Sometimers: Discipling the Individual
Discipleship Doesn't Wait for Consistency
This section closes where the Regular Attenders section closed — on discipleship — because the same principle applies here, just under harder conditions. It would be easy to conclude that real spiritual growth requires the steady rhythm of weekly attendance, and that discipleship for a Sometimer has to wait until their pattern stabilizes. That conclusion is understandable, and it's wrong. Discipleship was never meant to depend on a person's calendar. It depends on relationship, attention, and the Holy Spirit's work in a life — none of which require a fixed weekly schedule to function.
If your church treats discipleship as something that only starts once someone becomes a Regular Attender, you've quietly told every Sometimer that their spiritual growth is on hold until their circumstances change. For a Genuine Obstruction Sometimer, that message is especially painful, because it makes their spiritual formation contingent on something they may not be able to control for years. Discipleship has to be portable enough to reach someone wherever they currently are, not conditional on them first solving their attendance problem.
It helps to name the assumption underneath this mistake directly: the belief that discipleship is primarily something that happens to a person inside a room, delivered through a curriculum, on a schedule the church controls. Under that assumption, someone who can't reliably be in the room is, almost by definition, someone discipleship can't currently reach. But discipleship in its fullest sense has always been broader than that — it's the ongoing formation of a person's character, faith, and obedience, and that formation doesn't pause simply because a person's attendance does. A church that only has one delivery mechanism for discipleship — the in-room program — will always underserve this group, no matter how good that program is, because the mechanism itself excludes anyone whose life doesn't fit its schedule.
Seeing the Person, Not the Pattern
Everything in this section has pushed against treating Sometimers as a category rather than as individuals, and this lesson is where that principle matters most. A discipleship approach built around patterns — "here's what we do with Sometimers" — will always fall short of one built around a specific person's actual spiritual life: their questions, their doubts, their growth edges, their gifts. Two people can share the exact same attendance pattern and be in completely different places spiritually. One might be spiritually mature and simply constrained by circumstance. Another might be genuinely early in their faith and need something entirely different. Discipling well here requires actually knowing which is which, person by person, rather than applying a single track to everyone who shows up inconsistently.
Scriptural Examples Worth Holding Onto
Scripture offers several pictures of exactly this kind of individualized attention, and they're worth returning to as a church trains itself to see Sometimers this way.
The woman at the well (John 4). Jesus doesn't wait for her to become a regular presence among his followers before engaging her directly. He meets her in the middle of an ordinary day, addresses her actual life honestly — including the parts that weren't flattering — and offers her something real in that single encounter. Her response afterward ripples out to an entire town, started from one conversation with someone who never became part of his traveling group in any conventional sense. Worth noticing too: this happens at a well, at midday, in the middle of her ordinary routine — not in a synagogue, not on a schedule she'd cleared in advance. The discipleship moment came to her, in her own context, rather than requiring her to first arrive somewhere else.
Zacchaeus (Luke 19). Jesus notices one man in a tree, calls him by name, and invites himself specifically to that man's house. Zacchaeus wasn't a consistent follower waiting to be discipled once he proved himself — he was a specific individual Jesus sought out personally, in the middle of his actual life and profession, and that specific attention became the turning point. It's also worth noting that Zacchaeus was, by profession and reputation, someone the religious community around him had largely written off. Jesus didn't wait for social rehabilitation before extending personal attention; the attention itself was what produced the change.
The parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15). A shepherd with ninety-nine sheep already accounted for still goes after the one that wandered, treating that one sheep's location and condition as worth the same effort as the whole flock's care. The parable doesn't wait for the sheep to find its own way back into the fold before the shepherd acts — the shepherd goes to wherever the sheep actually is. There's something specific here for church leadership to sit with: the shepherd doesn't send a general announcement hoping the sheep hears it and returns on its own. The initiative and the effort belong to the shepherd, not the sheep.
Peter's restoration (John 21). After denying Jesus three times — about as inconsistent a season as a disciple could have — Peter isn't handed a probationary period before being trusted with ministry again. Jesus meets him specifically, asks him directly, and restores him personally, addressing Peter's actual failure rather than a generic call to recommitment. The specificity matters: Jesus asks Peter the same core question three times, mirroring the three denials directly, rather than offering a vague blanket forgiveness. Real discipleship named the actual failure and the actual person, rather than treating Peter as an interchangeable case of someone who'd drifted.
Nicodemus (John 3, John 19). Nicodemus first comes to Jesus at night, almost certainly because his position made a public, daytime visit too costly. Jesus doesn't treat that constrained, hidden approach as insufficient — he engages Nicodemus fully, with some of the most theologically significant teaching in the gospels, in a single nighttime conversation. And Nicodemus's story doesn't end there: he reappears later, defending Jesus and eventually helping prepare his body for burial, evidence that a single well-invested conversation with someone operating under real constraints can bear fruit long after the moment itself.
Across all five, the same pattern holds: real discipleship in scripture consistently moves toward the specific individual, in their actual circumstances, rather than waiting for them to first arrive at some baseline of consistency. That's the model worth carrying into how your church disciples Sometimers.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Discipling a Sometimer as an individual means the content of that discipleship should differ from person to person, shaped by who they actually are rather than a standard curriculum applied uniformly. It means asking real questions about where someone is spiritually, not assuming their attendance pattern tells you the answer. It means being willing to disciple someone primarily through a phone call, a text conversation, or an occasional in-person conversation, rather than assuming discipleship only counts if it happens inside a structured weekly program. And it means measuring progress by the person's actual growth — their honesty, their prayer life, their character — rather than by whether their attendance pattern has changed.
This also has implications for who does the discipling. A church that assumes discipleship only happens through staff-led programs will struggle to reach Sometimers at any scale, simply because staff time is finite and this group's needs are scattered across many different schedules and circumstances. The scriptural pattern above points toward something more distributed: ordinary believers, trained and trusted to notice and pursue one specific person the way the shepherd pursued one sheep, rather than discipleship being centralized entirely in a few leaders' hands. A Regular Attender with real spiritual maturity, paired intentionally with one Sometimer for ongoing, informal discipleship, can often reach that person more consistently than any program built around a room and a schedule ever could.
Carrying This Forward
This closes the Sometimers section, but the posture underneath it should carry forward into everything ahead. Every audience in this course deserves to be seen as a specific individual rather than a category — and Sometimers, precisely because their pattern is so easy to reduce to a label, need that reminder more than most. A church that disciples its Sometimers well, as individuals, in whatever circumstances they're actually in, is a church that has genuinely internalized what this whole course has been building toward from the start.
Exercise:
Pick one Sometimer and ask what they actually need spiritually right now — not what the category assumes, but what's true of them specifically.
Have one real discipleship conversation outside of a formal program — a phone call, a coffee, a text exchange with real spiritual substance.
Revisit the five scriptural examples with your leadership team and discuss which one most challenges your church's current approach to Sometimers.
Identify one Sometimer who may be spiritually mature but circumstantially constrained, and consider what it would look like to entrust them with a role that doesn't require weekly presence.
Set a measure of progress that isn't attendance. For one Sometimer you're discipling, write down what genuine growth would actually look like for them, specifically.
