What do we need to subtract in order to develop a disciple-making culture?

If we’re busy (and we are!) and disciples aren’t being made (and they often aren’t!) if we are to get to that place of “glorifying God by making disciples” we can’t just add something- there’s no room, no margin.

We need to subtract something before we add anything else.
And subtracting is hard. Far harder than adding sth.

Think of the difference between a Swiss army knife and a filleting knife. The Swiss army knife can do a lot of things, but none of them very well. The filleting knife has one simple purpose for which it is exceedingly well designed.

A church with a strong disciple-making culture looks more like the filleting knife than the Swiss army knife. Read More→

What’s the hard part of making disciples?

Another way to ask the question is, what’s the bottleneck, or the primary constraint?

What is the one thing that if we figured out how to do it our effectiveness in disciple-making would skyrocket?

Every major endeavour has a hard part, a bottleneck.

The hard part of writing a book is getting the first draft done.

In online marketing the hard part is getting someone to spend their first penny.

What about disciple-making? Read More→

What’s the difference between disciple-making and discipleship?
What’s the difference between discipleship and spiritual formation?
Etc…

This could easily devolve into a semantic argument, but let me explain where I’m coming from.

I believe the purpose of the Church is to make disciples. Individual followers of Jesus are likewise called to be and make disciples.

And, this is a key observation, there is an end point at which this has happened, i.e. a point at which a disciple has been made.

“After they had preached the gospel to that city and had made many disciples…” Acts 14.21 (NASB)

Discipleship, the way it is commonly used, carries the sense of an open-ended process. It’s used in parallel to the ideas of spiritual formation, spiritual growth, becoming mature in Christ. It’s applied to a myriad of programs and ministries that may or may not actually make disciples.

So what? Read More→