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

But before we turn to the what of deep discipleship, we must be reminded about why deep discipleship matters.

Over the past several decades the Western church has noticed alarming symptoms of our discipleship disease. Some of these symptoms include people leaving the church; students dropping out of church after high school; attendance dropping; and perhaps most important, a lack of seriousness among our people about what it really means to be a follower o

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

We have lowered the bar and settled for a lowest-common-denominator discipleship.

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.

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.

Deep discipleship is about giving people more Bible, not less; more theology, not less; more spiritual disciplines, not less; more gospel, not less; more Christ, not less.

I want to ask the better question, “Where do all disciples go?”

The final question is about scalability, sustainability, and strategy. Instead of asking the question, “Can my church do this?,” I want to ask the better question, “Why would my church not do this?”