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Jesus didn’t tell churches to make members
In talking with pastors, one thing I commonly hear is, “If we had more members we would be able to do more…” Because of the way we have been programmed in the past, a lot of times pastors and churches think if they are small there impact is small. This isn’t the way Jesus thought. Jesus could have called the masses, but instead he called a dozen, ordinary men, and sent them out on a mission to make disciples. Churches…
I was recently at a gathering of disciple-making leaders, and one of the leaders said this; “Many of our churches are doing addition, when we need to be thinking about multiplication when it comes to making disciples.” What he was saying is that we add people to our church, but we don’t expect them to reproduce themselves. Why? Do we communicate the expectation of reproduction to the people in our churches? For many I believe this is a foreign concept, and if we want to see healthy…
G – In 2010 LifeWay Research set out to discover what were the essentials in churches that were seeing Spiritual Transformation take place. One thing that consistently showed up was the importance of living in a healthy Christian community. Churches that are intentional about seeing people get connected to other believers (LifeWay termed this as relational Intentionality) were also seeing believers maturing and growing in their faith. A few years later, Ed…
Every day, every minute, every second, we make choices, and because we live in a time where there are so many choices, it can be hard at times to decide what’s important and how to best use our time and resources. We all face this challenge, at home, in school, at work, wherever and whoever we are. That’s why setting priorities is so important.
I want to be clear up front, I am not an expert on this topic, in fact, I am a fellow struggler just like many of you. So, the words that I’m…
What is your plan for making disciples? Do you have one?
The reason I ask is because as I lead churches through church health assessments, the one challenge that continually comes up is, “Our church does not have a clearly-defined discipleship process for moving a person from salvation to spiritual growth to significant ministry.”
Why is that important? In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus commanded the disciples to go and make disciples, and that same command applies to the…
Why Do Pastors Need To Reimagine Discipleship?
Have you ever noticed how you tend to remember things that happened twenty years ago, but you can't remember what you had for lunch last week? Well, maybe you don't have that challenge (yet), but I know there are others, besides me, if we're honest. I believe this is true for the way we view discipleship as well. For those of us who have been in the church for several decades, there is a "memory" of discipleship that we keep remembering. And not all those memories are bad, but some of them…
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