THE CHANGING WORLD OF MISSION STRATEGIES – Part 1

What Does Discipleship Look Like Today?

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org | June 4, 2026

If you were raised in the post-World War II era, church was simply what families did. Soldiers came home, pews filled, and preachers didn't have to press the case. The mainline denominations were flush — with people, with money, with confidence. Missions committees were formed, checks were written to favorite ministries, and consciences were duly salved. The institution ran itself.

That world is gone.

The top-down model — bishop to clergy to laity, with the laity dutifully doing what they were told — has collapsed. If a parish sees its bishop once in three years, it counts itself fortunate. The priest is on his own. Churches have shrunk. Thousands have closed. Denominations have fractured over sexuality, with most congregations barely sustaining double-digit Sunday attendance. The pension funds that once seemed the reward for faithful institutional service now look like the real reason some bishops hang on.

The picture is grim — and it is getting grimmer.

The tendency, nonetheless, is to keep doing things the same way. Hold a conference. Hire a growth consultant. Listen to the latest renewal guru. It all sounds wonderful until Sunday morning arrives and the priest looks out at twenty faithful, grey-haired souls waiting — as Beckett put it — for someone who never comes. In all likelihood, that congregation will close within a few years. The bishop will express regret, note that the property is well-situated, and quietly calculate the sale price. Failing a buyer, the building becomes luxury condominiums, with perhaps one or two units set aside for low-income residents as a sop to the diocesan conscience. Mission, redefined as real estate.

It doesn't have to be this way — but the honesty required to admit that is itself in short supply.

The problem cuts across theological lines. For theological liberals, the Great Commission has become the Great Omission, replaced by advocacy, therapy, and social programming. For conservatives who still believe in the Commission, the question is harder: they affirm the mandate but cannot seem to implement it in a culture that has moved decisively away from them.

THE DATA IS DAMNING

The numbers make the case plainly. A recent survey of American adults found that despite a modest uptick in interest in Christianity and church attendance in recent months, the number of people who hold a coherent biblical worldview remains critically low — including just 1% of Gen Z. Only 4% of Americans overall possess beliefs and behaviors consistent with biblical principles, a category the researchers called "Integrated Disciples." Ten percent qualify as "Emergent Followers," whose faith is heavily syncretistic. The vast majority — 85% — are classified as "World Citizens," people who may hold scattered religious opinions but whose governing framework is something other than Christianity. That category has grown by 16 percentage points since 2020.

Among evangelical churchgoers specifically — the people most likely to be the target of renewal efforts — the rate of "Integrated Disciples" has fallen from 21% in 2020 to 11% today. The church is not merely failing to reach the culture. It is losing the people already in the pews.

What this tells us is stark: the top-down discipleship model has not merely underperformed. It has failed. Not recently — it has been failing for a generation.

DOING THE SAME THING LOUDER

Anglican bishop Phil Ashey has been making the rounds with a message of mission and renewal — launching Revive weekends in Arizona, San Diego, and Los Angeles, calling congregations to deeper missional engagement and emphasizing that "there is no revitalization without renewal." It is a worthy message, sincerely delivered.

But it begs the decisive question: how?

How do you engage people who aren't coming through the doors? Where do you find them?

My own congregation has been experimenting with something called Pub Theology — renting space at a local pub, buying food and drinks, and opening up conversation about the questions of the day from a biblical frame. People engage. Some have said they'd come to church. Many have been burned by the church, abused by it, or simply concluded that the institution is not worth their Sunday morning. They don't hate Jesus. They hate what has been done in his name.

Pub Theology works, in its modest way. But it is not a strategy. It is an adaptation — one congregation finding a workaround. The structural problem remains.

A DIFFERENT WAY

Here is an irony that ought to stop every Western church leader cold: the United States, Canada, and Europe are home to the fastest-dying churches in the world. Iran — a nation wracked by war, 95% Muslim, actively persecuting its Christian minority and hunting down what few Jews remain — is home to the fastest-growing church in the world.

How is that possible?

The answer, in part, comes from people like Jerry and Stacy Kramer, Anglican missionaries who have worked in the Middle East for nearly twenty-five years. Their model of discipleship is mission-driven, Kingdom-focused, and deliberately movement-oriented. It is not about filling seats. It is about making disciples who make disciples who make more disciples — reaching the least, the forgotten, the unreached — and doing so in ways that are sustainable, transferable, and rooted in the New Testament pattern of the early church.

The Kramers define discipleship not as a program but as a way of life — a movement, not an institution. They describe what they call Disciple Making Movements as the engine of the global Christian revival now unfolding across the Global South and the Middle East. Their work has resulted in over 15,000 churches in ten countries, reaching fourteen generations of disciples and church plants in just three and a half years!

For the Kramers, "the least" is not an abstraction. It means forgotten widows, orphans, refugees, trafficked girls, and unreached ethnic groups — the people institutional Christianity has largely written off as too hard, too distant, or too costly. Discipleship, in their framework, is simultaneously spiritual and practical: trauma care for ISIS survivors, refugee recovery centers, orphan care with education and skills training. The Gospel made flesh in the most desperate circumstances on earth.

They operate as a movement, not an organization, with minimal overhead and a relentless focus on empowering local believers. No top-down hierarchy. No bishop who visits once every three years. No pension fund to protect. Stacy Kramer speaks often of small acts of daily obedience — the conviction that discipleship is not a conference you attend but a life you live, one obedient step at a time.

THE VERDICT ON THE OLD WAY

The Western church's institutional model has had decades to prove itself. The verdict is in. Cascading membership losses, shuttered buildings, a generation of clergy who were never taught to make disciples because their seminaries didn't know how, and a denominational apparatus more concerned with its own survival than with the mission it was created to serve — this is the inheritance of top-down, program-driven, conference-attending Christianity.

The Kramers' model is not a novelty. It is closer to the New Testament than anything the institutional church has produced in generations. It works in Iran under persecution. It works among refugees and trafficking survivors. The question is whether Western Christians have the humility to learn from people who have nothing — no buildings, no budgets, no denominational cover — and yet are watching the Kingdom of God advance at a rate that shames every diocese in North America.

The old strategies are not merely failing. They are finished. The only real question is whether the church will bury them before they bury the church.

— Part 2 will examine the Kramer model in detail and ask what genuine replication would require of Western congregations.