The vehicle of “Huddle” is quickly becoming a discipleship vehicle that many people are trying out, experimenting with and seeing extraordinary fruit in discipling and training current and/or future Christian leaders (If you’re interested in reading about this vehicle, you can check out this book. You can also get it in ebook form). However, one of the questions we get on a fairly regular basis is this: “I’ve been doing this Huddle for 6-9 months. Why does it feel like it has plateaued or stalled?”

It’s an excellent question that almost everyone we know runs into in the first few Huddles they lead.

Here are a couple of practical insights into this phenomenon:

1) The people in your Huddle aren’t leading anything. This is probably the #1 reason this problem comes up. And it makes complete sense. For many people, discipleship is equated with “understanding the Bible better” or something akin to “inner transformation.” Both are key aspects of discipleship, but certainly not the only ones we should be attending to. Perhaps one of the largest components of the life of a disciple is that they go out and make disciples and lead out in Kingdom mission. That makes the Huddle a much more dynamic environment because the people you’re investing in are experiencing success, failure, frustration, breakthrough, etc. on any given week. We often forget that Jesus deployed his disciples early in the game, but they were still connected to him. So in Mark 9, we see the disciples not able to cast out a demon. They come back to Jesus and ask why. “Oh…well for that one it requires prayer and fasting.” (We can almost picture Jesus shrugging his shoulders as he answers.) The best discipling environments mean you have people that are out there doing the work of the Kingdom.

2) Your Huddle has no direction. There are two questions you want to be constantly asking as you’re praying and preparing for your upcoming Huddle. First, what is God doing in your group in this current season of development? Second, what does he want to attend to in this specific Huddle? Sure, there is a loose framework that we’ve provided for the first year of Huddle with the LifeShapes, but that’s just a framework. In other words, when it feels like your Huddle is drifting and you’re uncertain what God wants to do with the people he’s given you to invest in, people pick this up and it can become aimless and listless. Really ask the Lord to give you clarity and direction on what he’s trying to attend to with the people in your Huddle.

3) If you’re not calibrating Invitation and Challenge well. We cover some of the basics in this blog that the guys over in the UK did on it a few weeks ago, but Jesus was able to invite his disciples into relationship with him while also challenging them to live into their Kingdom responsibility. He did both. They got full access to his life and more time than anyone else by a country mile…but they also were challenged about the places in their life that were living outside of the ways of the Kingdom. Every leader is better at one more-so than the other. Huddles can plateau when a leader is creating a culture that doesn’t have a full expression of both. If you’re all challenge, people will get frustrated, discouraged and never truly believe you care about them. If you’re all invitation, people will only ever want to hang out and do fun, comfortable things they are good at and rarely push into the difficult things that Jesus calls us to. It’s got to be both.

4) If Huddle is the only context for your investment in their life. This is a classic mistake people make in their first Huddle. They treat it much like the other discipleship vehicles they’ve used before and misunderstand that for true discipleship to happen, you need both the ORGANIZED and the ORGANIC. Huddle is the organized discipleship vehicle that has a regular and rhythmic pattern that is focused on discipleship and investment. However, we also need an organic component…they need access to your life outside of just the Huddle. Invariably, many people forget the more organic component and compartmentalize discipleship to the 90 minutes spent together in Huddle. But these few people you’re investing in need more. Fold them into the things you’re already doing in life and let them watch. If you’re having dinner, invite them and their families over for dinner. If they are hitting a brick wall of some sort and you have to get to the airport, have them drive you and talk about it on the ride. If you like the movies, go to the movies with them. Remember, if you have a good life already, you just have to share that with them!