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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. …

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What is the difference between a discipleship program and an intentional disciple-making approach? An intentional disciple-making process can involve studying a book, but it’s important to know that the objective is not to study a book, it is to learn biblical principles in the study and ask the question: “Now that I know this, how should I apply this to my life?” The objective is to learn what Scripture says, and be obedient to what it teaches us about living our lives.



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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…

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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…

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