Everyone in the room wants to become like Jesus.
Apprentices is a free app that helps a small group trace one person’s recurring failure down to the lie driving it, then build a set of spiritual practices aimed at that lie. Eight weeks of training, with a friend walking alongside.
The pastor and the person in the third row want the same thing.
The pastor preaches, counsels and prays, and sees the same people in the same place year after year. The man in the third row confesses the same failure every week and wonders why nothing changes. They sit in the same building, each waiting on the other.
of Protestant senior pastors call stagnating spiritual growth a major concern for their church.
of pastors strongly agree they are satisfied with their church’s discipleship.
Most churches have tried the usual answers. Sermons explain what is true. Accountability partners ask whether you did it again. Formation curricula teach everyone the practices of Jesus in the same order. Each one helps. None of them connects this person’s recurring failure to the lie driving it and to the practices that would retrain it. A trained spiritual director can do that, one person at a time, and most churches have none. Apprentices brings that path into the small group you already have.
Questions a spiritual director would ask, in the order they work.
Each gathering, one person takes the hotseat. The app leads the group down five layers with questions most groups never think to ask, and tells the leader at each layer whether to go deeper, stay, or go back.
- 1BehaviorWhat would someone watching from the outside have seen?This covers the good thing you can’t seem to start, as well as the thing you keep doing.
- 2EmotionCan you bring it up now? Don’t just remember it. Let yourself feel what you felt then.Where do you feel it in your body right now? Chest, stomach, throat, jaw?
- 3FearWhat is the behavior giving you? What does it provide in that moment?Strip away everything. What do you believe has to be true about you for you to be okay?
- 4Gospel truthWhat does the gospel offer that replaces what the behavior was providing?Then test it, there in the room: think about the trigger. Does it hit the same way?
- 5CommitmentWhich practices will you walk in for eight weeks: ones that disrupt the old pattern, and ones that form a new one?The answer is a set of practices built for this person, below.
The third layer is the turn most groups miss. A recurring failure is functional: it gives a person something, usually relief from a fear. Until the group names the fear and the payoff, any truth it offers lands on the wrong spot.
Never “try harder.” Never just “read and pray more.”
Once the lie is named, Apprentices matches it to a pattern and builds a cluster of the practices of Jesus aimed at that lie. Some practices interrupt the old habit and some form a new one, what Dallas Willard called disciplines of abstinence and engagement. The core practices are daily, for all eight weeks, because a habit worn in every day isn’t undone by something done on Saturdays. Each is small, or tied to a moment that already happens every day. Here are four of the eleven patterns, with some of their practices:
- Let it be done their way. Week 1, just count how often you correct someone. Then, when you see someone doing a task differently than you would, say nothing about how. Say thanks, and pray “You hold this.” Start with the smallest moments.
- Submission practice. Daily, climbing: let someone else choose something small, then how something you care about gets done, then yield on something that costs you. Never on anything unsafe or wrong.
- Sabbath. Weekly, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, phone in a drawer, no household decisions.
- Small, safe misses. Once a day, let people see one harmless imperfection: send the message without rereading it, ask the basic question in the meeting. Bigger ones in later weeks. Every one true.
- Reassurance fast. For eight weeks, don’t ask “Was that okay?” and don’t check reactions to what you post for 24 hours.
- Anonymous service. One kind thing a day that nobody will ever know about.
- The slow lane. Daily, take one small delay on purpose: the longest checkout line, letting the car merge. When the irritation rises, breathe out and say “God is the judge. I’m free.”
- The rehearsed response. Write one “When ___ happens, I will ___” for your usual flashpoint and say it aloud each morning.
- Blessing the offender. Every day, say the person’s name aloud and pray Numbers 6:24–26 over them. If you can’t mean it yet, say it anyway.
- Daily emotional naming. Write down three specific feelings from today and what set them off. “Fine” and “tired” don’t count.
- Numbing-agent fast. Name what you pour on the feelings (evening screens, a drink, busyness) and set it down during the hours it usually comes out.
- Lament aloud. Daily, a few verses of Psalm 13, 22, 42 or 88, aloud, without softening the words.
Every practice is scheduled around the person’s real week. A new parent, a night-shift nurse and a man whose wife sits in the same group each get a different version. Fasting is offered only where it is safe. Practices that climb tell the apprentice and the discipler each week’s step in their mid-week reminders. When none of the eleven patterns fits, the group can build one of its own. At six weeks, Apprentices asks them both whether anything changed.
Made for people who have been burned before.
Plenty of people have opened up in a group once and regretted it. Apprentices is built so nobody is cornered.
- Nobody is put on the spot.
A week before your turn, the app tells you it is coming and asks what you want to bring. You choose it, with time to think.
- You start with something ordinary.
Staying up too late. Snapping at the kids. Scrolling. The depth comes from the questions, so the starting point can be small.
- You can rehearse alone first.
A practice run walks through all five layers on your own phone and saves nothing.
- The group asks; nobody diagnoses.
The questions are open, and the leader’s guide says when to slow down or stop for the night and pick up next time.
One chair in the middle. A man you have known for two years sits in it, and tonight the group is not fixing him or quoting verses at him. They are just asking, and waiting. He starts where he always starts, with the anger, the same apology he has made a dozen times. Then someone asks where he feels it in his body, and he goes quiet, and his hand moves to his chest, and the room leans in because something true is finally about to surface.
The group does not let him stay on the surface. Past the snapping at his kids is the panic that he is failing them. Past the panic is the old, buried sentence he has believed since he was nine: if I am not in control, I am not safe. Nobody planted that. The questions just kept going, layer by layer, until he heard himself say it out loud and flinched at how long he had carried it.
It teaches people to name what actually drives them, instead of managing symptoms forever. The descent makes the hidden fear sayable, which is the first thing that has to happen before the gospel can touch it.
He has known the verse about being a beloved son since childhood. Tonight, with the lie finally named and lying exposed in the open, someone speaks that same truth into the exact place it was made for, and his face changes. Not new information. The eight inches from his head to his heart, crossed at last, in front of people who watched it happen.
It is where doctrine he already believed stops being a fact he can recite and becomes a thing that holds weight in his chest. Truth lands because it is aimed at the specific lie it displaces, not preached at him in general.
He leaves with three things, not a feeling that fades by Tuesday. Eight weeks of small embodied practices. One anchor truth written on a card in his wallet. And Marcus, who texts him Thursday mornings and asks the real question, and will keep asking until the eight weeks are done.
It makes formation concrete and shared, so the breakthrough survives the drive home. Change gets a calendar, a sentence to hold, and a brother who refuses to let it stay theoretical.
Do this a few times and the group becomes a place where people stop performing. They learn that the deepest thing about them can be said out loud and met with grace, not flinching, and they start to believe the gospel down where they actually live. Over a year you are no longer leading a group of people who behave well around each other. You are tending a family that knows how to walk each other home.
Free on iPhone and Android.