Deep Discipleship: How the Church Can Make Whole Disciples of Jesus

Local churches need to think through how they can develop a philosophy of ministry that will do just that. Depth with God is the way of holistic discipleship.

Discipleship outside the local church is exploding because discipleship inside the local church is neglected, but we will see that Jesus has commissioned the local church specifically to teach, form, and develop maturing followers of Christ.

The first question in chapter 1 is, “Why does deep discipleship matter?”

3. People are leaving the church, not because we have asked too much of them but because we have not asked enough of them. We are giving people a shallow and generic spirituality when we need to give them distinctive Christianity.

Discipleship never terminates with a disciple; all disciples are called to go make more disciples.

Our ministry disease is not that the evangelical church is too deep, but that it is far too shallow. The symptoms of people and students leaving the church, or the lack of maturing disciples, or decreased attendance are symptoms that should tell us not that we are too deep but that we are too trivial.

People are leaving not because we have given them too much but because we have given them far too little. They are leaving the church because we have not given them any reason to stay. We

We have tried to treat our discipleship disease by appealing to the lowest common denominator, oversimplifying discipleship, and taking the edges off what it means to follow Christ.

Without the proper diagnosis and treatment plan, we will do more harm than good.