In 2003, Mike Breen joined the senior leadership team of Community Church of Joy. Before coming to the States, he was rector and team leader of St. Thomas' Church in Sheffield, an Anglican-Baptist church that grew to be the largest congregation in the north of England with more than 2,000 members, 80 percent of whom were under age 40.

In this interview, Mike addresses his life's passion: ordinary discipleship - and what that means for an ordinary church.

Your "life message" is about being an ordinary disciple of Jesus. Why has that idea become embedded into your life?

Mike Breen: In England where I served as senior pastor, we were forced away from typical discipleship materials and programs. The people we were working with were not part of the "book culture." They had little or no education.

We served in an inner city, asking God to grow the church. We served the broken, the homeless. How do you attract people who can't respond to the traditional models of evangelism?

We basically went back to the Scriptures and asked, "Well, okay, what is the plan? What is the priority? What does it mean for individuals to seek the kingdom? How do they grow into community?

How did you answer those questions?

MB: The main answer is becoming a disciple of Jesus. That means, simply, learning from Him everyday.

How did that change your preaching?

MB: I became more transparent. In essence, transparency is telling on yourself. As a preacher of the Word, I must show those who need to be discipled that I am being discipled by the same Word.

Much of Gospels are the mistakes of the disciples. That was an important point.

MB: I, then, began to develop a much more narrative approach to my teaching. Not only did I provide testimonies as part of the application, but I also drew out the story line of the text and tried to fill out the text by giving people the story into which they could enter.

Disciples are called to follow Jesus, literally, in Greek, "to join him on the path." So what you have to do is show the path--that's usually the storyline behind the text--so that people can step onto the path themselves.

What would you say to a pastor of a small church who wants to take the first step of moving to the "ordinary" model of discipleship?

MB: The first is to get clarity on the vision because Jesus only told us to seek one thing: the kingdom. He said he was only building one thing: the church. That takes a lot of responsibility off us.

It's God's responsibility to grow the church. The apostle Paul says that God's far more interested in growing our church's than we are.

I also think that that clarity then needs to get processed externally - with by drawing in our church boards and staff into crystallizing the vision of the kingdom. The apostle Paul says that one plants and one waters, but God gives the growth. What I have noticed that if we follow these principles, something will grow.

My second recommendation is to focus on Jesus' strategy that he gave to the 72 other disciples: get together in two's and recognize the harvest is plentiful. Jesus said to go into the towns and villages. Paul adopted that model when he first came to Europe. He went to Philippi, where there was no synagogue. He finds Lydia, the one person who will receive him, and, impossible as it was to imagine, culturally, he, Silas, Timothy, and Luke all ended up staying at her house. Paul paired up with Lydia to spread the gospel in that part of the world.

I think pastors need to look for the "person of peace," the one person with whom they can partner. Usually there is one. Stay with that person. And you have the beginnings of a team.

How much of your time did you spend in finding these people?

MB: When I first moved to this model, I moved from zero percent of my time to about 10 percent. Over time, that continued to grow. By the time I left Sheffield, realistically, more than 80 percent of my time was spent with people in groups developing leaders.

By then of course I was developing leaders of leaders of leaders. I was discipling what we called "celebration leaders," leaders of more than 200 people who had celebration meetings on a Sunday. Those celebration groups were made up of smaller congregations called clusters that were overseen by lay people, and those clusters were made of small groups that were again led by lay people.

Small group leaders were only two relationships away from the senior pastor at any time. That is not the usual experience of the average person involved in ministry in most large churches.

Whether rich or poor, we all have 24 hours a day. You share your time with others, and you ask them to share theirs with you. Out of time develops relationships that lead to Jesus because, in the end, He is the true Discipler.