Discipleship the Traditional Way, the Navigators Way
After 40 years of searching for the best possible discipleship program or process, a local church found the way to intentionally turn their members into disciples – The Navigators.
NEW YORK – After 40 years of searching for the best possible discipleship program or process, a local church found the way to intentionally turn their members into disciples – The Navigators.
Gateway Cathedral with 2,500 congregants in Staten Island, N.Y., struggled with the right model for 40 years to find the problem with their ministry and Senior Pastor Daniel Mercaldo believes they've found the answer in Navigators' disciple-making ministry.
Unlike a program that a pastor can plug and play into a church, the Navigators counsel each church that wants to change from the bottom up and allows the church to do it without branding-naming them.
"For discipleship, we struggled through ten years of disappointment and after the first eight years, I said, ‘I am going to go to the oldest and most tried and most tested ministry in discipleship.’ And that is Navigators," said Mercaldo, who heads Staten Island's largest church.
A survey of 1,300 church pastors this year found that the second greatest need in the Church is discipleship, according to LifeWay Christian Resources. The concern has been with how to make leader-producing leaders.
Mercaldo has since involved his church in a two-year long process thus far that disciples Christians at whatever stage of faith and multiplies them into leaders.
The Navigators teach discipleship in groups of threes for the individual, a small group for a larger fellowship, and then a larger group meeting with leaders only.
The triad has unique advantages for forming deep relations fast, according to Samuel Hershey, on staff with the Navigators' Church Discipleship Ministry.
"There's so much that gets accomplished in a triad, where you have one leader and two participants,” says Hershey. “It avoids a lot of problems that came up in the past with just twos. It's a lot safer, and yet you're able to get deep relationships and confidence formed pretty quickly."
Groups of threes have one leader and two participants and always consist of the same gender. The groups meet at least once a week to share what they've learned from their daily walks with God and meditations on the Word.
"It's sharing out of your walk with God, as opposed to just giving information. It's a philosophical shift," says Hershey. "When truth is shared out of the life, people relate to it. It makes sense, and it becomes organic as opposed to getting lectured with information."
Mercaldo says this new form has completely changed his life as he finally found a way to relate to other men with God as the center.
"It's a real lift to me," comments Mercaldo. "In my own life, I began to understand.”
“The secret of Navigators is to make personal progress."
In this core group, "you actually are in a life to life situation with men, and the things that came up in my group ... were just incredible discipleship process things. That was the great thrill."
"Men don’t like to read or write," Mercaldo explains further. But in the core group, the men read and write and share just enough where they don't give up on it.
Many congregants have indicated their need for healthy friendships with members of the same sex that can support them and hold them accountable when they need to be.
Gateway Cathedral has multiplied these core groups, as participants became leaders. The church is also working on multiplying small groups and community groups, which are larger settings for fellowship.
"This discipleship thing permeates every ministry in the church. We want to make disciples of children in the children's ministry, women in the women's ministry and at all three levels," says Mercaldo.
