By Discipleship.org: We change our oil every 3,000 miles. We rotate our tires every 6,000 miles. We can check lights, fluids, and tire pressure regularly. We can even subscribe to Motor Trend.

Yet we can still run out of gas.

My guess is that if you’re receiving this newsletter, then you know how important disciple making is. It’s the church’s core mission. So, we ought to learn best disciple making practices, read up on disciple making culture, and attend workshops on making actual disciples, not just converts.

Even still, you can run out of fuel.

How? Disciple making must be fueled by solid theology.

If you don’t have a solid theology that undergirds and sustains your disciple making efforts, your disciple making will run out of fuel. “Out-of-fuel” can look like a theology which props up one’s own traditions but has stopped pursuing the way of Jesus.

Out-of-fuel can also look like a theology which veers off into theological progressivism and eventually leaves the way of Jesus behind altogether.

Theology matters. Solid theology fuels effective and faithful disciple making. Bad theology derails us from our core mission. Taking our cue from the late Dallas Willard, we are convinced that, “The gospel we preach, the gospel we uphold, and the faith we coach determines the disciple we get.”

That is why we are grateful to announce Theology Thursdays as a regular feature of the Discipleship.org Collective. Starting Thursday, April 15th at 10 a.m. CT, Theology Thursdays will be a weekly, one-hour deep dive into crucial topics of theology. Hosted by myself and Renee Sproles of Renew.org, here are some of the topics we will be exploring:

Who Is the Holy Spirit? (with special guest Dr. David Young, Author of A Grand Illusion and King Jesus and the Beauty of Obedience-Based Discipleship)What Is the Gospel? (with special guest Dr. Matthew Bates, Author of Salvation by Allegiance Alone and Gospel Allegiance)What Is Sin? (with special guest Dr. Anessa Westbrook of Harding University)How Can We Understand and Value Our Bibles? (with special guest Dr. Orpheus J. Heyward of the Renaissance Church of Christ)What Christian Convictions Are Essential? (with special guest Dr. Chad Ragsdale of Ozark Christian College)

We hope you are able to join us for Theology Thursdays as we seek to fuel disciple making with God-honoring theology.

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by Bill Hull and Bobby Harrington: The gospel and covenant commitment we wrote about in Chapter 1 of the free eBook, Evangelism or Discipleship: Can They Effectively Work Together? will ensure that evangelism more naturally leads to discipleship. The process takes us beyond a focus on decisions to a focus on entering into covenant relationships. We do not just think about converts, but about developing Christlike people. We don’t just focus on the cross, but on faithful living in light of all that King Jesus teaches.

We like to tell people to “focus on disciples, not steeples.” When you think of your community, your city, and your country and are describing the church, it’s probably natural to think in terms of steeples. For example, a denominational leader will tell you how many churches his denomination has in a state or the nation. We’ve all heard the stat that 20 percent of people in America go to church at least once a month. A national leader will say that only 4 percent of the population belongs to a church. Metrics like these are legitimate, but of only secondary importance.

We prefer to think of how many true disciples are present in any community, city or nation. I (Bill) recall Richard Halverson, former chaplain of the U.S. Senate, answering a question about his church’s location. At the time, he was pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Halverson said that although his congregation owned a building at a certain address, his congregation was scattered through the tri-state area (Washington, D.C., and the nearby areas of Maryland and Virginia) with members nestled in homes, community centers, places of commerce and office buildings. He went on to say that the church had people everywhere; they had infiltrated the entire community.

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

Activated Disciples

For a more visual illustration, think of this “infiltration” as individual lights, each one representing the daily location of a disciple in a particular city. These disciples are present in virtually every domain of the culture.

This reality eliminates what so many in the church consider a problem. The church spends so much time and money marketing its services to the unchurched population hoping to break down barriers that would motivate seekers to visit a church-sponsored event. The irony, of course, is that we are already where we need to be, right next to those who need Christ. Our best strategy is to activate the already present disciples to show the love of Christ and make more disciples in the society. When we activate disciples, we find that the categories, church and state, secular and the sacred, are not true barriers; they all have less power in natural relationships. The church is confused about their real work. Many disciples are inactivated lights. Their light is off or just flickering now and then.

The nature of spirituality as Jesus taught it is that we are the lights of the world that will shine if we don’t snuff them out (Matt. 5:14-16). The real work of the church is to activate those lights through discipleship and unleash them for good works in Christ’s name and for evangelism.

Presenting a full gospel that calls for a total life commitment to Jesus and inviting people to a full covenant response will help us reunite evangelism and discipleship. Jesus is the gospel. We respond to His cross and His person with our whole lives. He wants to save us and remake us in His image. When Jesus is remaking us we become activated lights, outposts of His kingdom within our personhood and within our lives, every day, everywhere.

We like to tell people, the church is for discipleship, and discipleship is for the world. That means the church works to develop mature and healthy disciples who then reach others in daily life. Christlike people are the point, the primary strategy for reaching others and fulfilling the Great Commission. The Great Commission is the natural extension of why Jesus came. He came because the world needed saving, and that divine purpose as the focus puts all its supporting activity in perspective.

In the next installments of this blog series, we’re exploring two other implications of the tie between evangelism and discipleship. Two Scripture passages speak most plainly about activating the fullness of disciple making:

The call to make disciples in Matt. 28:18-20
The preparation of saints to be activated in Eph. 4:12-16

Written by Bill Hull and Bobby Harrington

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).

Image Credit: NeONBRAND

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by Jason C. Dukes: Martin B. Copenhaver wrote a book called Jesus Is the Question. The premise of this book is simply that Jesus asked questions approximately 10 times more often than He gave answers. His disciple-making efforts were not about having information and answers—although He could have given more than enough answers to all the questions in the whole world—but about asking questions that caused His followers to reconsider their beliefs. What if we became disciples of Jesus who make disciples with Him by valuing tough questions more than having great answers?

Please consider this issue carefully because it is crucial to our engagement with the younger generations who are becoming more and more honest with their deepest questions. I fear that our evangelism efforts in recent years have focused too much on having the right answers and not enough on the actual questions people have. Moreover, I suggest that we have even missed the actual questions we ourselves wrestle with in our own heads and hearts. This is a serious issue that we must change.

To get other disciple-making content like this—but in person—check out the National Disciple Making Forum and reserve your seat here.

Questions—at least the ones that relate to spiritual seeking—are linked to people’s insecurities and emotions. This is true of those who already believe the Gospel of Jesus, as well as those who have yet to believe. We all have questions. Relational disciple making welcomes those questions. Informational discipleship merely addresses those questions intellectually at best and ignores them at worst.

In his recent book, This Is Our Time, Trevin Wax suggests that people nowadays interpret truth through their insecurities and emotions. In our efforts to deliver the Good News to the new generations around us, we have not presented the Gospel in ways that acknowledge and respect insecurities and emotions. We have also tended to not create relational presence—enough to even discern a friend’s insecurities and emotional dilemmas. As a result, we have not addressed the questions people are actually asking…

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by Jason C. Dukes: How do you think of “the Gospel”? How would you summarize it if you had to?

Do you think of it as “Good News”? Is it the most important message to you?

While Jesus certainly intended us to present a “Good News” message to a world full of people who are seeking, I suggest that it is more than merely something we present to others.

Before I give my alternative, let me suggest you download another eBook offered by Discipleship.org called The Discipleship Gospel Primer. It offers rich wisdom and compelling insight about the importance of the Gospel we preach. The Gospel we preach must move us toward being disciples of Jesus who make disciples with Jesus. I recommend it to you as a supplement to what I’m saying here!

The takeaway I want to highlight from The Discipleship Gospel Primer is that the Gospel is more than just an assertion that we are sinners and Jesus died for our sins. That is part of the Gospel, and we must present those facts. But the Gospel is much more than those two facts alone, and it must be presented over time and with our actual presence.

It’s like what a friend of mine named Tommy emailed me about the other day. He said he had heard me speak recently on “what the Gospel is not,” and he typed the following question, which I thought was worth sharing:

What if the Gospel, the Good News of the Kingdom of God, was about Jesus making a way to invite all mankind to become children of God, to live with Him in His kingdom, and to participate in His nature, experiencing His presence in an eternal life lived now and forever with Him? If this were the Gospel we upheld, wouldn’t it change the story of the church today?[1]…

Note: I am not saying presentation of the Gospel is not necessary for conversion. I am saying presentation is, in fact, necessary but most often in the context of this “presence” type of friendship. Sharing the Gospel on a whim with a stranger is not the norm in the New Testament; it is the exception. I write this so that we don’t feel pressure to make it the norm in our disciple-making efforts today.

Written by Jason C. Dukes

Jason and Jen have been married since August 1998. They met at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. Since August 2015, they have lived with their seven kids and yellow lab in the Nashville Tennessee area, where Jason coaches and equips disciples making disciples, churches starting churches, and churches renewing their intended purpose. Jason has helped start Westpoint Church, House Blend Cafe, the Reproducing Churches Network, and the Church of West Orange. He has also served as a student pastor, college pastor, lead pastor, and multiplication minister. Learn more about his writings at www.LiveSent.com.

NOTES:

[1] Shared here with permission.

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by Aaron Menikoff: Ambition is intoxicating. A few years ago I came close—a couple times—to having a book picked up by a premier, academic publisher. I’m not sure what bothered me more: the fact that both publishers ultimately turned me down, or the fact that I cared so much.

Even now, I hate thinking about this. What a petty concern! I know an Afghan brother laboring to help the underground church in Kabul. I’m praying for a sister battling cancer. My personal tremor doesn’t register on the Richter scale. But I can’t change the fact that rejection hurts. Ambition is intoxicating. Unfulfilled ambitions seem devastating.

I tried to baptize my discontent, to make it seem godly. After all, being published by a high-profile press would have meant greater respect. Greater respect would have meant a wider platform. A wider platform would have meant a larger audience. A larger audience would have meant more gospel impact, and so on. Nice try. The fact of the matter is I cared more about my fame than God’s.

Renowned author David Foster Wallace didn’t try to hide his ambition. An interviewer once told him, “Respect means a lot to you.”

“Show me somebody who doesn’t like to be respected,” Wallace responded, “I don’t think I’m more hungry for respect than the average person.” Maybe he’s right. But by God’s grace, Christians ought to be different. We must hunger for God’s glory, not ours. I know my own heart, and for a season I wanted to be successful more than faithful.

Looking back, God was kind to kill the book deal. He taught me the importance of longing for faithfulness—a precious piece of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22).

CAN YOU RELATE? 

Wallace and I aren’t alone here. There’s a reason so many books are filled with frustrated characters. Michael Henchard of The Mayor of Casterbridge lost his money and his office. Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman longed to be more than he was. Even the virtuous Lucy of Narnia convinced herself life would be better if she had the looks of her older sister, Susan.

Perhaps you can relate. Have you ever battled for wealth, prominence, or beauty—worldly metrics of success—only to come up short? How many kids, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, answer, “I want to be faithful”? I fear not many.

GODLY AMBITION

There’s such a thing as godly ambition. Dave Harvey warns us not to kill that God-given desire to achieve. He calls it “the instinctual motivation to aspire to things, to make something happen, to have an impact, to count for something in life.” Christians ought not squelch the craving to accomplish something big. Harvey is spot-on: “Humility, rightly understood, shouldn’t be a fabric softener on our aspirations.”

The last thing I want to do is de-motivate you from the kind of visionary action that marks a true believer. After all, there’s such a thing as false humility. It says with a sly grin, “Look at me now. I’m not trying to do anything great because I don’t want the attention. Don’t you wish you were as humble as I am?”

Instead of hiding your talents, take a page out of Jim Eliot’s life: “Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God.” There’s plenty of room in the Christian life for godly ambition.

Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to say you’re attempting great things for God when you’re really attempting great things for yourself. Before you know it, a hunger for personal fame elbows out a zeal for God’s glory.

How can you know if your ambition is godly or sinful? Our motives will never be pure this side of heaven. Indwelling sin makes sure of that. Nonetheless, we can and must pursue faithfulness, leaving the results to God.

WHAT IS FAITHFULNESS?

Fundamentally, the faithful are simply those “full of faith.” The Greek behind “faithful” in the New Testament usually refers to trust in the crucified, risen, and reigning King Jesus. In fact, God’s people have always put their confidence in the Lord. When Paul said Abraham “believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations,” he meant Abraham was faithful—clinging to the promises of God despite evidence to the contrary. Simply put, the faithful rely on God; they believe his Word.

However, faithfulness has another, related meaning. Those full of faith are reliable and trustworthy. The faithful have a proven track record of obedience to God.

The esteemed members of Hebrews 11 exemplified faithfulness in a variety of ways, not least by refusing to recant under fire (Heb. 11:26–38). When Paul explained how he “fought the good fight” and “kept the faith” (2 Tim. 4:7), he described faithfulness to the Lord. In the Parable of the Tenants, the one who wisely stewards his master’s property is called a “faithful servant” (Matt. 25:23). Likewise, the Christian who wisely stewards the gospel is called faithful, too.

Faithfulness shows up in a ton of different, practical, and beautiful ways:

Making time to meditate on Scripture in the midst of a busy schedule (Ps. 1:2)
Getting up early and working hard all day to provide for your family (1 Tim. 5:8)
Commending Christ in an office that makes fun of him (Matt. 10:33)
Showing up at the widow’s doorstep to mend her fence (James 1:27)
Teaching the Bible every week to a small crowd (2 Tim. 4:2)
Holding fast to the gospel when those around you are watering it down (Gal. 1:8)
Gently correcting your kids when inside you want to scream (Eph. 6:4)
Getting to the service early so you have a chance to encourage the saints (Heb. 10:25)
Submitting to your husband when you think he’s wrong (Eph. 5:22)
Leading your wife humbly and sacrificially (Eph. 5:25)
Giving money and time to a neighbor in need (Luke 10:37)

These are just some of the marks of a Spirit-filled life of faithfulness. The world cares about plaques and popularity, real estate and revenue, glamour and glitz. God cares about faithfulness—the steadfast commitment to honor the Lord in a thousand simple ways.

How can you be sure God cares about this? Because Jesus Christ, God incarnate, gave up heaven for a life of faithful obedience culminating in a cross. Faithfulness is nothing more—or less—than Christlikeness.

MY HEART TURNED

There’s nothing wrong with being disappointed, but when the publisher gave me bad news the sting was sharper than it should have been. I clearly cared more about being noticed than being helpful. It didn’t happen overnight, but somewhere along the way my heart turned. I took my eyes off of the faithfulness of my Savior and put them on myself.

At least I’m in good company. Solomon prayed and received wisdom from God. With this wisdom he settled disputes, managed a kingdom, and oversaw the construction of the very house of God. Solomon asked for wisdom that he might rule justly. God, as he often does, gave him so much more: “King Solomon excelled all the kings of the earth in riches and in wisdom. And the whole earth sought the presence of Solomon to hear his wisdom” (1 Kgs. 10:23–24). He had it all: wisdom, wealth, and prestige.

But somewhere along the way, his heart turned. Solomon started believing his own press. Though he once elevated the name of the LORD above his own fame (see 1 Kgs. 10:1), he eventually neglected God’s Word, disobeyed God’s commands, and allowed the kingdom to reflect his glory and not God’s. By accumulating wealth and weapons and wives—all in defiance of God (Deut. 17:14–20)—Solomon proved he loved success more than faithfulness.

THANKFUL FOR FAILURE

Solomon lost his kingdom; I just lost my pride. Looking back, I’m thankful my book was rejected. God splashed a cold glass of water on my face, reminding me he’s important, and I’m not. In the big scheme of things, it was a tiny trial. But it was my trial, and God used it to pry my fingers off a brittle ego.

More than that, God pressed into my soul what every Christian ought to know. In his divine economy, the metrics of success aren’t the amount of followers, likes, retweets, or mentions you get on social media. It’s not the number of letters behind your name, books on your shelf, or how fast you can run a mile (at my age, not very fast at all). Christians, above all others, ought to understand this. Our value isn’t found in what we do, but the perfect love of a Savior condemned in our place. And the fruit of the Spirit isn’t success; it’s faithfulness.

“WHAT ONE CHASES”

Wallace, that great American writer, committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. He struggled with depression for years and couldn’t find a way out. He achieved worldly success early on in life (everyone wanted to publish his books) but it wasn’t enough to appease his ambition. In the interview where he admitted he wanted respect, he also confessed he didn’t know where to find it. “A lot of my problem,” he said, “is I don’t really have a brass ring, and I’m kind of open to suggestions about what one chases.”

Wallace, like Solomon, had the world in the palm of his hand, but it couldn’t chase away the despair in his head. Worldly ambition, the carnal desire for success, is a bus with just two stops. One stop is failure—you get out knowing you didn’t achieve what you wanted. The other stop is success, but it doesn’t satisfy—you debark only to look for another brass ring that won’t leave you fulfilled. Either way you look at it, worldly ambition is a bus to nowhere.

What you chase matters. Christians are called to chase after Christ. To love him, to long for him, to pursue him with everything we have. What does this chase look like? Faithfulness: the steadfast commitment to honor the Lord in the nitty-gritty details of everyday life.

HOW CAN YOU GROW IN FAITHFULNESS?

Now more than ever the church needs models of faithfulness. We are bombarded by airbrushed images of success. They belittle faithfulness and commend acclaim. How can we grow in our pursuit of faithfulness?

Believe the gospel. Only those who have put their faith in the atoning work of Jesus Christ can be found faithful. Have you done this? Submit your life to Christ. Trust in him for your salvation. Believe he died on the cross for your sins and rose from the dead for your justification. Without faith, faithfulness is impossible.
Rethink success. It’s one thing to say success is a life of obedience to Christ, a life of faithfulness. But consider how you react when you don’t get what you want. Perhaps your heart hasn’t caught up to your head’s definition of success. If you think success is a big family, a stable career, or a large church then you’ve wrongly accepted the world’s metric. It’s time to rethink success.
If you are in ministry, listen to Mark Dever’s message, “Endurance Needed: Strength for a Slow Reformation and the Dangerous Allure of Speed.” It’s a sweet reminder that worldly ambition poisons the pastorate.
Get to work. Faithfulness is a gift of the Spirit, but it’s also hard work. Look over that list above. Checking off those boxes is not the pathway to heaven; we’re justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. But if God has given us new life, if he has changed our hearts, then we’ll roll up our sleeves and obey his commands.
Leave the results to God. Paul wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6–7). The call to faithfulness is not a call to laziness, but it is a call to rest. We are finite. We may write the best book we could possibly write, and never find a publisher. We may work as hard as we possibly can, and never be promoted. We may share the gospel a thousand times, and never see a convert. It’s our job to be faithful. The rest is up to God.

Source: “What Do You Want?”: Pastoral Reflections on Faithfulness

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by Gloria Furman: No two church planting wives are the same. Our unique church contexts, seasons, personalities, challenges, gifts, perspectives, and preferences could fill volumes.

WHAT’S DIFFERENT

If you sat down for chai with Ananya in Ahmedabad and asked her to discuss the blessings and burdens of being a church planter’s wife, she may have different things to say than Bonnie in Burnaby, Miriam in Niddrie, or Ana Clara in Sao Paulo. While I’m typing this in Dubai, certain blessings come right to mind—the extraordinary gift of worshiping Jesus with brothers and sisters from more than sixty nationalities and the overwhelming gratitude that members share even in difficult circumstances. Some burdens may include the daily pressure of navigating cultures in such a diverse context and the radiating desert sun that can zap your willpower and the battery in your car.

The loneliness and isolation that one church planting wife feels may seem like a welcome respite to a wife who compares herself to a goldfish swimming in a fishbowl surrounded by malicious cats. Concerning the spectrum of feelings about support-raising, one month may be like sharing an adventure and the next may introduce a suffocating strain on your marriage.

A wife’s confidence in “the plan” to plant a church may waver—even by the hour (and years later). One woman’s burden of acute stress in a new context or season may be a blessing in disguise as she learns to depend on the Lord for strength. For others, acute stress may be a red flag to change course.

The unofficial welcome committee may or may not roll out the red carpet for the minister’s family. I once heard a story about someone who called the school registrar and impersonated the pastor’s wife and took her kids’ names off the waitlist for next term. Another church planting wife says she has a closet full of the gifts that people keep bringing them.

One church planting wife may already be packing the house when her church planting husband looks to the horizon and wants to keep planting, and another may feel disappointed.

Persecution may be woven in with spiritual victory over demonic forces; anxiety may stand out on the backdrop of comfort and ease. These and many more contexts, seasons, personalities, challenges, perspectives, and preferences contribute to our uniqueness as church planting wives.

WHAT’S THE SAME

But some things are the same no matter who you are, what time period you live in, and where God has called your family to plant a church. For one, the conclusion is the same. By faith we all see how our various blessings and burdens are braided together in God’s hand as he only gives us everything needful for our good and his glory.

As she surveys the landscape of her blessings and burdens, the conclusion of every church planting wife is this:Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. All of the unique factors mentioned above—every single one of them—can and do change. But God and his Word do not change, and the light of this truth illuminates our perspective on all those changeable things.

Church planting wives need to have the light of God’s Word shine on their various blessings and burdens. We need this like we need the sun to rise. We need the light in order to go about doing what we need to do. Two things happen when you turn on the lights in the kitchen. One, you can clearly see what you’re doing (and where the coffee pot is). And two, if there happen to be any cockroaches having a slumber party, they’ll scatter. When God’s Word turns the lights on for us, so-to-speak, we see reality and the contaminating lies disappear. Blessings and burdens need to be held up to the light of the Word.

APPLICATION

Here are a few floodlights of unchanging truth that every church planting wife can apply:

1. Jesus, the Chief Shepherd, has been given all authority in heaven and on earth and gives his disciples his mission with his blessing and presence (Matt. 28:18–20). Issues surrounding calling, priority, and fear are all resolved when church planting wives look to Christ and recall Jesus’ utterly comprehensive authority to tell us what we’re to be about doing, his contagious zeal to spread the glory of God among all nations, and his unassailable power to provide for us and never leave us as we go about that work.

2. By the grace of Jesus alone can a church planting wife walk in love together with the under-shepherd whom she married (Eph. 5). As they walk with Christ together, they’ll find themselves outside the camp where Christ is, and only with the help of Jesus will they bear the reproach Christ endured. However much they love (or don’t love) their city, the husband and wife know their home isn’t dependent on his job because they’re seeking the city that is to come. When push comes to shove, as they say, and like Paul the church planting husband undergoes “the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches,” the church planting wife takes her cue to boast with her husband of the things that show their weakness and Christ’s strength.

3. Jesus loves his Bride, the church, and not even the gates of hell will prevail against her (Matt. 16:18, Eph. 5:25–27). Identity, gifting, and commitment issues are resolved when church planting wives look to Christ and see how he has made them to be a brick in the building, a sheep in the flock, a priest in the priesthood, and a member of the family. All of these metaphors light up the sparks in her Scripture-soaked imagination as she dreams up ways to build up the body of Christ with the gifts given to her by the ascended Lord Jesus.

Blessings and burdens mingle together as we live in this world that groans for the Day of redemption—now several minutes closer than it was at the start of this article. There’s no way a finite heart can hold all the things a church planting wife will face in life and ministry. But Christ can, he does, and he will.

Source: The Blessings and Burdens of A Church Planter’s Wife

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