MM33 – Movement of Church Planting and Discipleship—Discipleship Structures: Community-Based, Simple, and Reproducible

In his article, Ps Mervin Chia explores perspectives on how prioritizing friendship over programs and simple, flexible structures can create the organic “mentoring moments” necessary for authentic intergenerational discipleship.

In my previous article on Authentic Community, I explored how the intersection of community and discipleship finds its foundation in the Divine community—the Trinity. I described how two distinct communities I’ve built, the Chess Nuts 🌰 and my former Royal Ranger boys, took intentional shape around shared purpose. The core principle I articulated then remains central here:

Intentionality matters, but to the degree it provides “ample structure for us to genuinely do life together.”

The purpose of community-building and discipleship informs the structure
The question pastors face is not whether to build community, but how. We cannot prescribe a one-size-fits-all methodology because authentic community emerges from understanding our people where they are, attending to group dynamics, and allowing purpose to determine structure.

This shaped how Chess Nuts 🌰has evolved. Anne and I founded it for intergenerational connection, yet when Joel suggested introducing games beyond chess, I recognized that chess was merely a means to our purpose. We don’t abandon structure—we allow structure to serve our deeper purpose of connection across generations.

Over the years, many have called me their mentor. I initially resisted the title until Dr Tan Soo Inn offered a reframing: “The term is not important. You have been a friend who decided to walk with this brother. And it is he who named you mentor.” This shifted my understanding entirely. What I practice is not mentorship in the traditional hierarchical sense, but friendship with “mentoring moments”—organic conversations where wisdom and growth happen bilaterally.

We don’t abandon structure—we allow structure to serve our deeper purpose of connection across generations.

Friendship is the purpose    

This distinction matters profoundly. Mentoring conversations have endings; formal mentoring relationships terminate when their stated purpose concludes. Friendship, however, keeps the conversation alive indefinitely. It is friendship that creates the conditions for mentoring moments to emerge naturally. The beauty of this approach, as Dr Tan Soo Inn describes, is mutual mentoring, where “both parties act as mentor and mentee, recognizing that there is something to learn from each other.”^[1].

I experience this mutuality regularly. When my socio-emotional insensitivity surfaces—and it does—my friends graciously speak truth in love. They gently correct me, reminding me that perhaps my words were unwise in a particular context. These are my mentoring moments as a learner. In these wounds of faithful friends (Proverbs 27:6), I receive what I desperately need, and my friends extend the same grace to me that I offer them. This reciprocal dynamic reflects what Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified as essential: “Christians need other Christians who speak God’s Word to them.”^[2]

A hierarchical, unidirectional approach to discipleship often prevents this vulnerability. It creates distance by separating us into two categories—teachers and learners—when authentic Christian community calls for something different. In an intergenerational Christian community, all become speakers of God’s Word and hearers of it simultaneously. The three-year-old teaches the seventy-six-year-old; the elder learns from the child. As Bonhoeffer puts it, “The Word comes round once more, as a gift.”^[3]

Anne, who co-founded Chess Nuts 🌰 with me, articulates this beautifully from her experience. She initially believed deep friendship in church community would be limited to her cell group, youth ministry peers, or those near her age—simply because they related better. Yet during a Chess Nuts meetup, a young girl challenged us to a game, and a genuine friendship began. Anne reflects:

“Maybe sometimes there really is a mental barrier to forging bonds beyond comfort zones but truly as Jesus says, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these’ (Mark 10:14 NIV). Who is to say that little children cannot experience the Lord’s fellowship through our fellowship, or that people outside a certain age group cannot grow in discipleship together? That’s the beauty of community—spurring one another on toward love and good deeds with Jesus (Hebrews 10:24-25).”

It is friendship that creates the conditions for mentoring moments to emerge naturally.

Presence over Program
It is remarkably easy to confuse program-saturated activity with the work of God in the Church’s life, just as one might mistake a social club for the Church itself. While the Church certainly has a social dimension, pastors must continually ask: What is the Church?

Bonhoeffer provides clarity: “‘Christ existing as church-community’—the presence of Christ.”^[4] This is not abstract theology. Paul tells the Corinthians, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27). The presence I refer to is our human physicality, grounded in the Incarnation. God has loved and taken on real human flesh. Our reason for existence is not inherent to us but rooted in God alone. Therefore, our living as real human beings and loving the real people beside us is grounded only in God’s becoming human—in the unfathomable love demonstrated at the Incarnation.

This presence transcends both programs and the busyness of ministry that can masquerade as godly work. Joel, one of my former Royal Ranger boys and now part of the Chess Nuts 🌰 core team, poses critical questions that deserve regular reflection:

To what degree does the Lord prioritize the quantity of our works over their quality? Scripture affirms that action matters (Matthew 21:28-31), yet God examines the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). As we construct structures to support community and discipleship, have we inadvertently sacrificed intentionality? While continuity in ministry is valuable, we must continuously evaluate whether our programs still serve their original purpose. Has the Lord revealed to others the vision He has entrusted to me? Have I communicated the heart behind my ministry to those who will carry it forward? Are they equipped not merely to maintain structures, but to embody the purpose those structures serve?

While continuity in ministry is valuable, we must continuously evaluate whether our programs still serve their original purpose.

The fellowship described in Acts 2 presents a simple yet powerful vision of what the Church was meant to be: believers sharing life together as a demonstration of Christ’s love (John 13:34-35). This is where authentic discipleship occurs and community forms. Significantly, Acts 2:42-47 narrates the post-Pentecost early Church not as a prescriptive blueprint but as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit—the norm we should expect, not merely the spectacular utterances of tongues.

This sharing of life is understood not performatively but sacramentally. It points us to Christ, who first loved us and gave Himself vicariously for us. We therefore give freely from the fullness we have received. Thinking sacramentally means confronting our embodied limits and trusting God’s Spirit, who takes what belongs to Christ and reveals it to us (John 16:15).

A discipleship attentive to God’s presence means adopting the mind of Christ, considering the interests of others, and attending to a grieving friend over coffee instead of rushing to the next meeting. It means making space in a busy week to pray with someone struggling, or inviting someone into the messiness and inconvenience of home life as a means of doing life together. These are not program innovations; they are expressions of presence.

Authentic community and transformative discipleship emerge not from sophisticated programs or rigid structures, but from the willingness to be present to one another as Christ is present to us. When we prioritize friendship as the soil in which mentoring moments organically grow, we create space for an exchange of grace. This requires resisting the tyranny of busyness and the seduction of program-saturated ministry, choosing instead to trust that Christ’s presence indwells His body.

As Pentecostals shaped by Acts 2, we remember that structure serves purpose: we break bread, share life, attend to one another’s griefs and joys because the Spirit compels us to embody the love we have received. In these ordinary, sacramental moments of presence—intentional yet unhurried, structured yet flexible—God is actively forming us into the image of Christ. This is the work of the Church. This is what we are called to be.

It means making space in a busy week to pray with someone struggling, or inviting someone into the messiness and inconvenience of home life as a means of doing life together.

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^[1]SOO-INN TAN, GROWING PEOPLE RELATIONALLY: Frameworks for Spiritual Mentoring (GRACEWORKS, 2025), 59.

^[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer,Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Albrecht Schönherr, and Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness, vol. 5, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 32.
^[3]Ibid.
 ^[4]Dietrich Bonhoeffer,Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Clifford J. Green and Joachim von Soosten, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, vol. 1 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 260.