Based on the progress, reflections, and general outcomes, the project strengthened a discipleship focus and improved a general understanding of discipleship. The outcome was a perceived professional and spiritual growth, and a strengthened discipleship system. Consequently, further study of systems-thinking with the desire to strengthen a discipleship culture has merit and is recommended.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".