Date of Award

2025

Document Type

Project Portfolio

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry (DMin)

Department

Seminary

First Advisor

David McDonald

Second Advisor

H. Colleen Butcher

Third Advisor

Leonard I. Sweet

Abstract

Despite churches’ commitment to making disciples, many earnest Christians—active in church teaching, volunteering, and community life—feel ill-equipped to disciple others. While biblical instruction and resources abound, spiritual formation weighted toward cognitive learning relies on willpower and falls short in shaping identity and desires. The focus on personal salvation often reduces faith to sin management, leaving many underwhelmed and uncertain about how to live meaningfully as citizens of the kingdom. Without qualitative, relational, and reproductive disciple-making, faith lacks transformative power. A.R.C.hitecture for Mission: Prototyping Pathways to Renew the Heart of the Church is a pracademic manuscript that explores disciple-shaping movements from minority positions, reframes spiritual formation, and designs disciple-making trajectories for faith communities. The core question driving this research is: How can emerging Christians in the West relationally develop healthy, reproducing disciples with agency to usher in the kingdom of heaven? Focusing on emerging leaders (ages 22-35), I introduce “A.R.C.” as both a disciple’s developmental framework and a trinitarian-inspired metaphor to illustrate transformation.

As a definition, a disciple’s A.R.C. is:

● Animate the heart of God,

● Reproduce the mission of Christ, and

● Commission them with the desires of God by the Spirit.

As a metaphor, A.R.C. represents:

● A narrative structure revealing plot, development, and mission,

● A charge illustrating conduction and the transfer of energy, and

● A trajectory that accounts for external forces shaping growth.

The key benefit of this project is a relational arc that begins with belonging. Like an ideal and healthy family, belonging is a loving attachment that shapes identity. By blurring the lines between evangelism and discipleship, belonging shapes identity through strategic relationship, transfiguring lives in a way cognitive belief, behavior modification, or conformity cannot. Relational disciple-making nurtures desire, offering agency and meaning in God’s mission.

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