“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

Make Disciples

The word discipleship has HUGE baggage with it. For some it brings memories of a boring class, or workbook. For others it brings memories of a set of legalistic rules you had to follow for 8 weeks and at the end of that time you were handed a piece of paper that said you were officially a disciple. I remember when I was a teenager and I was signed up for the Tuesday night discipleship program in my youth group. At the end of the night after finishing 1/8 of our discipleship process my girlfriend and I would sneak out behind the church and do things that were not very “disciple like”  These programs and people were not wrong in their motive, and at some time or another all of us have tried to use a systematic program to make disciples, but at the end of that road we have dealt with the frustration of our people being smarter but not transformed.

Discipleship is not information download or attendance!

So what is it? How do we make disciples? Well….for me to give a systematic answer would not do you any good since those don’t work. All I can do is speak from my experiences and reading of the gospels. Read the rest of this entry »

When an earthquake occurs, scientists will talk about the “shifting” of the earth’s plates…the geological strata layers within the earth. These “shifts” force the earth upward to adjust and often cause damage to existing structures and sometimes loss of life.

In the culture where we live, there have been dramatic shifts which forced the Body of Christ to adjust. Sometimes those shifts have been the forces in the religious world as was the case when Martin Luther was inspired to challenge the conventional wisdom of the Catholic Church with his 95 Theses. Sometimes the shift has been the result of multiple factors in political or economic systems, such as the rise of communism and the results of World War II forcing the church underground in the Eastern Bloc of nations.

When the “shift” comes, loose things or ill-prepared things go flying and often are destroyed. Recently, I’ve been thinking about such shifts in culture which are dramatically repositioning the church of Jesus Christ… Read the rest of this entry »