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Building DBS Into Your Church's Education Program — add short discovery drills to the classes you already hold

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Building DBS Into Your Church's Education Program

A leader's course for making your education ministry reproduce disciple-makers — not by converting it to discovery, but by adding ten minutes of practice to classes you already hold. The pipeline, the five levels, the scoreboard, and a phased rollout you can start this month.

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Leading this class

This course is for church leaders — church leaders, education and discipleship directors, lead teachers — who are ready to ask a hard question: what is our education program actually built to produce? Most were built to reward knowing — which is half a disciple, and the half most churches are already good at.

This course adds the other half, and the move is smaller than you expect: not converting your program to discovery, but adding ten minutes of practice — a drill — to classes you already hold, and keeping it up long enough for the skill to stick. The lesson you planned still happens.

It carries more frameworks than our personal-discipleship courses — a pipeline, five levels of integration, a scoreboard that replaces attendance, and a phased rollout — but the pedagogy is the same one we’re asking you to install: discovery over lecture, even for leaders. Every session opens with a look-back and a passage, and every session ends with a concrete, datable step in your real congregation — run the taste class, recruit and coach one teacher, draft the scoreboard, deliver the phased plan.

Eight sessions:

  • Opener — the reframe, and a live taste of the method itself.
  • B1–B6 — the strategy: the factory, the five levels, installing the drill, the age pipeline, the track and the bench, and how to phase, protect, and defend the work.
  • C1 — Multiply — release, don’t lead. Your scorecard is leaders released.

Train the way you want your church to lead — because leaders reproduce what they practice, not what they hear. Bring your real program; you’ll leave each session having changed something in it.

If you preach most Sundays, Let the Passage Preach brings the same method into the pulpit, so the whole church sees it done every week.

Chapters

  1. The Reframe, and a TasteBefore any strategy, taste the method yourself — then name the reframe: you are not converting your program to discovery, you are adding ten minutes of practice to classes you already hold.
  2. B1 — Your Program Is a FactoryA program produces what it's built to reward — and most reward knowing. Meet the pipeline and the scoreboard that replaces attendance.
  3. B2 — Five Levels of IntegrationFive levels from a gateway taste to a facilitator bench — and the on-ramp nobody skips. A described DBS persuades no one; a tasted one does.
  4. B3 — Install the DrillTen minutes at the top of a class you already hold, then the lesson you planned. The teacher keeps teaching — and a coach keeps the drill from collapsing into a short lecture.
  5. B4 — The Age PipelineThe level most churches skip — and the one that makes fluency compound. Children don't get a drill installed; they grow one, a piece at a time, with the paraphrase from about age ten.
  6. B5 — The Track and the BenchLevel 4 is the escalator that turns feeders into facilitators; Level 5 is the bench where the program reproduces its own teachers. Your scorecard is leaders released.
  7. B6 — Phase It, Protect It, Defend ItRoll it out in phases, not by decree; protect the young work from professionalization; and defend it with a both/and, story-first — we are not converting the program, and the lesson still happens.
  8. C1 — Multiply: Release, Don't LeadThe close of the arc. Your success is leaders released, not groups led — model, assist, watch, launch, and give it away.
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Leading this class

For Leaders

How to use them

Answer the pulpit question in the first five minutes

Somewhere in session one a leader decides whether this course is an attack on preaching. Everything after that decision is heard through it, and a man who believes his pulpit is under threat will not hear session two at all.

So say the both/and early, say it plainly, and say it again at the end of the session. Preaching is not the problem; a program that can only produce hearers is. Do not wait to be asked — by the time somebody asks, half the room has already answered it privately.

The taste is the strategy

The room will want to skip to the frameworks. There is a pipeline, five levels, a scoreboard and a rollout in this book, and leaders are fluent in that language.

Do not let them. Every framework in this book assumes a room that has been through a cycle, not one that has had it described, and a leadership team installing discovery off a slide deck installs the format without the thing. Run the taste, in full, before a single framework is named.

That is also the argument of the whole course made once, in miniature: you are training them the way you want them to lead.

The audit is a description, not a verdict

Session two produces a map of what each class actually produces, not what it is about, and it will offend somebody. A class that a good person has taught faithfully for nine years is going to land on a low rung.

Say the distinction before the offence arrives: this describes what a format can produce. It is not a judgement on the teacher, and those are genuinely different things. Watch too for a team mapping what its classes are about instead of what they leave behind. Only the top rung a format can reach counts, and a class almost always reaches lower than its subject implies.

Make the map standing up, on paper, as a team. The same map built by one person on a laptop is a document rather than a shared conclusion.

Small and real beats broad and announced

Three failure modes in this course all have the same shape, and you will meet at least one.

A team that reaches for the higher levels first, because the lower ones look like preparation rather than substance. A team converting three classes in one term, when one conversion with a coach behind it is what actually survives — do three and you get three teachers nobody had time for, plus a durable story that this does not work here. And somebody drafting an announcement, when what changes a congregation is a testimony that grew.

Each one is the same instinct: reach for scale before there is anything to scale.

Name the costs instead of denying them

Two things in this course genuinely cost somebody something, and pretending otherwise is what makes a room quietly stop participating.

The retrofit asks the most competent teacher in the building to do less of what he is best at. That is a real loss, and naming it out loud is what makes it bearable. And the track-and-bench session asks a director whether he actually releases people or hoards them — a question that is not credible unless you answer it about yourself first. The people in that room have watched how he actually behaves, and they will weigh the answer against it.

Close on names, not on warmth

The last session collects every commitment the group made across eight sessions, each with its person and its day. Bring them all.

The failure this course exists to prevent is a final session that feels good and names nobody. What counts as finished is one person named and one task actually handed to them. When somebody has no name to give, that is usually a symptom rather than a lapse — go back and ask which of the early levels got read instead of run.

Using the two books

The workbook is the participant’s: short lead-in, the questions, the space to write. Print it front-and-back for a binder.

The leader book is this one plus the whole teaching and the facilitator layer — per-session timing, what to prepare, and what to watch for. Keep it open in front of you during the session. It carries answers and notes that are not in the participant book, so hand out the workbook, never this.

This class

8 chapters

A leader's course for making your education ministry reproduce disciple-makers — not by converting it to discovery, but by adding ten minutes of practice to classes you already hold. The pipeline, the five levels, the scoreboard, and a phased rollout you can start this month.

Time needed

Per session
25 to 35 minutes per session
In total
Eight sessions, spread over a term rather than a weekend

Before you lead

Run a full discovery cycle yourself in the week before session one — not read about one, run one, alone, with the retell out loud. This course asks a room of leaders to install a pedagogy, and the one thing that cannot be faked in front of them is having practised it. Then bring your own education program's real schedule, because every session ends with a change to it.

What to bring

  • A printed workbook for every participant
  • Butcher paper and markers for the pipeline audit in session two
  • Your church's actual class and group schedule, on paper