The Trellis and the Vine by Tony Payne, Colin Marshall

Sarah, on the other hand, is a very capable and caring woman who has a real knack for explaining the Bible clearly. She is currently being trained to lead one of the women’s Bible study groups that meet on Thursday mornings.
    The point of using this sort of tool is not to turn Christian ministry into a set of lists but to help us focus on people —because ministry is about people, not programs. If we never think about people individually and work out where they are up to, and how and in what area they need to grow, how can we minister in anything other than a haphazard, scattergun way? It’s like a doctor thinking to himself, “Seeing each of my patients individually and diagnosing their illnesses is just too difficult and time consuming. Instead, I’m going to get all my patients to assemble together each week, and I’ll give them all the same medicine. I’ll vary the medicine a bit from week to week, and it will at least do everybody some good. And it’s much more efficient and manageable that way.”
    Some readers may suspect that this is starting to sound rather too anti-church and anti-sermon, and when you see the title of chapter 8 (‘Why Sunday sermons are necessary but not sufficient’), your suspicions may get worse. We’ll talk more about the issues in that chapter; suffice to say at this point that we are very pro-church and we think that the ‘sermon’ is an essential, valuable and highly effective form of ministering God’s word—it’s just that it’s not the only form, nor the only way to see gospel growth happen. If growing the vine is about growing people , we need to help each person grow, starting from where they are at this very moment. There needs to be inefficient, individual people ministry, as well as the more efficient ministries that take place in larger groups. This is the sort of individualized ministry that Paul envisages in 1 Thessalonians 5:
We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labour among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all. (1 Thess 5:12-14)
    The leaders labour hard in their vital role, and are to be esteemed highly because of it. But there is an equally important role for the “brothers” to be involved in: ministering to all the various situations that individual Christians encounter in life.
    This is another enormous benefit of using a diagnostic tool like the one above. It helps us see what people need next—which is always to help them move one step to the right. What Need-Help-Jean needs next is to gain (or regain) her solidity and stability in Christian faith. What Solid-Barry needs next is some encouragement and training to start ministering to others, rather than just growing in his own happy world. What Raising-Issues-Bob needs next is to get beyond discussing general issues of God or Christianity, and hear the gospel.
    Incidentally, if you’re the pastor of a church, this tool also helps you to see where the gaps and holes and needs are. In a healthy ‘gospel growth’ church, there should be a decent spread of people across all categories. If you list out all the people you know, both in your congregation and the contacts on the fringe of the congregation, you’ll quickly see where the challenges are. If there are very few people in the outreach category, then your church is not doing enough to make contact with non-Christians and tell them the gospel. If there are lots in the outreach category but almost none in the follow-up category, there’s every chance that you’re running lots of events and programs to make contact with people, but not prayerfully sharing the gospel often enough so that people are actually converted and need to be followed up. And so on.

    T RAINING IS THE ENGINE of gospel growth. Under God, the way to get more