Building DBS Into Your Church's Education Program

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 name and date the group produced across eight sessions. 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.