by Bobby Harrington: Bill Hull and I have joined together to urge pastors to learn how to focus on truly making disciples.

Let me explain . . .

There is general agreement among pastors that making disciples is central to the church’s mission. It is a curious phenomenon, then, that so few pastors would say they are good at it!

A recent study of church members found that 52 percent of those who have attended church at least once in the past six months believe their church does a good job of helping members grow spiritually. The same study found that only 1 percent of pastors think they are doing a good job at helping their members grow.

That is, only 1 percent of pastors believe they’re doing well at making disciples.

What do the pastors know that church members do not? Pastors have more theological knowledge and understanding than most about Christ’s expectation for the disciple making in the church. They know their churches well and can see all the faults. They are experts on their short comings. Most clearly, they understand that distractions, conflicts, and a shortage of well-trained leaders hold their church back from what God desires for them.

Pastors understand that they are to be disciple-making leaders who create a multiplying disciple making movement, beginning with the church they serve. But, unfortunately, if you asked most pastors to raise their hand if they were sure about how to go about it, very few would raise their hand high.

Bill wrote the seminal book on this topic, The Disciple-Making Pastor, over thirty years ago to address this problem. That is why, having sold 150,000 copies, this book is still in print today! In fact, it has never been more needed than right now.

With over forty years of experience, writing more than twenty-five books, and training thousands of pastors to make disciples who actually make disciples, Bill is one of the leading experts on what it takes to be a disciple-making pastor in the world today.

Continue Reading . . .

Join Bill Hull and his special guests—Bobby Harrington, Dave Clayton, David Young, Michelle Eagle, and Ben Sobels (all proven disciple makers)—for this online seminar, “The Disciple Making Pastor.”

This seminar will lead you through an engaging process that will clarify the role of a disciple-making pastor, what disciple-making pastors really believe, the challenges they must be prepared to face today, and the critical practices of disciple-making pastors whom God uses to create disciple-making movements.

Click Here – To Learn More

As a preview, here is what to expect in the five sessions:

Session 1. Why are Disciple Making Pastors Needed?

Pastors are to raise up everyday disciples who become disciple makers who reach the nations (Eph. 4:11-13; Matt. 28:18-20; 2 Tim. 2:2). But if Pastors are unclear on why they are to be leaders of disciple making communities, then confusion will be in control of the church’s activity. The Why is theological in that the gospel we believe will determine the disciples we make.

If for example our gospel is primarily about how the Christian feels, how fulfilled they are, and how the church meets their needs, there is very little chance that a consumer gospel can make any useful disciple.

The wrong kind of gospel just makes matters worse. We create disciples that are of no use to Christ and his mission. This session’s special focus is the nature of the gospel, a gospel that includes discipleship as a natural part of what it means to be saved.

The secondary issues is what is called the “high cost” of non-discipleship. Pastors have wasted much time attempting to talk congregants into upping their spiritual game. At the same time, we have taught them a non-discipleship gospel that has convinced them that discipleship itself is optional. This must be turned around, disciple making pastors are the key.

Session 2. What are Disciple Making Pastors Up against?

Opposition from the outside world against a pastor’s disciple making efforts is fierce and constant. Pastors are up against rigid religious traditions, misconceptions about discipleship, a culture that craves to be entertained, an anti-training bias in the church, a demand for immediate results, superficial knee-jerk decision making, a constant re-interpretation of things, not to mention the full frontal attacks of the spiritual forces of darkness.

All these outside influences work against a pastor. But it’s the struggles inside a pastor that ultimately determine their disciple-making destiny. Being a disciple-making pastor requires a satisfied soul. A satisfied soul empowers a pastor to be patient enough, tough enough, and committed to Jesus and His message and methods long enough for a movement of multiplication to take hold. There is a pathway through this jungle without signage, so a guide is needed

Writer Linda Stone aptly labeled our age one of “continuous partial attention.” That is, you are multitasking your way through the day, continuously devoting only partial attention to each act or person you encounter. It is the malady of modernity. We have gone from the Iron Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to the Age of Interruption. The anxiety associated with this addiction to superficiality is a serious threat to the making of disciples.

Cal Newport in his 2016 best seller, Deep Work, says it is rare, it is meaningful, and it is valuable. “’Deep Work’ is defined as Professional activities performed in a state of distraction free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate.” Most knowledge workers…have lost their ability to perform deep work. Dallas Willard called pastors and teachers to the nations. From a biblical world-view, spiritual knowledge is the most important kind, and pastors are custodians of that knowledge. The Apostle Paul described Christian leaders as “servants of Christ who have been put in charge of explaining God’s mysteries” (Col. 1:26-27) Since distraction is a major threat to this mission, what can be done?

Session 3. What are the Goals of a Disciple-Making Pastor?

It is alarming how many church leaders, board members, and staff teams are unclear on what a disciple of Jesus actually is. They don’t have a definition of a disciple on the tip of their tongues. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for Christian leaders to gather to define a disciple and for the conversation to go on for hours!

Even more unfortunate is that these discussions often end in either a heated argument or a frustrated stalemate. What is clear is that many church leaders aren’t clear on the goal of disciple making – a Christ-like disciple.

You can’t make Christ-like disciples if you don’t know what a Christ-like disciple is. If there is one person in the church who should be equipped with a clear, biblical, and viral definition of a disciple, it’s the pastor.

Many churches have a definition of a disciple that is true – but not useful. For example, “a disciple is a follower of Jesus.” Or, “A disciple is someone learning to live and love like Jesus.” Or,” A disciple is a person on mission with Jesus.”

All of these are true, but not useful! They suffer from ambiguity; ambiguity protects us from accountability. You not only can’t measure a disciple with these definitions, you don’t have enough specificity to make a disciple, forget replication of more disciples. The goal of a disciple-making pastor is about the creation of and replication of a certain kind of person who will change their world, a Christ like disciple.

“We now have sunk to such a depth that the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent persons.” George Orwell

Session 4. What is the DNA of a Disciple Making Pastor?

Some discussion has already taken place with respect to a Disciple-Making Pastor having a satisfied soul; being the kind of emotionally stable person needed to lead a disciple making movement.

Bill likes to offer definitions of what he refers to as “the DNA” of a Disciple-Making Pastor. There are at least eight characteristics of this DNA. For example, Bill says that a Disciple-Making Pastor must be convinced that all that are called to salvation are called to discipleship – no exceptions, no excuses.

The characteristics Bill will define – this disciple making DNA – must be consistently cultivated in a pastor’s life, not only for their own spiritual health but also for the fullness of life experienced by those they disciple. After defining the eight characteristics of disciple making DNA, Bill discusses with his guests how to best cultivate them not only in our own lives but also in the lives of those we disciple.

Session 5. What is the Strategy of the Disciple Making Pastor?

If you don’t have a plan, you don’t intend to do it! A pastor’s calendar is filled with many “good” things – preparing sermons, visiting the sick, maintaining and repairing buildings, conducting memorial services, coordinating volunteers, leading staff, etc. One thing that rarely makes it onto a pastor’s calendar is discipleship. They don’t have time for it.

A huge part of the problem is the established church – what it rewards, what it ignores, and what it punishes. But the church needs pastors to make disciples, develop disciple making leaders, and create a comprehensive discipleship strategy for the church. These things take time – a lot of time. If the pastor is not spending time doing these things, you can be sure no one else is.

In this session the panel will discuss practical ways pastors can manage their time, navigate the church’s expectations, and also what pastors need to spend time doing as it relates to creating a disciple making movement among their congregations.

Pastors should be making disciples but they’re not.

The Disciple Making-Pastor Seminar …

Most don’t know how. Many pastors have never grasped why.

For Jesus, making disciples was his passion; it was also his plan for rescuing people and restoring his creation.

Just recently, Bill joined with a group of church leaders to create a fresh and contemporary recording of the disciple making pastor.

If you are a pastor or you care about how pastors can follow Jesus and make disciples, please join us for the Disciple-Making Pastor Seminar.

For King Jesus,

Bobby Harrington, Point Leader, Discipleship.org

Join us at our National Disciple Making Forum!

November 7th- 8th in Nashville, TN

Sign up Today!

New Blogs

““Can I Pray For You?”—Alex Absalom’s Breakthrough Disciple-Making Learning”

by Alex Absalom

READ THE BLOG

“5 Principles of Discipleship from Colossians 1:28-29”

by Downline Ministries

READ THE BLOG

“Family Discipleship Activity: Intentional Faith”

by D6 Family

READ THE BLOG

New Podcast Episodes

LISTEN NOW

S6 Episode 28: The Driver Is the Intentional Leader: Take the Baton and Pass It Forward

S6 Episode 27: The Micro Group Vehicle (3s & 4s): Creating the Hothouse Effect

S6 Episode 26: The Micro Group Vehicle (3s & 4s): Relational Ingredients for Authentic Discipleship

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Source: What Makes You a Disciple Making Pastor?

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If we’re going to see revival in twenty-first century churches across America, it’s not going to happen without a discipleship revolution. This revolution needs to happen everywhere—in Baptist churches in Missouri, in Anglican churches in Arizona, in Pentecostal churches in Pennsylvania, in non-denominational churches in California, and beyond. It will never happen, however, unless and until the church returns to preaching the gospel Jesus preached.

Unlike the various false gospels we listed above, the gospel that Jesus preached didn’t separate conversion from discipleship. For Jesus, discipleship wasn’t an optional “add-on.” His gospel didn’t just call people to pray a little prayer for their sins to be forgiven so they’d get to heaven when they died. When you read the four Gospels in the New Testament, do you ever see Jesus call people to respond to his gospel like this? No, Jesus’ gospel called people to follow him no matter the cost and without conditions or excuses—to the end. Jesus never taught that you could be a Christian and not be his disciple.

Our First Assumption

by Discipleship.org: As we state early in The Discipleship Gospel, we write with two underlying assumptions, which we want to make clear. The first is that you cannot make Christlike disciples from a non-discipleship gospel. We can capture the primary call of Jesus’ gospel in two words: “Follow me.” Following Jesus involves much more than just praying a one-time prayer for the forgiveness of your sins. It also means that the longer we think people can be Christians without being disciples (that they can believe in Jesus without following him), the more we’ll see our best disciple-making efforts fail (no matter how sincere we might be or how much money we might spend).

This is an excerpt from The Discipleship Gospel by Bill Hull and Ben Sobels. Download a free primer for this book here or get your copy of the whole book here.

Your church can hire a discipleship pastor, buy the best discipleship curriculum, invite the most dynamic discipleship speakers to your church, and encourage the whole congregation to start making disciples—and it might work for a while. But if you continue preaching a non-discipleship gospel, the early blaze of glory that started with your discipleship efforts will soon burn out. We know this because we’ve lived it.

The church where I (Ben) have been the senior pastor for the past seven years (Cypress Community Church in Salinas, California) is also my first experience as a senior pastor. When I arrived, I knew we needed to start making disciples, but I had very little idea of how to make that happen despite having a Master’s of Theology degree and ten years of ministry experience. So I prayed, read books, and talked with other pastors. I found that I wasn’t alone in being a pastor who didn’t know how to create a disciple-making movement at my church. I should have waited longer. I didn’t. Instead, I went ahead and rolled out a new discipleship initiative for our congregation like I was rolling out a red carpet.

The discipleship initiative at Cypress began with a short six-week, high-energy sermon series on discipleship. It culminated with a discipleship weekend led by a national discipleship expert who came to the church and taught a discipleship seminar on Friday and Saturday with a sermon on Sunday. Our “hired gun” did an excellent job. It was awesome! I was so excited and so were a lot of people in the church.

Our church staff signed up almost one hundred people into discipleship groups. We bought them all the best discipleship curriculum money could buy, gave them a page of detailed instructions on what to do, and set them loose on an incredible disciple-making adventure. Overnight, our church went from zero discipleship groups to more than thirty. It was great!

Within a year, three groups were left. That wasn’t great. I was disappointed and disillusioned.

In hindsight, I realized that I expected the right discipleship tools to do the trick. But there was a fatal flaw with my amazing, well-funded discipleship initiative: I hadn’t started with the gospel. Because I hadn’t begun with a close examination of the gospel I was preaching, we were trying to make Christlike disciples while I was still preaching a non-discipleship gospel.

For the second assumption, read Chapter 2 in The Discipleship Gospel.

This was taken from The Discipleship Gospel by Bill Hull and Ben Sobels of The Bonhoeffer Project. Used by permission of HIM Publications.

The post A Discipleship Revolution appeared first on Discipleship.org.

Source: A Discipleship Revolution

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by Bill Hull and Bobby Harrington: Over the years of doing and leading ministry in the local church, we both agree that the church’s most difficult problem is not growth or the revolving door as some might say. But rather, the church’s deepest challenge lies in convincing its citizens that who they are and what they do outside of church services is the real work of God. Some have called it “being in the world,” or “being on mission.”

We think there is wide agreement among church leaders that getting people to do what they should out there is more difficult than getting them to gather in here. For that reason, far too many leaders and churches have dropped the expectation that the common Christian will actually reap any kind of harvest in their normal lives. After all, such an amorphous ideal is impossible to control, difficult to count and may not make the church bigger or more prominent.

The title of this eBook sets up a competition of sorts between evangelism and discipleship. Indeed, some people think about the two as competitors or at odds with each other. But is it possible that discipleship and evangelism are not in competition? Could it be that they are like brothers from the same father? They keep turning up at each other’s parties and special events. People speak of them in the same sentences and name academic courses after them. They’re often at the crux of a question during a panel discussion or study: “What is the relationship of evangelism to discipleship?” Or the more provocative inquiry, “What comes first, evangelism or discipleship—can you have one without the other?”

They might seem in conflict with each other because they share a certain likeness. Maybe we feel the need to focus on, or emphasize, one over the other.

Yet, clearly when you have only one and not both, things do not go well. Evangelism without discipleship tends to be short-lived, focused on packaging, presenting, counting and impressing. Conversion becomes the finish line; all is well, and any further duties are optional.

I (Bobby) grew up as a non-Christian, and I still have lots of non-believing friends. One of my biggest regrets is Gayle, one of our best friends. My wife and I led her to Christ. She seemed so excited and on fire at first. But then it was like she had enough; it required too much of her. And honestly, we could have done better in what we taught her back then. It was as if Gayle made a deal with God; her eternal insurance was purchased. Despite our efforts, she never really got that conversion was about trusting and following Jesus for life. I’m sure you’ve had a Gayle in your own life.

On the flip side, discipleship without evangelism creates the very unhealthy condition of sterility in followers of Christ. Christians who do not evangelize are not fulfilled in their lives, and they take on a certain intramural pettiness. When people are educated beyond their level of obedience, they become religious schizophrenics, experts on what they are not experiencing.

Both discipleship and evangelism are needed. Could it be that evangelism is the front end of discipleship, and maturing those who believe is the back end? When one or the other is lacking, Christians and their churches suffer. More importantly, what Jesus told us to do suffers.

Words matter. So before we go any further, we should define what we mean by evangelism and discipleship.

Evangelism

To some degree, evangelism and discipleship are invented words, coined to describe important functions. Evangelism is rooted in the Greek word euaggelion, meaning good news. Historically, “to evangelize,” meant to announce the Good News. Now, we use evangelism as a catchall term for the entire field of study, research and the process of spreading the gospel.

We can’t hope to thoroughly explore the present state of evangelism in this eBook, but we can identify three observations that may be helpful in describing evangelism in the Western Hemisphere.

Universally, evangelical Christians agree that evangelism must be done. And while most of us would never admit it, there is also near universal agreement that you can be a good Christian and not evangelize. We say this with confidence. Consider the recent statistic that less than a quarter of church-going Protestants engage in telling others about Christ in a way that helps the person listening make an informed decision.2

We have no real consistent expectation that the common believer will reproduce him or herself and teach others in direct response to Christ’s command to make disciples. We need to ask the church’s teachers and members, “What is your reason for not obeying our Lord’s commission to make disciples?”

Over the last 50 years, various kinds of aggressive evangelism have not yielded the hoped-for crop of new believers who could have penetrated all domains of society—the domains meant to transform the culture. This has nothing to do with how many have decided to follow Jesus, but rather how many have been taught that they are expected to penetrate their sphere of influence. Evangelicals have been successful in other areas—crusades, public forums, television and new media. These efforts, while an adrenaline rush for Christians, have not touched the national character, especially in the church. The church has lost ground, increasingly living on the margins. And the general public thinks of evangelism as simply bothering people. The good news is that the church is desperate to find a better way, which could be that reaching people is more private than public, and is personal and rooted in relationships. It could be that the solution is hand to hand, person by person, found in the common ordinary situations of life.

This comes from the free eBook Evangelism or Discipleship, which you can download here.

Discipleship

Like evangelism, the word “discipleship” is not in the Bible.3 By adding “ship” to it, discipleship literally means “the state of learning” or “following a teacher.” Some people like to refer to it as apprenticeship, which we think is a good description.4 At its roots, Christian discipleship means to follow and learn from Jesus. In Matt. 28:18-20, disciple making is described as a “core mandate” (which we take as a synonym for discipleship).

“Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age’” (NIV).

We suggest a definition for discipleship (and disciple making) based on Matt. 28:18-20 and Jesus’ example: “Discipleship as trusting God’s presence as we intentionally enter into the lives of others to guide them to trust and follow Jesus and obey all his teachings.”5

Unfortunately, the church has reduced discipleship to a program rather than a life of following Christ and learning from Him, as He modeled for His disciples. That programmatic approach has created a negative perception of discipleship in many who have “tried” some curriculum or program that didn’t help them. But as an introductory matter, we offer some observations about the state of discipleship.

Discipleship as a movement needs to fully emerge from its own self-constructed ghetto. Measuring spiritual maturity by cognitive achievement or Bible knowledge rather than fruitfulness created the ghetto. For those serious and intentional about their faith, the ghetto became a safe haven. Discipleship is often head-centered, focusing on Bible education. The common person who isn’t committed to in-depth Bible study tends to shy away from it.

The discipleship movement is often in crisis due to the disconnection between discipleship and reproduction. A movement based on the idea that it will reproduce and doesn’t will languish. The “teaching them to obey everything Christ commanded” part of the Great Commission didn’t create reproduction because it fell into the same dark hole of low expectations—the same expectations that often sink evangelism. Instead, we need to figure out how to cast vision for high expectations of multiplication

Next to reproduction, the most difficult part of discipleship is life-on-life accountability, which is absolutely necessary and very prone to abuse. We tend to be either too controlling or too slack, as though follow-through doesn’t matter. People need encouragement, support and often a firm hand to help them keep their commitments to God. Legalism and control don’t work, but as leaders we do need to find ways to counteract a strong strain of libertarianism in the church when it comes to personal accountability. This is ground zero—where the battle is often fought.

The commission to make disciples is at the very heart of where evangelism and discipleship meet. Jesus issued the Great Commission to give His followers both a reason (to save the world) and a plan (to find and make more disciples).

Our Perspective:

Evangelism and discipleship are not two things; they are one. Jesus has commanded us to “make disciples.” Two subordinate phrases describe how we accomplish the Great Commission.6 The first part of making disciples is the process of a person “coming to trust in and follow Jesus.” The Bible sees that process being confirmed in baptism. The second part of making disciples is “teaching people to obey all that Jesus commanded.” We commonly think of this second part as discipleship, a lifelong journey of learning from Jesus how to live one’s life as though Jesus were living it.

Jesus’ Matthew 28 commandment included the expectation of reproduction, that new disciples would become well-taught disciples who would in turn embrace the mission and make other new disciples. Anything less is to sabotage the master plan. Evangelism is simply a form of pre-conversion discipleship. The two—evangelism and discipleship—are the front and back of the same coin, if you will. When we engage in this disciple-making process, Jesus tells us that He will be present with us—to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20).

The Question:

Thirty years after graduation from seminary, I (Bill) was asked to address the faculty and student body at my alma mater. I began with a question, “After thirty years of ministry, I still wonder why the church insists on trying to reach the world without making disciples?”

That question strikes at the heart of this discipleship-evangelism matter. The church continues to struggle with a disconnected mission. Disciples have a mission, and the mission is to reach people. Evangelism necessitates disciples who have matured to the point of reproduction. Discipleship includes evangelism, and evangelism is a part of discipleship.

Written by Bill Hull and Bobby Harrington

NOTES:

Frank Laubach, Man of Prayer (Syracuse, N.Y.: Laubach Literacy International, 1990), page 154.
https://lifewayresearch.com/2012/08/13/churchgoers-believe-in-sharing-faith-most-never-do/. This research is the most positive among most of what is available.
We are on a little stronger ground with discipleship because both “disciple” and “making disciples” are in the Bible.
Gordon Smith of Regent College in Vancouver, Canada, promotes an understanding along these lines in his book, Beginning Well: Christian Conversion & Authentic Transformation (InterVarsity: Downer’s Grove, Ill., 2001). See also, Robert Stein, “Baptism and Becoming a Christian in the New Testament,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, Spring, 1998, pp 6-17.
Bill Hull uses a different, but related definition: “Discipleship occurs when someone answers the call to learn from Jesus how to live his or her life as though Jesus were living it.” For the sake of collaboration, he has agreed to this definition in this work and in the ministry of discipleship.org. As a co-writer with Bill, Bobby cannot emphasize enough the value found in Bill Hull’s extensive work on these matters. Please go to BillHull.com to see more information.
The participles in vv. 19–20 are subordinate to the command “make disciples” and explain how disciples are made: by “baptizing” them and “teaching” them obedience to all of Jesus’ commandments. The first of these involves the initiation into discipleship, and the second focuses on the lifelong task of sanctification or obedience. See Craig Bloomberg, Matthew: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), 431.

Bill Hull is a Co-Founder of The Bonhoeffer Project. Bill’s passion is to help the Church return to its disciple making roots. He considers himself a discipleship evangelist. This God-given desire has manifested itself in 20 years of pastoring and the authorship of many books. Two of his more important books Jesus Christ Disciple Maker and The Disciple Making Pastor have both celebrated 20 years in print. Add a third in the popular trilogy—The Disciple Making Church—and you have a new paradigm for disciple making.

Bobby Harrington is the Executive Director of Discipleship.org, a national platform, conference, and ministry that advocates for Jesus’ style of disciple making. He is the founding and lead pastor of Harpeth Christian Church (by the Harpeth River, just outside of Nashville, TN). He has a Doctor of Ministry degree in consulting and has spent years as a coach to church planters and senior pastors. He is the author of several books on discipleship, including DiscipleShift (with Jim Putman and Robert Coleman) and The Disciple Maker’s Handbook (with Josh Patrick).

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Source: Evangelism and Discipleship: Can They Effectively Work Together?

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by Bill Hull: We should notice that Jesus calls different disciples to different roles, and during his life on earth, disciples followed him in different ways. In the come and see period of his first four months of ministry, Jesus collected more followers that the twelve who became closest to him. Many joined Jesus for a time, even though they may not have been personally invited. Other disciples were marginal or secret, like Nicodemus who came to Jesus under the cover of night and Joseph of Arimathea who was a secret disciple. But they were still considered disciples. Thousands of curious people gathered to hear Jesus teach and pretended to be disciples, but left when the teaching or situation became difficult.[1] True disciples are those who continue into the Come and Follow Me period.

After the Come and See period is the Come and Follow Me period, but this following has different forms for different disciples. While Jesus was on earth, many disciples left their jobs and homes and physically followed him around the countryside. But Jesus would sometimes tell followers to leave him or return home rather than join his band of disciples. For instance after the woman anointed his feet with perfume, he told her, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Luke 7:50 NLT). He instructed a healed leper, “Stand up and go. Your faith has healed you” (Luke 17:19 NLT). When the delivered demonic begged to go with him, Jesus said, “No, go home to your family, and tell them everything the Lord has done for you and how merciful he has been” (Mark 5:19 NLT).

Jesus left scores of people in small towns and villages behind him and did not invite them to physically follow him. However, they also became his disciples because they believed in him and followed his teachings in the ordinary terrain of life. These differences are helpful for us to remember, because the vast majority of those following Jesus—throughout history and today—are called to work ordinary jobs, raise families, and be lights in their communities rather than being called to leave home to become missionaries, pastors, or international aid workers.

NOTES:

[1] For example, Jesus fed 5,000 followers in John 6:1–15, but many disciples left him after hearing his hard teaching in John 6:60–70.

This excerpt has been adapted from Conversion and Discipleship.

Source: Disciples Come in All Shapes and Sizes

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by Bill Hull: What was Jesus asking from his followers? When he said, “Follow me,” what did he expect them to do? Once again, the answer is more straightforward than we might imagine. He asked them to leave their tax booth, drop their nets, and leave their home behind, and he implied that he would handle the rest. Jesus didn’t ask for a creedal recital or a formal confession. He asked for a demonstration of just enough faith to begin walking with him.[1] The story of Peter and Andrew provides an illustration. “One day as Jesus was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers—Simon, also called Peter, and Andrew—throwing a net into the water, for they fished for a living. Jesus called out to them, ‘Come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people!’ And they left their nets at once and followed him” (Matt. 4:18–20 NLT).

Bill Hull is one of the speakers at this year’s National Disciple Making Forum. Learn more and register here.

Mark’s account fills in the rest of the story. “A little farther up the shore Jesus saw Zebedee’s sons, James and John, in a boat repairing their nets. He called them at once, and they followed him, leaving their father, Zebedee, in the boat with the hired men” (Mark 1:19–20 NLT). James and John may have already warned their father that this might happen, since they had probably already met Jesus. So Zebedee was left holding the nets, but he probably wasn’t surprised. He knew the affect Jesus had on his sons. Yet regardless of what he thought, they left to follow Jesus.

Did leaving behind profession and family qualify as “saving faith?” The truth is that we don’t have a nice, neat compartment into which we can place these men. We can’t say they were Christians because no church or organization existed at this point. All we can say for sure is that they were followers of Jesus and had much to learn from him at this point.

NOTES:

[1] The Come and See period was about four months and is recorded in John 1:35–4:46. While this episode with Levi is recorded early in Matthew, it is placed after the Come and See period when calendared out in a Harmony of the Gospels, and begins the Come and Follow Me period as recorded in Matthew, which is about ten months long. For further explanation, see Bill Hull, Jesus Christ, Disciplemaker (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004). Robert Thomas and Stanley Gundry, The NIV Harmony of the Gospels (New York: HarperCollins, 1988) is a good resource for seeing the stages of Jesus’ four calls to his followers: Come and See, Come and Follow Me, Come Be with Me, and Remain in Me. This four-fold call is derived not only from Scripture but was also noted by A.B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1988), 11.

Follow Bill Hull on Twitter here and Facebook here.

This excerpt has been adapted from Conversion and Discipleship and originally posted on The Bonhoeffer Project blog.

Image credit: Shutterstock.

Source: Jesus Asks for More

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by Bill Hull: When we start to train our mind to look at life differently, a great struggle will ensue. And if this training is not in the context of supportive relationships, we will probably fail. Lack of relational support is also why so many people gain weight back after significant weight loss. If they think it is a terrible loss to not eat chips, cookies, pasta, and ice cream, they look on these unhealthy foods with longing and miss eating them. Eventually, they go back to their old habits because they want to go back and think they need to.

So like the goals in weight loss and healthy eating, the goal for spiritual growth is to form the will through the process of transforming desires and then through obedience to exercise good desires until they establish good habits and godly character. As Willard says: “We want to have a will that is fully functional, not at war with itself and capable of directing all of the parts of the self in harmony with one another under the direction of God” (Willard, Renovation, 156).

Confusing Disciplines with Spirituality

As helpful as spiritual disciplines are, they must not be confused with spirituality itself. They are not the basis for our relationship with God but simply practices that provide a context for him to work to transform us. I find it most helpful to think of spiritual disciplines as like the exercises we do to improve our physical well-being. Some disciplines will work indirectly like running, which changes the physiology of the body. The muscles burn energy, the lungs expand to take in increased oxygen, and the heart pumps harder. Over time (several weeks), the muscles grow stronger, the lungs have more capacity, and the heart’s ability to pump blood increases. The runner did not directly will the muscles, heart, and lungs to become better; this happened indirectly. The runner willed to run to attain the desired result but also gained greater general health.

The spiritual disciplines work in a similar way. Let’s say that you desire to become a more loving person. You can’t command your feelings to suddenly change. But you can choose to take the actions that will lead to the desired result. You ask God to change your motives. Then like a runner, you begin a program of regularly praying, taking in God’s word, and worship him in a variety of ways. Over time, your heart begins to enjoy pleasing him, like many runners begin to enjoy running. You may choose to fast, transferring the physical desire for food to spiritual longing for a deeper experience of God and the nourishment he provides. Then you may choose to serve others by doing loving things for them. Suddenly one day you realize that you enjoy serving others and that loving others has become natural for you. Like running changes the body, your spiritual discipline exercises, developed into habits, change your character, which is revealed by how you act. You chose to keep at these exercises because God put the desire for change in your heart.

Let me give you another practical, concrete example from real life. One fruit of the Spirit is self-control, the ability to do what we intend to do and not do what we don’t intend to do. Many people lack this ability. They cannot pass a pastry tray without having a taste, or pass by an attractive person without flirting. Often the desire for that food or person remains in their heart and mind.

Jesus on Transformation

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks of the process of spiritual transformation. The religious leaders, scribes, and Pharisees were focused on external behavior, ignoring the heart. But Jesus looks at the source of behavior, not just the outward appearance. He teaches that true godliness is driven from the mind, will, and spirit. For example, Jesus teaches that murder is the result of anger. If people are not first angry with others, they are not likely to murder them. So rather than avoiding the act of murder, we should focus on thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. Jesus tells us to deal with our anger, cultivate peace and love in our relationships, and forgive others who wrong us.

Here is an analogy. If you are flying to Houston from Los Angeles, you don’t have to fly to Seattle. Flying to Seattle is not something you need to worry about. In the same way, if you learn to forgive others and deal with the root of your anger, you won’t need to worry that you will kill them.

Lust provides another concrete example and connects to our earlier discussion about self-control. Suppose you are a man who meets an attractive woman, and you allow the image of her to take up residence in your mind. You can’t go through a day without thinking about her, having fantasies about her, and creating an alternative universe where you are together. You realize that something must be done to stop these desires. Our first impulse, trying harder to exert our will power, won’t work. You can’t command yourself, “DON’T LUST. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT HER!” Neither will attempting to obey commands and keep promises. No, the problem is too deep for these solutions. You need to address the source of your thoughts and the reasons behind your desire. The goal is to get to state were not thinking about the woman does not seem like a loss. You need to examine your longing and why you feel deprived when you don’t have what you desire. You need to bring the provision of God into that place of longing.

The Remedy

These situations are where the spiritual exercises and disciplines are helpful. The good news is that we have remedies to cure wrong desires! Whether our longing is for a person, food, a house, a job, or some other thing, the remedy is the same. Consider some basic things:

Begin by asking God, “Why am I longing for this person, thing, or situation?” Pray for help in discerning the source. Find another person you trust to talk with about it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer often spoke about how sin wants nothing more than to be alone with you. Sin is empowered when we shut others out.
Take a close look at your expectations and think about the consequences of satisfying your sinful desire. Often, we fail to think through to the end. So we need to ask what would it be like, honestly, to get what we want? Our dreams are filled with assumptions about the world that are not aligned with reality. Graciously, God will show us the fallacy of our dreams, which may have been fed by the values and idols of the culture in which we live. Also, you may have triggers in your life, unconscious ways of responding in which you’ve been trained to be dissatisfied with what you are or have. Remember that the enemy’s goal is to make us dissatisfied with what God has given us and to doubt that he loves us. The enemy wants us to think that God is withholding good things from us.
Be patient. Change takes time. You may ask why and then have to wait in trust for God to reveal the answer. In the meantime, practice what he tells you. Avoid the triggers and practice the antidote: remember that everything you have is a gift from God and learn to be thankful for what you do have. Focus on the good news of what Jesus has done for you in the cross and resurrection. Your mind will eventually change and inform your will. Over time, you will begin to want what God has convinced you is good. One day it will dawn on you that you no longer miss thinking about that person, food, house, job, or whatever. Its power is gone, and that is just fine with you.
Keep exercising the spiritual disciplines such as worship, service, Scripture reading and memorization, prayer, fasting, confession, submission, silence, and solitude. These disciplines expose our motives and bring the flaws in our character to the surface. Negative thoughts that have been buried for a long time and create destructive emotions will be exposed. The disciplines will provide the structure and context that you need for long-term growth and maturity.

Written by Bill Hull

This excerpt has been adapted from Conversion and Discipleship.

Image credit: Unsplash.

This was originally posted by Bill Hull on The Bonhoeffer Project blog here.

Source: How Spiritual Disciplines Form Habits

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by Bill Hull and Brandon Cook: 

The first, and perhaps the most obvious, problem with The Human Paradigm is that we never arrive! Have you noticed that X is ever-elusive? The closer you get to it, the farther away you realize it is! This plays out in life all the time, when say, we get the job we wanted and find that somehow it doesn’t satisfy us. Have you ever noticed that getting what you thought you wanted can actually be a miserable experience?

And in spiritual terms, we all know that for all the growth and progress we make, there’s always more to go. We’re never where we could or “should” be. The more mature you get, the more you realize that attaining some sort of spiritual standing on your own merits is not going to happen. We’re always discovering just how far we are from the person we want to be. And yet, many—if not most—of us believe that we have to earn God’s love or grace, and then resent that, and resent that we aren’t able to do it.

So that’s a real problem: As much as we grow, we never arrive and, in fact, we can feel like we’re traveling in a circle, not a straight line. For this reason, many Christians get burned out on following Jesus. It’s just exhausting, if you’re approaching it through The Human Paradigm.

Bill Hull and Brandon Cook, authors of this blog and eBook, will be teaching at this year’s Forum. Meet them and get more content like this in person at the 2017 National Disciple Making Forum.

This is one of the largest gatherings of disciple makers in North America with 65+ workshops, 15+ speakers, and 10+ tracks. Join us to learn practical ways to make disciples of Jesus this November 9-10 (Thursday-Friday). Register for the 2017 National Disciple Making Forum here.

Growing up, I (Brandon) was constantly told to have a quiet time for prayer and reading Scripture. I thought that was the only way I would get close to God, and I did sense the value in times of quiet for my soul. To this day, I believe that silence makes way for an encounter with God, and that without silence there is no space for spiritual transformation. Yet I struggled—as did most everyone else I knew—with having quiet times. It’s just hard and somehow unnatural to approach with any eagerness a God who you believe, at root, is trying to fix you or trying to get you to climb a ladder toward Him.

Many people, in fact, leave the church entirely after discovering that “doing the dance” doesn’t deliver all they thought it would. People leave the church because they discover the gospel they have believed—that life will basically work out if you do this dance—proves to be insufficient. Tragedy occurs. Life twists and turns, sometimes painfully, and if you believe that it’s because you didn’t do the dance well enough, you’ll either conclude that God is capricious or that all this Jesus stuff is just hooey. This just can’t be who God is, and if it is, then I want no part of Him. Who could blame them? We’ve taught people, in essence, “do these things, and everything will be okay” instead of “everything will not always be okay, but God is with you and that’s enough!” Our gospel, under the influence of The Human Paradigm, is often way off. Rather than teaching people the gospel of God with us, we’ve taught them the gospel of “do it right to get close to Jesus.”

The second problem—and this is a critical one—centers on focus. Where is the focus in this paradigm? On self! How am I doing? Am I having enough faith? Am I readingmy Bible enough? I, I, I! In fact, as we said earlier, the defining question in The Human Paradigm is “How am I doing?”

Now, this is not a bad question per se. In fact, it’s a great discipleship question that Jesus often engages people in. But if it’s your only, or even primary, discipleship question, you’re in big trouble. Any spirituality exclusively, or even just primarily, focused on this question is cut off from real life and vitality. It’s trapped, imprisoned; it leads to highly educated people who have no real outlet for their knowledge and desire. They often grow tired and give up, and the desire for more dissipates into the tissue of ordinary life.

The problem is, while the question, “How am I doing?” is really satisfying to the ego, the concerns of our spirit are wholly different. We were designed to be most satisfied when we’re forgetting ourselves, not focusing on us. Heaven is self- forgetfulness. Jesus described our way of being as “like little children.” Think of the freedom of a two-year-old who has not yet developed his fear of “what people might think about me.”

Come over to my (Brandon’s) house most nights and you’ll find our daughter dancing in circles, the definition of “throw your hands in the air like you just don’t care.” When we give, we become self-forgetful, which is not far from an experience of heaven. When we focus on others instead of our own immediate needs, when we do something beautiful for another, we discover that truly “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” And the opposite holds true: The heart of hell is a soul focused only on itself and its own needs at the expense of others. So it’s very unlikely we will experience much joy or abundance if we’re constantly monitoring, evaluating, and bemoaning on the one hand—or pridefully exulting, on the other— how poorly or how well we’re doing.

Jesus is constantly trying to get our focus off of ourselves and onto loving God and loving others. He said that such a devoted life sums up the entirety of His work in human hearts (Mark 10:45). But oftentimes, we are so caught in a paradigm that has trained us to constantly check in on how well we’re doing at being “good Christians” that we never become good Christians.

*Stay tuned by coming back to our blog for the next blog in this series, which will be coming soon!

This is an excerpt from the free eBook written Bill Hull and Brandon Cook of The Bonhoeffer Project. You can download the full eBook on their homepage here.

Bill Hull is a Co-Founder of The Bonhoeffer Project. Bill’s passion is to help the church return to its disciple making roots and he considers himself a discipleship evangelist. This God-given desire has manifested itself in 20 of pastoring and the authorship of many books. Two of his more important books, Jesus Christ Disciple Maker, and The Disciple Making Pastor, have both celebrated 20 years in print. Add his third in the popular trilogy, The Disciple Making Church, and you have a new paradigm for disciple making.

Brandon Cook is the lead pastor at Long Beach Christian Fellowship and a co-founder of The Bonhoeffer Project. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, he studied at Wheaton College (IL), Jerusalem University College, Brandeis University, and The Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He worked as a professional storyteller before joining a transformational training organization and moving to SoCal in 2006, becoming a pastor three years later. Over the course of five years of pastoring, he became convinced that his work—and the work of the church—is to become fully committed to discipleship and making disciple-makers. The Bonhoeffer Project is for him a quest to live into the question “How are people transformed to live and love like Jesus?”

Image Credit: Daniel Burka

Source: Taking the “I” Out of Discipleship

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