Thursday, November 24, 2011

The One Question the Church Must Engage With

David Cooke is asking it:

"Ultimately, each church will be evaluated by only one thing - its disciples. Your church is only as good as her disciples. It does not matter how good your praise, preaching, programs, or property are; if your disciples are passive, needy, consumeristic, and not radically obedient, your church is not good." (Neil Cole)

Cooke writes:
I have been asking people/Vicars (who are people too:) that question of 'How' and have yet to find anyone who can give me an adequate answer to the question of what their plan is for encouraging and equipping disciple-making.

This is my experience too. We've been discovering that nearly everything we need to grapple with as a church comes back to discipleship. In my limited searching, I've not yet found another church which has calibrated its life to any great extent around the Great Commission 'go and make disciples'. The nearest is probably Exeter Network Church, whose 4mation groups look like a great model for mutual discipleship, and who manage both to engage with their community as well as to gather apart from it.

So if you're out there, and you've had a go at this question, then I'd love to hear from you...

3 comments:

  1. ta for the 4mation group link - looks interesting

    i assume you had a look at mike breen's book "building a discipling culture"

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Radically Obedient"?

    I would have thought that Radically Disobedient would be more like discipleshp, as it is not about conforming to the world, but not conforming.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Not that I'm any sort of expert, but I don't think there's any substitute for slow, time-consuming one on one mentoring.

    ReplyDelete