Discipleship

#BestOf2013: What If We Made Disciples and Left Church Growth to God?

/ 5 minutes of reading

We’re often told that one of the reasons so many churches remain small is lack of faith. But I wonder… could it be that the reverse is true? Might our obsession with bigger and bigger churches be rooted in a greater lack of faith?

Have we been afraid that God might not do his part (building his church) if we’d simply be faithful to do our part (making disciples)? Is it possible that the glut of church growth books, seminars and classes in the last few decades been our attempt to help God out?

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“Sit Back, Relax and Enjoy the Service” May Be Killing Your Church

/ 4 minutes of reading

“Sit back, relax and enjoy the service” may be one of the most dangerous sentences ever uttered in church.

It sits side-by-side on the bad idea shelf with “Let’s erect a building and tell people they have to come here if they want to worship Jesus.”

I expect to hear promises of great customer service in a restaurant, on an airplane or in a movie theater. But the idea that church is a place where we pay others to do ministry as we sit passively, consuming and passing judgment on the product being offered may be the greatest single reason for the anemia of the modern, western church.

The church is not a customer-service-based business. We’re a community for life-transformation. But, like the monkey stubbornly clinging to the apple on the other side of the cage, we’ll never free ourselves to be biblically active communities for life-transformation until we let go of our passive, consumer-driven mindset.

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Unhealthy Churches Should Not Act Like Healthy Churches – Until They Are

/ 7 minutes of reading

There are a lot of books and articles about how a healthy church should behave. That’s appropriate. We should always have a picture of our desired future in our hearts and minds. But what does a pastor do with an unhealthy church? I’m going to propose a radical idea that shouldn’t be considered radical at

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Pastoring Shouldn’t Be This Hard (And 4 Ways to Make It Easier)

/ 5 minutes of reading

Being a pastor is the fourth hardest job in America. That’s been the common wisdom floating around the internet for a couple years now. It may be true. But it shouldn’t be true. It certainly doesn’t need to be true. I think it’s time to stop making it true. There are two reasons people believe that statement to be

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How to Quit Using a Discipleship System and Start Making Disciples

/ 4 minutes of reading

Does your Small Church have a discipleship system in place? Most don’t. Mine doesn’t. We used to. But we quit doing it years ago. It didn’t work for us. We were using a well-known discipleship curriculum from a megachurch, that we adapted to our Small Church. We did it because everybody – and I mean everybody!

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