Why I Started This Blog

It seems to me that the church's primary priority should be discipleship in order to best "Seek His Kingdom" and "Follow the Risen Christ".

It seems to me that this isn't even close to the priority of the church. In fact, it is practically non-existent in my circles.

Glenn Smith says that there is a cone of priority for pastors and that the top of the cone (the most time spent) is programming and the bottom of the cone (the least amount of time spent) is discipleship and evangelism. According to Glenn, the cone must be inverted.

Discipleship and Networking (which always has evangelism as it's point) must become my number one priority, including my own personal discipleship.

After years of consideration, I place discipleship into a grid of 4 areas, and all of these areas end up having an infinite depth.

1. Connecting with God (worship, prayer, Bible reading, journaling, listening)
2. Connecting with People (forgiveness, grace, love, hope, healing, marriage, parenting)
3. Connecting Locally (meeting the needs of your community)
4. Connecting Globally (meeting the needs of your world - at least one difficult place)

My areas are similar to many others. Bob Roberts' T-Life has been most influential. But perhaps it is too complex.

Each of the areas influence all of the other three areas.

As I blog, my hope is to inform my thoughts on discipleship with the following books.
1. The Simple Church by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger
2. The Present Future by Reggie McNeil
3. The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman
4. Good to Great by Jim Collins
5. The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch

Problems with Discipleship

This is from Jordon Cooper's blog, and following is Jordon's comment.

Discipleship
Willow Creek admits to getting it wrong.

In the Hawkins’ video he says, “Participation is a big deal. We believe the more people participating in these sets of activities, with higher levels of frequency, it will produce disciples of Christ.” This has been Willow’s philosophy of ministry in a nutshell. The church creates programs/activities. People participate in these activities. The outcome is spiritual maturity. In a moment of stinging honesty Hawkins says, “I know it might sound crazy but that’s how we do it in churches. We measure levels of participation.”

Having put all of their eggs into the program-driven church basket you can understand their shock when the research revealed that “Increasing levels of participation in these sets of activities does NOT predict whether someone’s becoming more of a disciple of Christ. It does NOT predict whether they love God more or they love people more.”

People like Dallas Willard have been saying this for years, increased level of church activities do not produce disciples, it just produces people who spend more time at the church (and out of their communities where they could be making a redemptive difference). The reason we default to activities can be explained by Lyle Schaller in his book, Reflections of a Contrarian where he talks about the kind of statistics churches and denominations count. Because it is easy to count participation in activities, we count that and therefore do things to increase those stats. On the other hand it is really hard to quantify a person becoming a better disciple of Christ which in turn gets put aside. Especially when almost every snake oil salesmen (church growth consultant) is selling churches on the idea of church programs (again, see what Darryl has to say about that). Good for Willow Creek to come to grips and their mistakes and for sharing them with the rest of the church. I think the problem runs deeper than teaching more Bible reading and spiritual disciplines but at least the discussion is happening.