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I was raised in a home where regular, frequent attendance of church services was the norm. I was in church by the time I was just a week old, and I attended faithfully from that point forward. It was just a…

Youth live in transition between childhood and adulthood, so youth ministry always has the potential to pull them in either direction. Too often, it tugs toward childishness. We offer really sophisticated day care. We compete with entertainers. But the…

The best way to make disciples is with patience. It’s also the only way to make a community, multiply a community, and plant new communities in a healthy way. But it’s also not the American way, nor the American church…

It feels that at some point, we might have lost our way. Perhaps we became more concerned with success than fruitfulness. Jesus says we evaluate things in the Kingdom on their fruitfulness…but somewhere along the way it became about…

Boys don’t enter the world knowing how to be godly men; they have to be trained into it. Of course, the primary training role for that formation should be the boy’s father. He is to disciple his son every…

We need to remember that God is inviting people into Jesus’ story. As important as we might think we are, we only serve as the go-between. We are called/commanded to go out and live on mission. As we live…

We have a poor understanding of the local church. We operate from a poor definition of church planter. We have a poor understanding of our Commission.  We act as if Jesus has commanded us to plant churches.  We are commanded to…

Woflgang Simson considers the command to make disciples who obey all that Jesus commanded. He finds over 70 things that Jesus commanded. What if these things form the constitution of the…

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about spiritual formation and discipleship, and rightfully so. I think we can all agree there’s a discipleship deficit in evangelicalism. Perhaps the elephant in the room is that there isn’t a whole…

Jon Tyson explains how the church gets distracted from its mission of making disciples of Jesus. Instead, the culture is making disciples, and doing a much better job of it than the church. That’s a big…

We have a poor understanding of our Commission.  We act as if Jesus has commanded us to plant churches.  We are commanded to make disciples.  It is out of disciple making that churches are to be birthed.  The weight…

I have this gut-wrenching feeling that many students will move off to college with nothing learned from church except food, games and shiny events. None of these things are bad, but they aren’t the crux of what will keep…

David Platt explains how every Christian is a missionary. Christians are the people of God with the Word of God and the Spirit of God. Those are the basic ingredients for a missionary…

Alan Hirsch discusses the problems surrounding discipleship. Problems range from the fact that we fail to recognize its centrality to the mission of God to the fact that the Church in the West is not very intentional about it…

Alan Hirsch gives a few simple reasons for why discipleship is the mission of the…

This video shows what a disciple making movement looks like and how it…

Francis Chan shares a story about how he got a 2nd chance to talk to someone who God wanted him to talk to after he had already blown it once. His encouragement is to make sure that fear doesn’t…

There is no command in the Bible to go into all the world and plant churches. The Church is never told to plant churches until the end of the age or search out all people groups and plant churches…

What if church, the gathering of God’s people in a particular local, was supposed to be a temporary thing, a seasonal ecosystem that cycled through life and death, or a snapshot of ecclesiastical, historical, and geographical history. I know,…

Paul Washer explains what is wrong with the “sinners prayer.” Rather than having someone pray a prayer and then tell them they are going to heaven, he says we should tell people that the evidence of their salvation will…

Dhati Lewis explains how we desperately need to recapture the art of hospitality in order to make disciples. He describes a process of taking people into his home for discipleship. This goes beyond information transfer to achieve more of…

We started going out on the streets, praying for the sick in every place. Me and a buddy were going out on the streets all the time and seeing many healings. I’ve learned that the high point is no longer…

Looking back on my many years in youth ministry, I see that I was working so hard to win the hearts of students to the youth group. I want the youth group to be the place where they found their…

I’ve come to believe that instead of being a bunch of churches separated by music style or building, God sees one bride and one city church. In my experience, we are a divided, fighting, graceless, defensive mess. If your…

I believe one of the greatest barriers to effectively fulfilling the great commission could very well be the Church itself. As someone once said, “The quickest way to ‘church the un-churched’ may very well be to ‘un-church the Church’.”…

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will…

This is part 1 of a two-part series of video posts on Alan Hirsch’s presentation on discipleship. See part 2 here. Alan Hirsch explains how traditional evangelical thinking that we must evangelize first and then disciple second is flawed.…

Order matters. This is true for massive, complex projects like launching something into space, and it is also true for small, simple things like baking. Across the board, when you get things out of order there can be devastating…

Paul Tripp shares his thoughts about how parents can lead their children in a process of becoming mindful of God’s mission and purposes so that they can be aligned with that mission and purpose. In other words, this is…

The church, by and large, is filled with passive consumers who are unwilling to take spiritual responsibility for the lives of others. We need to be reminded that the command to “follow me as I follow Christ” is not…

Every Christian and ministry faces the slow, subtle, suffocating pressure of the ordinary. The creeping clutch of worldly concerns confronts us all. We settle into routines and ruts. Our zeal cools as we have our minds and then our…

Today’s Throwback Thursday post recalls a short video that demonstrates well the need to re-establish the making of disciples as THE mission of the church. “I don’t know any pastor who has been more personally fruitful in discipleship ministry…

God doesn’t intend for you to move past the gospel or the basics of Christianity; He intends you to build your life on the gospel and the basics of Christianity. God’s people will never be missional if all we do is sit around and inspect…

David Platt and Francis Chan have a friendly chat about the reality that disciples of Jesus make more disciples of Jesus. They also talk about the reality that many people think that they are disciples of Jesus and are…

Jesus understood the Great Commission begins with the souls of the little ones. The Great Commission is not just personal, but multi-generational. The disciples were standing in the way of parents and grandparents, and Jesus quickly put an end…

I’m very concerned with the way modern Christianity tends to think about our “devotional life.” It seems as if we’ve reduced these devotions down to five minutes of reading a Psalm and saying a quick prayer for the day,…

In honor of Throwback Thursday, I want to recall one of our earliest posts. Mike Breen puts his finger on a problem that is plaguing the so-called “missional movement.” It’s time we start being brutally honest about the missional…

The question isn’t merely about the mission; it’s about how disciple-making should be defined. Is disciple-making broad or narrow? Below are four important truths we should keep in mind as we consider biblical…

The pattern and ethos of Jesus-style discipleship revolves around the idea that it is disciples who in turn make disciples. According to the New Testament pattern, pastors, church programs, and preaching alone are not what make disciples. No, it…

We posted previously that everyone should drop what they are doing and read Rob Rienow’s book Visionary Parenting. In that post, we promised to find a review of the book. We haven’t forgotten about that promise, and we deliver…