What ails your church? Hopefully the answer doesn’t come too quickly! Hopefully your church is the picture of health, where everyone’s growing in love of God and love of neighbor.
Or maybe your church has a discipleship disease. If so, then J. T. English can help with his book Deep Discipleship: How the Church Can Make Whole Disciples of Jesus (B&H). Before taking over as lead pastor of Storyline Fellowship in Arvada, Colorado, English served as a pastor at The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas. He founded and directed The Village Church Institute, which is committed to theological education in the local church.
J. T. sees churches worried about being irrelevant, worried they’re asking too much of busy people. Many Christians seem to think the church has gotten too deep. But J. T. couldn’t disagree more! As you might guess from his book title, he says most churches aren’t nearly deep enough. He writes:
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 are treating the symptoms of the wrong disease. 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.
The good news is that deep discipleship does not require massive resources, a large congregation, or an enormous ministry staff. It starts with not apologizing when we ask Christians to make commitments. J. T. joined me Gospelbound to discuss Sunday school vs. small groups, travel baseball vs. CRT, active learning, and commissioning culture, among other topics.