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Jim Putman Good morning. Great. It’s an honor to be here. My name is Jim Putman. I’m the senior pastor at Real Life Ministries in Post Falls, Idaho, and a part of what’s called the relational discipleship network, and we’re thrilled to be here as a team. We’ll be having some tracks going on as well. And I’ve been privileged to be a part of the founding of all of this discipleship.org stuff, and renew stuff. There’s another great conference to go to. And it’s been a fun journey. For me, about 28 years ago, I was frustrated with the church. I grew up in a Christian family, saw what the church did to my family, and very little of that was positive. My father was a pastor, a church planter, and his version of the church had shipwrecked our family. And so I had very little desire to be a part of something that didn’t work from within. Though my father was absolutely sincere. His methodology that he had been handed was killing him, and it was showing very little fruit. I, the Lord, tricked me into ministry in a variety—you can read about some of that and some of the stories. I became a youth minister who then became very frustrated with the adult church that I was a part of. And so I was encouraged to, rather than just walk away, plant a church. And it was really built on some ideas that had sort of blossomed in me. I was a sports guy. I understood sports. I understood the objective of sports. I understood the difference between a player and a coach. I understood that the role of a coach was to get individual players to grow in their ability, and then not just in their personal ability, but in their ability to play together as a team. The joy of winning with a team was always amazing to me. I just hadn’t experienced it much in the church. And so I came at this disgruntled. Many of the stats that you see currently, they weren’t a lot different back in those days. And so as I went along, I remember I had a key experience. Our youth group had grown from about three or four kids to 150 kids in a little church that was 150 people. And I didn’t know what to do. All we had was a basement. And we didn’t have music. We didn’t have anything. We just had this church basement of this old, smelly church building. And because you couldn’t get them all in one room, we started to break into different rooms in the building, which means I had to have different leaders leading these groups. And we had to do a lot of stuff outside of the building. And again, most of the kids didn’t come from the church. So we had to figure out how to mobilize the few we had to reach those people in the community. And we had to do it outside the walls. And as I started to look at this, I didn’t know what to do. So I got the advice to go to a church across the country that was—it was before they talked about mega churches—a very successful church who had a youth group of 1,000 people. And so I went with another youth minister to this ministry. And when I got there, they had their own building that was at least this big. And they had video screens—this was before video screens were even a thing. I didn’t even know you had those things. And the building had lights and all this stuff. Remember, this is 40 years ago, 35 years ago. And it was amazing watching the music and watching the videos. And the whole time I’m just sitting there thinking, I got an old, smelly building that I can’t fit anybody in. I got one TV that I got at a garage sale. I don’t have one person who can play music. Not one. I have everybody under 50 years old helping me with youth ministry, and there’s only four of those in the whole church. And I remember then going to the church service, and the whole time I was there—and then I came away so discouraged. Because if this is what it takes, I can’t reproduce any of this. I can’t do this where I live. I don’t have the capacity, the ability, the budget. There’s not one thing I could actually take. And that was really a crossroads for me. I started going, well, wait a minute. The greatest disciple maker in history didn’t have any of this stuff either. So rather than focus on what I don’t have, what can we do with what we do have? And so I started looking at the scriptures in a different way. And I started noticing some things there. I started noticing that Jesus didn’t choose amazing people by the world’s standards. Jesus chose ordinary, unschooled people that most people wouldn’t have chosen. Again, that sort of hit me because I thought you had to go hire the done, hire a bunch of trained professional people. And Jesus didn’t have any of that. Jesus used the model of—yeah, he wasn’t against big crowds when he could get them—but he didn’t do his best work in the big crowds. He did his best work with 12 guys. I had a room that could fit 12 guys. I started thinking about the time he spent with those people. And how he discussed things and how he modeled things. I started seeing in the scriptures things that I could actually do. I started thinking about the methods. Things started to spring to my mind like: ● Jesus used ordinary unschooled people ● He used reproducible methods that ordinary unschooled people could use See, if you use methods that only the exceptional can use, then you’re teaching people about something rather than teaching them to do something. And so it was like—Jesus just walked with guys, and he knew the Word, and he’d call them out. And he gave them opportunities, sent them out by twos. He’d bring them back. He’d say, “How much longer must I put up with you? Oh, you of little faith.” I was like, I have those kind of guys. I am that kind of guy. And I started to look at things a bit differently. There was an unchanged message. He didn’t change his message with the Pharisees and then say something different with the tax collectors. Now he applied it differently. And so I just saw people were at that time—it was all about a show. Or it became about a show. We have the best show, the best music, the best this, best that, the most dynamic speakers. And at the time, there were already changes in theology coming out all over the place trying to make it more acceptable to the people in America. That’s how you win people—just tell people what they want to hear. And Jesus just didn’t do that. He stuck to the message. And he went with those who came. He went with the goers. And as I started to understand, his goal was never to do it all for them. His job was to raise people up in relationship who would then be able to do it themselves. Winning was not gathering a crowd. Winning was releasing a spiritual army of ordinary people that go into every sphere of their lives, armed with a relationship with God through Christ, with the Word of God. As I started to look at the things I could do, I noticed that the product of working with Jesus was that you were learning to be a servant. You were learning to have relationship. He took people that wanted to fight about who the greatest of the kingdom of heaven was. And over and over again, he said, “I didn’t come to be served but to serve.” And he sent them out by twos. He sent people out who, as they grew in their understanding of God, they grew in their ability to relate to each other. And he sent them out in relationship. He had said things like, all the prophets hang on two commands: love God, love others. So the impact of Jesus’ life was that there was a restored relationship with God and a growing relationship with others. By which when they went out to do the mission, they went out and did the mission together. There was a greater impact because when you go out alone, it gets tough. When you go out with a brother and sister in Christ, you have the ability to do better work together because you have different gifts. And you’re able to withstand the pressure that the world puts on you, that the devil puts on you. The relationships that we’re called to have together help us withstand the ministry. You are aware that the ministry is difficult to withstand. It’s a war. And so for my perspective, it’s like, you know what? I’m going to stop chasing the newest fad, the newest cool guy. I wasn’t that guy. I couldn’t hire that guy anyway. So I said, we’re going to go back to doing things Jesus’ way. And you’ll be shocked at what can happen. You really will. The message was never supposed to be about a person. There’s only one hero of the story: Jesus the Christ. It was never supposed to be about special gifting or some experience. I’m not against hazers. I’m sick of arguing about hazers. I’m not against good music. But those are secondary things. As we started to implement those simple things: Raise up people who can raise up people who can raise up people. Not superstars—just faithful people. God began to do something amazing. And you know what the biggest problem was? More people started to come. And then the question became: How do we keep the main thing the main thing? How do we stay focused and not get distracted—even by success? How do you keep being a disciple who follows Jesus personally? How do you make sure that layers and structure don’t get in the way of ordinary people making disciples? Let me say this: If you are not going to remain in relational discipleship environments, you eventually will not have a church that has them. When you stop making disciples personally, you burn out. If I stopped doing it, the rest of ministry would kill me. When you forget why you started, it drains you. If your staff stops discipling personally, your church becomes a sloganized version of itself. As you grow, your job becomes protecting the mission. Here’s the closing thought: The same Jesus The same message The same Word of God The same methods Will work anywhere. The problem isn’t whether it works. The problem is whether we will work it. # PDF Visual Extracts [[BONFIRE_PDF_VISUAL page=6 kind=page_render index=1 provider=gemini model=gemini-2.0-flash]] DESCRIPTION: The image contains four lines of text that suggest that the effectiveness of a method is not in question, but rather the willingness of people to apply it. OCR_TEXT: The same methods Will work anywhere. The problem isn't whether it works. The problem is whether we will work it. STRUCTURED_DATA_JSON: {} [[/BONFIRE_PDF_VISUAL]]