Go and Make Disciples!
If Jesus were planting a church in your community, how would he do it? It stands to reason that He’d repeat what he did 2,000 years ago—by investing his life into a select group of individuals and training them to reproduce. Would that be your strategy?
If you’re planting a church, it may be tempting to start by drawing a crowd of Christians through marketing and outreach efforts. However, is that the most effective way to saturate your community with the gospel and reproduce disciples of Jesus? While marketing and outreach can support your church’s disciple-making efforts, they won’t establish it. That’s your job.
Developing a disciple-making culture in your very first group will take time, and must be your main priority. If you’re a church planter, that means you’ll have to be patient in your efforts to organize public worship gatherings. Before focusing on organizing powerful worship experiences, focus on developing contagious worshippers. Equip them to hear and obey God, proclaim the gospel, and reproduce their love for Jesus in others.
If you are feeling the pressure to launch a public worship gathering to attract people to your church before establishing a disciple-making culture, remember Jesus’ example. He spent three years developing a disciple-making culture in his core group. At the end of those three years there were about 120 or so committed disciples (Acts 1:15). Then at the right time, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that core group reproduced and eventually multiplied. Are we following his lead?
The resources in this month’s newsletter will help you develop a disciple-making culture in your church or church plant core group. Don’t leave that to chance. Be intentional. Everything you do with your first group will shape the culture of the church for years to come. Go and make disciples!
-Patrick Bradley, Director of Operations
November 2024 – Content
- Disciple Making Strategy Template
- Disciple Maker’s Tool Belt
- A Disciple-Making Journey
- Free eBook: The King Jesus Revolution
Disciple Making Strategy Template
If someone were to ask you, “What’s your church’s strategy for making disciples?”, how would you respond? Can you answer that question confidently? If you don’t have clarity about it, how will anyone else? Don’t just get busy doing church things and hope disciples are produced.
Be intentional about making disciples who make disciples. With the help of our Disciple Making Strategy Template, you can begin to clarify your church’s disciple making strategy. The template will walk you through several important questions you’ll need to wrestle with as you develop a vision and plan for helping people at your church trust and follow Jesus. Don’t leave disciple making to chance. Craft a strategy so that every leader at your church can support it and execute it together.
A Disciple Maker’s Tool Belt
If you’ve ever found yourself in the middle of a home improvement project, you know how important it is to have the right tools for the job. The same is true when working to establish a disciple-making culture in your church. You always benefit from having the right tools for the job. That’s why we want to make sure you know about Movements.net. Steve Addison, author of The Rise and Fall of Movements and many books about disciple making, has developed this website to bolster every believer’s disciple-making tool belt. It’s filled with practical tips and tools to help everyday believers make disciples who make disciples.
If you’re looking for encouragement, visit the Podcast & Video Channel and hear about how God is at work all over the world multiplying disciples. If you’re looking for skills to train your disciples in, visit their Skills Training page. Be challenged and equipped to be a multiplying disciple of Jesus with the help of Movements.net.
A Disciple-Making Journey
One of the first things to focus on if you want to be an effective disciple maker is your personal walk with Jesus. Are you falling in love with God more every day? Is your love for people and your burden for the lost increasing because your heart is beating faster for the things of God? The truth of the matter is our disciple-making efforts should overflow from our rich relationship with God, others and ourselves.
As we seek to lead others closer to Jesus, we should pay close attention to the example we are setting for them. Not only will our relationship with him empower us to make disciples with pure motives; it will also provide those following us a healthy model to follow. Is your relationship with God, others, and yourself worth emulating? To remind you of how essential your spiritual and emotional health is in your disciple-making efforts, listen to this podcast: A Disciple-Making Journey with Jeff Vanderstelt and David Achata.
The King Jesus Revolution
Curt Erskine recently wrote a series of articles focused on often overlooked advice related to developing a disciple-making culture in a church. Discipleship.org has turned those articles into a free eBook, The King Jesus Revolution, to make it easier for leaders to access the information. This free resource highlights the first six ideas Curt recommends churches implement to help them champion the cause of King Jesus-style disciple making within their church.
After ten years of studying and implementing disciple making in seminary and the local church, Curt now wants to share the main lessons he’s learned through both failure and success. Download your free copy of The King Jesus Revolution and then share it with the leaders of your church to help you develop a disciple-making culture together.