Discipleship Documentation
Discipleship is for the long work one man does with another: a plan with stages, books to read, something to do between meetings, and a written record both of them can look back on. It uses the same people and the same sign-in as Tracker. This guide covers what it does today.
Discipleship is in beta. What is described here works, and churches are using it. Two things are worth knowing before you start rather than after. Nothing here notifies anybody: no email goes out when a disciple logs his reading or when a mentor leaves a comment, so the two of you still talk to each other. And almost nothing can be deleted once it is saved. A plan, a journal entry, a meeting, an activity log and a book all stay. Both are covered below in full. Beta means the shape of the product can still change. It does not mean anything you write is at risk.
Getting Started
Tracker watches a whole congregation. Discipleship is narrow on purpose: one mentor, one or two disciples, one plan that runs for months. The people come out of the same church directory, so nobody is typed in twice.
Step 1 — Sign in
Go to shepherdingtools.com/discipleship and sign in with the same email and password you use for Tracker. Every Shepherding Tools app shares one login.
Step 2 — Check that it is switched on
Discipleship is included in every plan, the free one included. It is switched on for one person at a time rather than for the whole church, and a new login account gets it without anybody doing anything.
If yours is an older account, or if somebody simply cannot see Discipleship in the switcher at the top left, the box to tick is in Tracker. Go to Admin > Users. Click his name. Find the App Access block, tick Discipleship, and save. Two things follow from that:
- A member with no login account cannot use Discipleship. Give him login access in Tracker first, then set his app access.
- The App Access block only appears on an account that already exists. Create the account and save it, then reopen it to tick the box.
There is no administrator role inside Discipleship, and no settings screen. What you can do is decided entirely by the plans you are on.
Step 3 — Find your way around
The top bar holds five places, plus a link out to support:
- Dashboard — your active plans, and buttons through to Plans and Journal. It is a short page.
- Plans — every plan you are on, grouped under Active, Paused and Complete.
- Journal — everything you have written, in one list.
- Library — the books your church has added.
- Templates — plan outlines you can start a new plan from.
On a phone the same five sit behind the menu button. Support opens our contact form in a new tab.
Step 4 — Set up, in order
The pieces depend on each other, so do them in this order:
- Add the books you plan to assign to the Library.
- Build a template, if several people will work through the same outline. Skip this for a one-off.
- Create the plan and add the disciple on the same form.
- Add milestones, assign activities, assign books.
- Add the first meeting.
Add your disciples when you create the plan. There is no way to add somebody to a plan afterwards, and no way to take somebody off one. Decide who is on it before you click Create Plan. A plan with the wrong people on it has to be replaced rather than corrected.
1. Plans
A plan is one piece of work between a mentor and one or more disciples. Milestones, goals, activities, meetings and books all hang off it.
Starting a plan
Click Plans, then + New Plan. The form asks for:
- Start from a template — optional. Choosing one fills in the title and description for you, and both stay editable.
- Title and Description.
- Add Disciples — search by name or email and click a result. Add as many as belong on the plan.
The people search covers everyone active in your church directory, including people who have no login account. Somebody without a login cannot open Discipleship, so he would appear on the plan and never see it. Check his login first.
Mentors and disciples
Whoever creates the plan is its mentor. Everyone he adds is a disciple. The two roles do different jobs, and neither can do the other's.
- The mentor adds and ticks off milestones, assigns activities and books, adds meetings, comments on what a disciple shares, and has a fourth tab called Shared with me.
- A disciple writes his own goals, logs activities, writes journal entries, and keeps his own private notes on a meeting.
A mentor cannot write a goal for his disciple, and a disciple cannot tick a milestone. That is deliberate on both sides.
Visible to church leadership
The New Plan form used to carry a Visible to church leadership box. Ticking it recorded an answer that nothing ever read, so we removed it rather than leave a control that looked like it did something. No screen anywhere shows a plan to somebody who is not on it, so a plan is visible to its own mentor and disciples and to nobody else.
Active, paused and complete
A mentor can rename a plan and change its status: click Edit beside the title. The three statuses are Active, Paused and Complete, and the Plans page groups your plans under them.
A plan cannot be deleted. Mark it Complete when it is finished, or Paused if it has stalled and you expect to pick it up again.
Milestones
Milestones are the stages a plan works through, in order. They sit above the tabs with a count and a bar, like MILESTONES (2/4).
A mentor manages them from the plan itself:
- + Add Milestone puts a new one at the end.
- The up and down arrows reorder.
- Edit renames. Delete removes.
- Ticking the box marks it done and strikes the title through.
A disciple sees the milestones and the bar. He cannot tick one. Marking a stage complete is the mentor's call.
Goals
Goals are the disciple's own words about what he wants to work on, in the green box on the plan. He adds them with + Add Goal, and he can edit or delete his own.
A mentor reads goals and cannot write them, not even his own. On a plan with more than one disciple each goal shows whose it is. If nobody has written a goal yet, a mentor sees no goals box at all.
2. Activities
An activity is something a disciple does again and again and records each time: reading, memory work, prayer, service. The mentor assigns it once. The disciple logs it as often as he does it.
Assigning an activity
Open the plan, stay on the Activities tab, and click + Assign Activity. The form has five parts:
- Activity — the picker starts from seven built-in types: Reading, Scripture Memory, Prayer, Journaling, Book Study, Service and Report. There is no way to add your own from any screen, so what you see is what you have.
- Description— what you actually want done. "Read two chapters before each meeting" is the useful kind.
- Minimum entries — how many times he should log it. Leave it blank for no minimum, and no progress bar appears.
- Required — shows the activity as Required rather than Optional. It is a label for the two of you. Nothing is enforced and nothing is blocked.
- Assign to — everyone on the plan, or people you pick.
A disciple only ever sees the activities that are actually his.
Logging an activity
A disciple opens the plan and clicks + Log Activity. The button appears once something has been assigned to him.
- Pick the activity.
- Set the date. It defaults to today.
- Write in Shared with mentor, in Private notes, or in neither. Both are optional.
- Click Log Activity.
An entry cannot be edited or deleted afterwards.
How progress is counted
A disciple sees his own count, and a bar where there is a minimum: 3 entries / 5 required.
A mentor sees one line per disciple instead, each with his own count against the same minimum. A man who has logged nothing shows as zero rather than dropping off the list, because a zero is the number a mentor most needs. Under that, the mentor sees the three most recent entries with the name of whoever wrote each one, and a box to comment.
An activity with entries cannot be removed
Delete on an assigned activity refuses once anybody has logged against it, and says so: This activity has logged entries, so it can't be deleted. Removing it would take his written record with it, which is not a thing to do by accident. Edit the description instead, or leave it and stop logging against it.
3. Meetings
A meeting is a date, an agenda, and what came out of it. Everyone on the plan is a participant.
Adding a meeting
Only the mentor adds meetings. Open the plan, click the Meetings tab, then + Add Meeting. Set the date and write the agenda. Meetings are listed newest first.
Each meeting is entered one at a time. There is no recurring meeting and no calendar.
Agenda, shared notes and private notes
Click Notes on any meeting to open it. Three boxes, and each one says underneath who reads it:
- Agenda — everyone on the plan.
- Shared notes — everyone on the plan.
- My private notes— you, and nobody else. The mentor has his own and each disciple has his own. Neither can read the other's, and neither can overwrite it.
Anyone on the plan can open a meeting and edit it, mentor and disciple alike. That is on purpose: the private note is what keeps each man's own thoughts his.
A mentor can also leave a comment under a meeting. Comments are visible to everyone on the plan. A meeting cannot be deleted, so correct the date or clear the notes instead.
4. Books and the Library
The Library is your church's shelf. A book assignment is a portion of one book given to somebody on a plan. They are two different things, and the Library comes first.
The Library
Click Library, then + Add Book. Two ways in:
- Search Open Library by title, author or ISBN, then click a result to add it. The cover comes with it.
- Add manually by typing the title and author. Use this for anything Open Library does not have.
The Library belongs to the church, not to you: everyone in your church who uses Discipleship sees the same shelf and can add to it. A book with no cover, or a cover that fails to load, shows a book icon. Search the shelf with the box at the top.
A book cannot be removed from the Library once it is added.
Your notes on a book
Click any book to open it. Write your note, and name the page, chapter or section it came from if that helps. Notes are listed oldest first and appear in your Journal.
Book notes are yours alone. Nobody else reads them, your mentor included, and they never appear on a plan. The form has a Private box; today it changes nothing, because every book note is already private to you. A note cannot be edited or deleted once it is saved.
Assigning a book on a plan
Open the plan, click the Books tab, then + Assign a Book.
- Pick a book. The picker offers only what is already in the Library.
- Name the Portion, like Chapters 1–4.
- Assign it to everyone on the plan, or to people you pick.
Remove takes the assignment off the plan and leaves the book on the shelf. Only the mentor assigns and removes.
Add the whole reading list to the Library in one sitting before you build the plan. The assign form has no way to add a new book, so a missing title means backing out to the Library and starting the plan work again.
5. Journal
The Journal is your own writing, gathered in one place and sorted newest first.
What shows up in the feed
Four kinds of thing land here, each with a coloured label saying which:
- Journal — entries you wrote here.
- Activity — activities you logged, if you wrote something with them.
- Book — notes you made on a book.
- Meeting — meetings on your plans that have an agenda or shared notes.
Search the box at the top, or narrow to one plan with the dropdown beside it. Search looks at what you wrote, shared and private alike. An activity you logged without writing anything in either box does not appear, because there is nothing to show.
Writing an entry
Click Journal, then + New Entry.
- Choose a plan, or leave it on No plan.
- Write in Shared with mentor, in Private notes, or in both.
- Click Save Entry.
Under the shared box a line names who will read it, by name: your mentor on the plan you chose. Leave the plan on No plan and it says so plainly, because an entry attached to no plan reaches nobody. An entry cannot be edited or deleted once it is saved.
Where you read your mentor's comments
A mentor's comment on your journal entry or on an activity you logged shows up in your Journal, underneath the entry, labelled Mentor. It does not appear on the plan, so the Journal is the page to check. The one exception is a comment on a meeting, which sits on the plan's Meetings tab where everybody on the plan can read it.
Shared with me, for mentors
A mentor gets a fourth tab on the plan called Shared with me. It holds the journal entries his disciples chose to share, each with the author's name and a box to reply.
It holds journal entries and nothing else. Activity notes are on the Activities tab and meeting notes are on the Meetings tab. The tab is named that way rather than "Journal" because the Journal in the top bar is your own writing, which is a different thing.
An entry a disciple wrote entirely in the private box does not appear on this tab at all. Not the text, not the date, not an empty row. The fact that he wrote something is itself something he did not share.
6. Who Can See What
A man will not write honestly if he is unsure who is reading. So every box in Discipleship is one of three things, and the screen says which one underneath the box at the moment he types in it.
The three kinds of box
- Shared with your mentor.The journal entry's shared box, the shared notes on an activity log, and your goals. Your mentor reads them. Another disciple on the same plan does not.
- Everyone on the plan. Meeting agendas, meeting shared notes, milestones, and comments left on a meeting.
- Private to you.The journal entry's private box, the private notes on an activity log, your own private notes on a meeting, and every book note.
A comment your mentor leaves on your journal entry or on something you logged goes to you, not to the rest of the plan. A comment on a meeting is the one everybody reads, which is why meetings are the place to put anything the whole plan should have.
What a mentor cannot see
A disciple's private writing is not merely hidden on the mentor's screen. It is never sent to his browser: the plan he loads does not carry it. A journal entry with an empty shared box is not listed for him either. His own private note on a meeting is his; the disciple's is the disciple's; and neither can reach the other.
Nobody outside the plan
A plan is visible to its own mentor and disciples, and to no one else in the church. A pastor who is not on the plan does not see it. Neither does a sysadmin. There is no oversight screen and no church-wide report of who is being discipled. See Visible to church leadership for a box we once had that claimed otherwise and has since been removed.
7. Templates
A template is a plan outline you can use again: the milestones, the activities, and a sentence about how often to meet. Officer training and a new members' course are the obvious candidates.
Building one
Click Templates, then + New Template. Past the title and description there are four parts:
- Milestones — the stages, in order. Add them, move them with the arrows, remove the ones you change your mind about.
- Activities — the same fields as assigning one on a plan: type, description, Required, Minimum entries. Everything here is assigned to everyone on the plan when the template is used.
- Meeting rhythm— a sentence, like "Weekly, 60 to 90 minutes". It is guidance for the mentor and nothing more. Using a template creates no meetings, because a meeting needs a date and a template has no way to know one.
- Share with entire church — covered below.
Church-wide templates
The Templates page sorts what you can see into My Templates, Church-Wide and Shared by Others. Tick Share with entire church and yours moves into Church-Wide, where anyone in your church can start a plan from it.
Only the man who made a template can edit it, church-wide or not. Everyone else sees an Editbutton on his own and none on anybody else's. A template cannot be deleted.
A plan gets its own copy
Choosing a template on the New Plan form copies its milestones and activities into the plan. It does not link them. Editing the template a month later changes nothing on a plan already running, and changing that plan changes nothing on the template. This is why you can improve a template between cohorts without disturbing the men already partway through.
If a template names an activity type your church cannot see, creating the plan is refused and the message names the type at fault. It is not quietly dropped, because a plan silently missing part of its outline is the kind of thing nobody notices for months.
8. How This Fits With Tracker
One directory. The people you put on a plan are the members already in Tracker. The search reads that directory, and the names shown on a plan come from our records rather than from whatever was typed into the form.
One sign-in. Same email, same password. The switcher at the top left moves you between the apps you have access to.
Access is set in Tracker. Under Admin > Users, each person's row carries an App Access block with a Discipleship box. There is nothing to configure inside Discipleship itself.
Nothing flows back yet. A meeting recorded here does not become a contact in Tracker, and a plan does not appear on a household profile. The two products share your people and nothing else today. If you want a discipleship meeting counted as pastoral contact, log it in Tracker as well.
9. What It Does Not Do Yet
An honest list, so you can plan around these rather than discover them. None of them need reporting; we already know.
- No notifications at all.Nothing in Discipleship sends email. A disciple who logs his reading is relied on to mention it, and a mentor's comment waits until the disciple next opens his Journal.
- Nobody joins or leaves a plan after it starts. Membership is fixed at the moment you click Create Plan.
- Almost nothing can be deleted. Plans, journal entries, activity logs, meetings, book notes, library books and templates all stay once saved. Milestones, goals, book assignments and an activity nobody has logged against can be removed.
- Nothing can be edited after savingexcept a plan's title and status, a milestone, a goal, an activity assignment, a template, and a meeting. Anything you wrote as a record is a record.
- No activity types of your own. The picker offers the seven built-in ones and no screen adds to them.
- No export and no printable report.Nothing gathers a plan's record into a document to hand to a session or a presbytery.
- One mentor per plan. The man who creates it. There is no way to add a second.
If one of these is blocking something your church needs to do, tell us. During a beta, what churches actually run into decides what gets built next.
Tips & Best Practices
- Check the disciple can sign in before you build the plan around him. A member without a login account will never see it.
- Set a Minimum entries on the activities that matter. Without one there is no progress bar, and a mentor is left counting entries by eye.
- Write the description as an instruction. "Two chapters before each meeting" is checkable; "Reading" is not.
- Tell your disciples that the private box really is private, once, at the start. Most men assume the mentor can see everything and write accordingly.
- Turn a plan you have run twice into a template. The third one takes a minute.
- Put the meeting agenda in before the meeting rather than after. It is the one field both of you can read in advance.
- Because nothing here sends email, agree on a rhythm out loud: he logs by Saturday, you read and comment on Monday.