Connecting Churches to Improve Discipleship
When Uber and Lyft first started coming on the scene, our family was living overseas in Asia where transportation culture is much different from most of the US. When not walking or riding our bikes, we simply took the bus, the subway, or a taxi pretty much every day to get around. We never even considered buying a car. Public transportation was way too convenient!
When the Asian Uber-equivalent became popular I initially didn’t think much of it … transportation was already so convenient, and I remember thinking “Why do we need even more options?” Nevertheless, I was shortsighted because even though it was usually easy to get around, there were times that travel was not as easy as we wanted it to be. Maybe it was rush hour or time for a shift change, and there were no taxis anywhere. Maybe we were off the beaten track with only the occasional bus or taxi coming by, and even then they were full when they finally came. I came around and saw that “Asian Uber” helped us get where we needed when the usually great transportation we were accustomed to did not.
What Does Uber have to do with CCBT?
The bottom line is that Uber helped to fill in the gaps. It is hard for a single service to meet everyone’s needs all the time, and Uber’s new model of brokering a network of drivers is useful for seeing how to bridge gaps. This is where I’ll close the circle and try to make all of this relevant to CCBT. CCBT is great! Our focus on creating curriculum that is useful to churches in helping to bring all to maturity and many to leadership is an excellent vision. We think our curriculum is useful in working toward that vision, but we also acknowledge that there may be some missing aspects required of a fully fleshed out discipleship curriculum.
Coming back to Uber … Uber does NOT give people rides! Uber facilitates a relationship between people with transportation resources and people who need those resources (but don’t have them). IN THE SAME WAY, CCBT has changed its strategy from being a “service provider” to being the facilitator of a relationship. We want to work to create a connection between those with outstanding programs and curriculum and those who need and want those resources and methods in their churches!
CCBT’s New Strategy: Facilitator of a Relationship
With this new vision of focusing on relationships with churches in our network to “help churches make disciples”, we’ll be shifting our focus away from simply promoting our specific CCBT curriculum. We still think our curriculum is great, so we are not abandoning it; but we want to focus more on our network of churches and harnessing any great curriculum that may help in making disciples. To do this we will be reaching out to churches in our network. We’ll share our new vision and begin the work of identifying curricula already available in the network and how they might be shared with others.
We are excited to see how God uses this effort to further his Kingdom work amongst churches everywhere.