The Disciple-Making Church

This book by Bill Hull is great. It applies principles gleaned from how the apostles trained disciples in the early church and how we should apply them to a modern church.

I was surprised by the way the book is written. I was expecting something more along the lines of an essay on how the author had applied disciple-making at his church. Instead, the book is a fairly thorough treatment on the book of Acts, including in-depth information about the various New Testament churches (Antioch, Philippi, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica). The author does an especially good job of making you feel the personality and character of each church, and the unique challenges that the apostles had in listening/responding to God and moving the church forward. One of the most interesting insights was that the church never prayed for safety in the midst of persecution, only for courage and boldness in sharing the Gospel.

Only after extracting principles from the Bible does the author present his own ideas on disciple-making in the last few chapters of the book. One of the most powerful ideas was the method of training small groups to share about Christ:

... I favor and support evangelistic events that gather people to hear a direct Gospel presentation. The far better way, however, is to train people to walk down the paths of their lives, where, quite naturally, they find people who need Christ. Training people in small groups to do event evangelism did not work across the board for us. People could not translate the event skills into the natural flow of their lives. When they left the groups, they stopped planning events, because they just didn't find it practical.

Changing our style, we helped Christians network more effectively and began to ... [count it] outreach when someone took a friend to a baseball game, helped him landscape his yard, or baby-sat his children. This laid the foundation for future talks and opportunities to lead that friend to Christ.

... Most of our people faced the obstacle of where to gather with the unchurched -- they lacked a natural vehicle into which they could take people. The most natural place was the small group. To the seeker, unchurched, and the Christian looking for a church home, the Christian can naturally say, "Would you like to come into my small group?"

This made it much more clear how I could introduce the idea of disciple-making into my College & Career class at church. First is the idea building common ground and love with those around us we want to reach, and second is creating a small group environment where members can feel comfortable in bringing others to see and hear about Christ. The challenge is to work on these ideas myself as I introduce them to the students.