I’m working with a colleague on how we can help people start small businesses around the world. When he was in Thailand a few months ago, we decided to try out our ideas on this newly started shrimp farm.

A couple of weeks ago I threw him a pen and asked him to write the steps on the whiteboard. As he narrated all the events that led us to the photo above, he wrote out the key steps. When he was done, the whiteboard looked a lot like a typical business start-up plan off the internet. What caught my attention, however, was not what he wrote, but what he said while he was writing.

What he said, was that he believed God wanted him to do this, that he prayed about who to work with, and that the guy insisted on sharing his story over a meal before they talked business. These are the discipleship practices we’re seeing bear fruit all over the world. I asked, “if someone just followed what you wrote, and skipped what you said, could they succeed?” He has lots of cross-cultural experience and assured me they would fail.

So why don’t we write down what actually works? Why do we filter out the good stuff? In our western thinking, we tend to skip the relational parts. Like, we’ll read the book of Romans to glean theological points, but Paul was writing to people he loved.

He starts with thanking God for them, remembering them in prayer, praying God would let him visit them and longing to see them. Which people in your life do you feel that way about? He ends with again longing to visit them that he might be refreshed, greeting lots of them by name and calling them dear friends and brothers and sisters.

I was with a group of people in Toronto a few weeks ago, gathered together to share with each other what actually works in discipleship. Not what we know, or what we get paid to do, but: where’s the actual fruit of a believer multiplying, and how did that happen?

Various people shared various points. I found myself thinking “I know that already”, or “that didn’t work for me” or “I have no idea what you’re talking about”. Then they would tell a story and the lights would go on, not just for me, but for everyone. Oh! I knew most of that, but I was missing a key piece. Or, I can see now why what I did didn’t work. And, that’s not very different in practice from what I’m familiar with. Stories let us track with 80-90% of what’s happening, so we’re tracking, and then it’s that little twist that changes everything.

I came away thinking about mission-vision-values. Maybe you’ve heard that you can write down your mission statement, and you can write down your vision, but the values lose all their punch if they’re just written. They need to be spoken, and people need to hear the stories behind them.

I think this is the same with discipleship. The three points don’t communicate past the head level. We need to enter into the story to be touched in the heart, and the heart is where discipleship takes root.

Stories are the language of discipleship.