A guy named Christian is on a campus in New York City. He leads a Bible study full of believers who’ve walked with Jesus for years. At the same time, he’s on the basketball courts, sharing the gospel with guys who barely know who Jesus is. People are getting saved. Someone just got baptized.
Now he’s got a question: does he combine these two groups, or keep them separate?
That sounds like a logistics problem. It isn’t. It’s a DNA problem, and if you’re doing anything in the harvest right now, you’re going to hit the same wall Christian did.
The culture you already have decides what happens next
Play this out before it happens to you. Take a room full of believers who’ve been walking with Jesus a while. They’ve built a language. They can reference twelve passages outside the one you’re studying. None of that is bad on its own. But drop a new believer into that room and the message lands whether you meant to send it or not: you don’t know enough to be here yet.
Now flip it. Take a guy from the basketball courts who barely knows who Jesus is, and drop him into a room of insiders with all that history. He’s not going to fight the culture. He’s going to leave. Quietly, and for good.
Flip it back. Put a longtime believer on the basketball court, into the middle of guys who are rough around the edges and don’t know church etiquette. That believer might try to bring his religion in with him. But he can’t overwhelm that culture. He’s the outsider now. Most likely the courts just shrug him off.
Whichever culture already exists, that’s the one that wins. That’s the whole insight. Nobody has to try to make it happen. It’s just what culture does.
Jesus didn’t start with a Bible study
Look at how Jesus actually built his group. He didn’t sit down first and see who wanted to learn some material. He went and did the stuff he wanted reproduced, and he watched for who came along.
That’s the filter. Not “who’s interested,” but “who’s willing to do what I’m doing.” He still talked with Nicodemus, an insider who knew the whole system inside and out. But Nicodemus wasn’t the starting point. The starting point was the work, and the invitation into the work.
If you’re trying to build something that reproduces, the question to ask isn’t “can I make this work.” That’s a logistics question, and it’ll trap you into workshop mode forever.
The real question is: what is this going to reproduce?
You get whatever you celebrate
Here’s the mechanism underneath all of it. Culture forms around what gets held up as the win. Whatever a group talks about, whatever it points to and says “that, do more of that,” is what the group becomes. That starts on day one, not eventually.
This cuts both ways. It means an existing group with years of history can still be reoriented, by changing what gets celebrated. It’s slower, but it’s possible. And it means you don’t have to solve Christian’s problem by forcing two groups to merge or by staying rigidly separate forever. You solve it by deciding, deliberately, what you point to.
If guys from the harvest start showing up and doing the stuff, celebrate that loudly. If guys from the existing group start joining in on the harvest side, celebrate that too, because they just voted with their feet. Either way you’re teaching the room what you’re actually after.
And when you’re back with the existing group, tell the harvest stories. Not as a guilt trip. Just tell them. A baptism, a name, a conversation on the courts that turned into something. You’re not lecturing anyone into caring about the lost. You’re letting the story do what an announcement can’t.
Don’t force the merge. Let people contribute differently.
Christian’s actual setup had a gift buried in it. He was co-leading, and the other leader’s strength was going deep with the existing believers.
Instead of treating that as a conflict to resolve, the counsel was simple: let each of you lean into your strength.
One goes deep with those already in. One keeps inviting people out of the harvest. Neither is pulling the group in a different direction. Both are contributing to the same goal from a different angle.
That’s the move when you’re solo leading too. Find someone with actual buy-in, someone who has skin in the game for making disciples out of the harvest, and let that be their lane while you hold yours. Without buy-in, you’ll get a fracture. With it, you get two contributions instead of one conflict.
This is the hardest thing you’ll navigate, and that’s normal
If you get any traction in the harvest at all, this exact fracture point is coming for you. It’s one of the hardest things to navigate in disciple-making right now, and honestly one of the most important things to get good at. Not because it’s rare, but because it’s guaranteed.
When it does, don’t try to solve it with a logistics fix. Zoom out to the bigger pathway you’re on, the whole arc from lost to leader, so you can see where the tension is actually coming from. Then zoom back into the daily work.
Ask what you’re celebrating. Ask what culture that’s building. Then go do the stuff, because most of this gets caught, not taught.
Thank you Mark Perri, Faith & FASD, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dave Miller!
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