About a year ago, I released Part 1 of this series without expecting an avalanche of responses. Boy, was I naive! That first article was about resources required for the traditional Sunday attractional model of church versus the non-traditional model of simple churches in homes, cafes, coffee shops, and other gathering spaces.

That article took off and created a ton of great discussion and contemplation.

THE SKINNY ON THAT ARTICLE❓

Conservatively, it requires an annual budget of about $3.5 million to run one megachurch of 2,500. That’s about $1,400 per person. Newer studies put it closer to $4.5- $7 million annually.

This is a general breakdown of where that money goes. 1

• Staff Salaries and Benefits: 45% to 55% ($1.1M – $1.9M) for pastoral, administrative, and ministry staff.

• Facilities and Operations: 20% to 30% ($500K – $1.05M) for mortgages, maintenance, insurance, and utilities.

• Ministries and Local Outreach: 10% to 15% ($250K – $525K) for internal programs, youth groups, and community events.

• Missions and Charitable Giving: 10% to 15% ($250K – $525K) for external and global missionary support.

• Savings and Debt Repayment: 5% to 10% ($125K – $350K) for emergency reserves and capital debt.

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🪙 On the other side of the coin, the simple church requires around $40 a person to run a hundred simple churches of around 25 people each. Same reach, richer relationships, simplified model, a fraction of the cost.

• Facilities ($0): You use existing living rooms, backyards, or basements. Utilities may bump up slightly, but host families usually absorb this cost.

• Food & Fellowship ($20 – $100+ per meeting): This is usually the largest ongoing expense. Many house churches offset this by running potluck-style meals where everyone contributes.

• Media & Tech ($0 – $50 per month): You do not need expensive sound systems. Costs may include a Spotify/Apple Music subscription for worship playlists or a streaming license (like CCLI) if you project lyrics.

• Curriculum & Bibles ($0 – $100 upfront): Many group studies, reading plans, and discipleship materials are free online. You may occasionally buy physical books or study guides.

• Legal & Administration ($0 – $500 upfront): If you choose to formalize as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit for tax-deductible donations, expect state filing fees and accounting software costs (like QuickBooks). Many house churches operate informally without this.

• Childcare ($0 – $80 per meeting): Adults often take turns watching children for free. If the space is tight, hiring a local teenager or babysitter is a small collective expense.

When I was researching the two models, Gemini created this fun table.

⚖️ Traditional vs. Simple Church Costs

Dozens of you wrote back.

🎉 Some of you cheered.
⚠️ Some of you pushed back.
❓And a handful of you asked a question that inspired the second and third installments.

Some honest questions deserved thoughtful answers.

That’s How One Article Became a Series of Conversations!

Click Here to Read Part 1 | Click Here to Read Part 2

Part 2 was about RELATIONSHIPS.

Why twenty-five people multiply faster than twenty-five hundred, and why the 59 one-anothers of Scripture can’t survive in a crowd. Again, popular article with some excellent responses and questions!

Now, it’s time to tackle another honest question.

“If this really is the better way, why does almost nobody do it?”

Fair. Let’s answer it.

I don’t think the answer is money, and I don’t think it’s strategy.

Last week I posted a survey on my platform that asked my readers:

33% of respondents said the reason people aren't making disciples is that they are…

📆 TOO BUSY TO INVEST!

Although that question is a little different from the one we are exploring today, I would bet the farm it would be the same answer. I’m not trying to win an argument today. I’m trying to help you see something hiding in the bushes of the modern attractional church.

Who Actually Got Jesus’ Investment?

Here’s a question worth slowing down for: how many people did Jesus actually spend His life with?

• ⛪︎ Not preach to.

• ❤️‍🩹 Not heal.

• 🍕 Not feed.

Spend His life with.

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When you read the Gospels looking for that, a strange pattern surfaces. Jesus could preach to thousands, and He did. He could have built the first megachurch in human history with a single afternoon of 🥖 loaves and 🐟 fish.

But that is not where He put His hours.

Look at the groups of people Jesus invested in and the amount of his margin they got.

• 🎯 The three (Peter, James, and John) got ALL of Jesus.

  • They saw Him transfigured (Matthew 17:1).

  • They were in the room when He raised Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:37).

  • They were with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane on the worst night of His life (Matthew 26:37).

• 👉 The nine got a lot of Jesus.

  • Traveling and eating.

  • Questioning and being questioned.

  • Trained in the ordinary, unglamorous rhythm of just following Him around.

• 👉 The seventy-two got some of Jesus.

  • Occasional teachings

  • Sent out (Luke 10)

  • Hard sayings

• 👉 The crowds got a little of Jesus.

  • Healing.

  • Deliverance.

  • Some bread and fish.

  • And, as far as we can tell, only about eight long-form sermons.

🤔 Consider this 🤔

If Jesus is our model, and the crowds got the least of His time, why have we built almost our entire church economy around serving the crowd?

I’m not asking that to make you feel guilty.

I’m asking because I built my own ministry life around the crowd for years and never once thought to question it.

❓Have you❓

And notice what Jesus was not limited by. He wasn’t short on resources. He wasn’t short on charisma. He could out-preach and out-heal anyone who ever lived.

He chose the small circle on purpose❗️

So the question isn’t whether we can gather a crowd. Plenty of people can. The question is whether we’re brave enough to do what Jesus did with His busy calendar and limited resources.

The Mantra that Keeps Me Awake

There’s a sentence in my book, Hand to the Plow, that reorganized how I think about all of this. The phrase was introduced to me by Dan Grider of Ignite Disciple-Making Network, and it changed most of how I view ministry, particularly disciple-making and church planting.

💥 More time with fewer people produces greater results

Read it again slowly, because it runs against nearly everything the last few decades of church culture trained us to believe.

We were taught to broadcast to the masses. Reach as many people as possible with the best message. Scale the platform. Grow the audience. Invest in systems that can handle exponential growth.

And to be clear, that instinct is not all bad. Jesus preached to thousands. Hebrews tells us not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together (Hebrews 10:25). Gathering matters!

But ask yourself an honest question: did the crowds change the world?

The five thousand ate the fish and went home.

The twelve were incredibly broken,

• One betrayed Him

• One denied Him

• Most of them scattered when it got hard

But they turned the known world upside down inside a couple of generations.

So which one did Jesus bet on?

Think about the math for a second. If you invest deeply in two people this year, and they each invest in two next year, and that pattern holds, by year ten you have touched over a thousand people.

Not “touched” like a Sunday handshake.

• Trained.

• Equipped.

• Multiplying.

Every one of them reproducing the same pattern in someone else.

That’s not a program. That’s a movement.

Now compare that to standing in front of a thousand people every single Sunday and preaching the most Christ-exalting sermon ever delivered. If those thousand people never reproduce a single disciple in their everyday lives, what do you actually have?

You have attendance, but not necessarily multiplication.

Which raises the real question of this whole series.

🎯 How Are We Keeping Score of Our Fruitfulness 🎯

The Obstacle We Have To Wrestle to the Ground

I want to be VERY CLEAR, because I love the local church in all its forms, and I am not throwing rocks at the form. Some of the most faithful people I have ever known are carrying loads inside big churches that I could not carry.

🚫 This is not an anti-church argument. It never has been.

But I have to ask an honest question.

What happens to a leader’s time when the church becomes a business?

Think about what it actually takes to run a 2,500-member organization. A multi-million-dollar building that has to be heated, cooled, insured, and paid down. A staff that has to be hired, managed, reviewed, and paid every two weeks. A weekend production that has to be planned, rehearsed, and pulled off at a high level fifty-two times a year.

• 💰Budgets.

• 👨🏻‍💼Boards.

• 📽️ Slide Decks.

• 📝 Liability.

None of that is sin. All of these are real-life issues.

And all of it quietly eats the one resource disciple-making needs most:

❤️‍🔥 More Time with Fewer People ❤️‍🔥

Here’s the trap that I’ve watched good men and women walk into with the best intentions. The bigger the container gets, the more of the leader’s life the container consumes, until the very people called to make disciples no longer have the margin to spend all of themselves on three, a lot of themselves on nine others, and some of themselves on seventy-two.

So we do the reasonable thing.

We delegate the depth. We professionalize the one-anothers. We build small groups inside the big group and hope the real thing happens somewhere down in there.

And I just want to gently ask: if the deep work has to happen in the small group anyway, what is all the machinery around it actually for?

Here’s the part that lands closest to home for most of us reading this, because most of us are not the pastor. We’re the everyday disciple with a job, a family, and a calendar that’s already full.

⛪️ What does the crowd model quietly ask of you?

It asks you to show up.

• Attend.

• Serve.

• Volunteer.

• Fill a slot.

And those aren’t bad things.

But be honest about what they cost. Every hour the machine asks of your limited margin is an hour you did not spend going deep with the two or three people in your own oikos, your relational web of neighbors, coworkers, family, and friends where you

🏠 live,
👩🏻‍🎓 learn,
📎 work,
⚽️ and play.

Ephesians 4 says the gathered church exists to equip the saints for the work of ministry. That’s a church sending people ➡ OUT into disciple-making, not just receiving people 🔄 IN for consumption. So here’s the question that haunts me for the ordinary believer:

That’s not an accusation.

It’s a question I had to answer for my own life. What’s your honest answer?

You Can’t Get Jesus’ Results From a Not-Jesus Behavior

If we want the results of Jesus, we have to practice the principles of Jesus, walk in the behaviors of Jesus, and embrace the values of Jesus.

We love the results Jesus got. A movement that outlived Him, outran His calendar, and eventually crossed every border on earth. But those results came out of a method. More of Himself to fewer people, on purpose, for three years, with 🚫 no building, 🚫 no budget, and 🚫 no platform to protect.

So here’s the question underneath all my other questions:

Do we want His results badly enough to actually try His method?

I don’t think the answer is automatic, because His method costs something.

• It’s slower.

• It’s smaller.

• It doesn’t photograph well.

There’s no stage, no lights, and nobody claps when you spend a Tuesday night pouring your life into three ordinary people who may never know your name is on a book.

But it multiplies.

And the crowd, for all its energy, mostly just stays a crowd.

You Can’t Score a Baseball Game on a Football Scoreboard

Can you imagine a baseball game being scored on a football scoreboard? Seven points is a completely different story depending on which game you’re watching. A touchdown means nothing on a diamond.

One is a 😬 NAIL-BITER, and the other is a 🤩 BLOWOUT!

That is why we feel like such failures when we try to measure a simple church with a megachurch scoreboard.

For decades, the primary metrics of church health have been the same three numbers: attendance, giving, and program participation.

• Butts in seats.

• Dollars in the plate.

• Volunteers on the roster.

And those numbers are not worthless. They tell you something. A growing church often has real spiritual vitality. Generosity is a discipleship issue. Volunteerism reflects engagement.

But there’s a problem with making them your scorecard: you can hit every single one of those numbers and still have zero multiplication of actual disciples of Jesus Christ❗️

• You can have a full parking lot and empty hearts.

• You can have a packed weekend service and a generation of young adults walking out the back door for good.

• You can have a growing budget and a shrinking Kingdom footprint.

I’ve watched it happen in churches I have loved. The scoreboard looks great on the surface while underneath it a movement has stalled. Jesus’ Great Commission was not “Go and fill auditoriums.” It was “Go and make disciples.”

So what would actually happen if we kept score of that?

Try measuring these instead:

• ✔ How many spiritual conversations did we have this week with people who aren’t yet following Jesus?

• ✔ Is each of us currently investing deeply in two or three people who are on a disciple-making journey?

• ✔ Have the people we’re investing in begun to invest in others?

• ✔ Are we praying, specifically and by name, for the people in our oikos who are far from God?

• ✔ Is anyone in our lives moving closer to Jesus because of our intentional presence?

Feel how different those questions are from “Did I attend enough this month?” They should feel different. They are scoring an entirely different game.

And here’s the quiet miracle of it: changing your scoreboard changes what you see. Start counting Kingdom multiplication instead of congregational participation, and you start noticing things you used to walk right past. The coworker who asks the unexpected question about faith. The neighbor going through a divorce who just needs someone to sit with her. The everyday moments God set up as your mission field all along.

❤️‍🔥 Change what you measure, and you change what you look for. Change what you look for, and you change how you live.

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So Let Me Leave You With Questions, Not a Verdict

I told you at the top I wasn’t here to win an argument. I meant it. I would rather you come to your own conclusions in the quiet than take mine on loan.

So deeply consider these for a minute:

• Who got all of you last week? Your calendar already answered that one. Was it a few people, a crowd, or a machine?

• What scoreboard have you been checking to feel like your spiritual life is “winning”? And where did you get that scoreboard in the first place?

• If you genuinely wanted the results of Jesus, what would you have to stop doing to make room for His method?

  ---

You don’t have to blow anything up to answer these. You don’t have to quit your church this week. You just have to be honest about the game you’re actually playing, and the game Jesus played.

More time with fewer people produces greater results.

• He gave everything to three.

• A lot to nine others.

• Some to seventy-two.

• A little to the crowds.

And the crowd is the part we kept.

What would change if you flipped it?

✏️ In the comments, tell me: who are the two or three people you could start giving more of yourself to this week? First names only. Let’s pray for them together. 👇

If you want to learn more about Simple Church, prayer mapping, and the tools that make relational multiplication actually work, DM me or go to disciplemakingcollective.com!

From the Samaritan woman at the well to the Good Samaritan in the New Testament, the Bible uses stories of this people group to instruct us how to live our lives to honor God. What is a Samaritan? And who are these people whom the nation of Israel has looked down upon for over 3,000 years?

It’s easy to think of the people groups in the Bible as virtually fictional. But history proves that the cultures of the Old and New Testament are real, live humans having real-life experiences.

🤯 Get this 🤯

As of 2024, there are around 900 Samaritans, split between Israel (some 460 in Holon) and the West Bank (some 380 in Kiryat Luza) on Mount Gerizim near Nablus. (see Wikipedia) That means that around half of them live on the same mountain that they occupied 3,000 years ago.

That makes them one of the world’s smallest surviving ethnoreligious groups. To put the fragility in perspective, their numbers reached a record low of around 100 people during the early modern period and have slowly climbed back since.

💥 These Samaritans are the same people represented by the woman at the well, as told in John 4!

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Let that sink in!

Over nine hundred living Samaritans in Palestine today! It’s hard to imagine in our post-biblical mindset that a group of people has lived in the same exact spot on the globe for over 3,000 years!

Who Are the Samaritans?

The History of Samaria

It’s hard to settle 100% on the origins of the modern-day Samaritans. However, we can find the birth of the city called Samaria quite easily.

Almost 1,000 years before Christ was born, Solomon was completing his reign over the Jews. Following his death, his son, Rehoboam, inherited the throne of Israel. Immediately, a leader named Jeroboam, who had served in his father’s Kingdom, surfaced with a challenging mandate. For all Israel to embrace Rehoboam as King, he must lighten the load of taxation and oppression (some things NEVER change 😂🤣😂).

King Solomon had placed Jeroboam in charge of forced labor in the previous Kingdom. He saw firsthand how much damage excessive taxation and oppression dealt to the people of Israel.

“Your father made our yoke hard; now therefore lighten the hard service of your father and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you.”

Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:4)

Rehoboam ignored wise counselors pleading to lighten the load. He denied Jeroboam the relief he asked for. As a result, the Kingdom split into two as 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel pledged loyalty to Jeroboam.

Jeroboam traveled north to establish a new capital and retained the name Israel. Rehoboam stayed in Jerusalem to build Judah, the southern Kingdom.

A few generations after Jeroboam died, Omri, the King of the Northern Kingdom, took over. Omri purchased a hill from a fellow named Shemer, and that hill became known as Samaria. Israel had a new capital to replace the temple city in Jerusalem. The town sat beside the coveted Mt Gerizim.

Samaria was born.

Jews setting up house in the new city of Samaria took on Gentile wives from the area. Israel viewed the resulting generation as a half-breed, unclean, rebellious people.

So, What’s Wrong with Samaritans?

It doesn’t get much worse than half-breed in the Jewish culture. After all, the Messiah was coming through the line of the Jews. He must. So it was imperative to keep the bloodline pure. God was serious about that.

But if there was anything more vile than a half-breed, it was a half-breed who demanded independence from the people God has called out to be His representatives – his nation.

Samaritans also set up their own “temple” on Mt. Gerizim, where we find this people group today. Losing access to Jerusalem meant they needed a new place to worship. And if that wasn’t egregious enough for the people of the Southern Kingdom, they claimed their place was the proper place of worship. To this day, they claim that they are the protector of the true law of God.

Mt. Gerizim became the central place of worship for these half-breed traitors who left to form their own Kingdom.

What’s so Special about Mt. Gerizim?

Mt. Gerizim is a 2,600-foot-tall mountain just south of the important city of Shechem. Just after Joshua defeated the city of Ai and before entering the Promised Land, God proclaimed that Mt. Gerizim was the place of blessing while Mt. Ebal was the place of curse. Therefore, the Samaritans believe that before Jerusalem was blessed, there was their mountain.

When the Lord your God has brought you into the land you are entering to possess, you are to proclaim on Mount Gerizim the blessings, and on Mount Ebal the curses.

Deuteronomy 11:29

You see this fact in the story of the woman at the well. It was a point of major conflict between the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel for a thousand years prior to this conversation at the well.

¹⁹ “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

John 4:19

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The Samaritans are a people group who are half-breed, rebellious people who worshipped at an illegitimate temple. Maybe we’re starting to get the picture.

People of the Southern Kingdom, inhabitants of Jerusalem, the very city of David, wanted nothing to do with this vile group of people lest they be contaminated by the darkness that prevailed over them.

These people weren’t just different; they were defiant!

Who would deny temple worship? Who would dare contaminate the bloodline and risk compromising the lineage of the Messiah, the Savior of Israel – the next conquering King of the Jews?

Enter Jesus,

• the rabbi who could have chosen anyone to be his follower, but instead chose the Hebrew school flunkies who had to return home and work their parents’ businesses.

• the teacher who tapped as his student the scum who lined his pockets with silver he skimmed off the top of oppressive Roman taxes he collected from his very own people.

• the leader who invited into his circle the zealot who had probably sliced the throat of some innocent Roman soldier who had simply done what he was commanded to do by his commander.

Into town walked the long-awaited Messiah. He stopped to take a break at the well, most likely not stopping for a drink, but for a radical encounter. He could have played it safe and found a religious male Samaritan and still made His point. But that was not enough.

She jerked back, startled that a man would be standing at the well in the middle of the day. She came late because she couldn’t stand to see the others and feel so guilty, so lowly – not one more time.

He saw her, not as a woman who couldn’t keep a husband and took whatever she could get just to avoid the desperation of loneliness she felt when she went to bed alone at night without a man to give her life meaning.

He chose her because she was helpless, unable to fix herself and unable to change the opinion of others in town. Jesus engaged with her because she was the enemy of His lineage. The Messiah initiated a conversation with her because she was a representative of the people who worshipped on another mountain. He chose her because he looked past her DNA and beyond her failures and looked into her heart.

It was the same reason a rebellious half-breed, spiritually illegitimate Samaritan became the hero of the parable He would later tell when He looked an expert of the law in the eye who was trying to test Him.

He proclaimed through action – not just words – that neither race, religion, failure, gender, history, appearance, status, doubt, reputation, illegitimacy, relationships, worship style, nor anything else you could possibly imagine on this planet defines you. What He says about you and how you respond to His proclamation is your true identity. And His final mandate to his followers as He was departing was to baptize ALL people, teaching them to obey his commands!

Why Does It Matter?

900 Samaritans have been worshipping on that same mountain for over 3,000 long years! That lady at the well pointed to that very mountain in our story of Jesus.

They are still stuck between two cultures – even today! In the daytime among the public, they speak Arabic to keep the peace with those around them. But, when they return home, they speak the ancient language of God’s people. They still sacrifice on their holy mountain. Samaritans still celebrate the holy days of the Jews. They even claim to be the protectors of the original law of Moses.

The community was almost wiped off the face of the Earth in the early 20th century. Their community dipped below 150 people! But they are still here. Still holding fast to their identity.

Although still clinging to the Pentateuch and waiting for their Messiah, they stand as a reminder. Jesus stood beside a water well two millennia ago and proclaimed that anyone could come to Him. He would fill their otherwise unquenchable thirst for life!

Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

Jesus

Why do Samaritans Matter?

They matter because Jesus made a Samaritan the hero of a very important story to teach us about his Grace. Because a woman who was hopeless and spiritually thirsty found what she needed so that we would have a signpost to find what we need.

And because WE ARE ALL scarred. We are all lonely. We are all half-breed rebels in some way or another. It matters because HER story is OUR story. THEIR grace is OUR grace. It matters because no matter where you or I find ourselves, He is a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

DRINK DEEPLY!

Check out his Substack, platform, The Christian Historian, HERE.

Article by Jeremiah Kharkovits

You likely heard the following statement or at least something of the sort: “science and faith are enemies.” This is, of course, not true, but why? And if it’s not true, why does it even matter?

In this article, I plan to unpack that, while also showing that many of the scientists that we know believed in God.

Where It Came From

Before I get to the real juice of the article, it is important to mention when the myth of science and faith being enemies really began. The myth comes largely from two 19th-century books — John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Both volumes paint science as the hero and faith as the villain.

And that thinking is just false.

What The Men That Built Modern Science Believed

In addition to pushing the myth, many secularist individuals make it seem like many of the scientists who shaped modern science agree with their view. Now, this is very simply debunked.

• Nicolaus Copernicus was a Catholic canon who dedicated his heliocentric model to the Pope.

• Johannes Kepler described his work on planetary motion as “thinking God’s thoughts after him.”

• Isaac Newton wrote more about theology than he ever did about physics, or science for that matter.

• Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, funded lectures defending Christianity against atheism and left money in his will to keep them going after he died.

• Gregor Mendel, the monk who founded modern genetics, ran his pea-plant experiments in a monastery garden. Sounds like they didn’t believe the myth, “science and faith are enemies and cannot coexist,” after all.

Furthermore, other instrumental scientists like Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, John Ray, Francis Bacon, Lord Kelvin, Blaise Pascal, and others were firm believers in God, while being scientists. Their work built the foundations of modern science.

Then Why Does The Myth Still Exist?

Many people deny the truth and the facts because it either doesn’t fit their worldview, feels uncomfortable, or contradicts what they previously thought. Additionally, men such as Richard Dawkins have promoted the myth to oblivion, which has influenced thousands, if not millions, of people worldwide.

Lastly, when people turn away from God, their understanding and thinking have to fit that, which then leads to the fabrication of myths like, ”science and faith are enemies.”

Why The Truth Matters

Firstly, it matters because a myth is destroyed and a truth is restored.

Secondly, it reframes the relationship from combat to origin.

The conflict myth assumes science happened despite religion. The real history shows science emerged largely because of a Christian view of the world.

Lastly, if the myth is true, then a person cannot have faith and work in science; thus, they have to choose one or the other. Dismantling the myth restores the reality that both can coexist peacefully.

Now, this article isn’t meant to say that all major scientists were Christians or that they all believed in a Creator, but rather that without the work of scientists who were Christians, we would not have modern science.

That’s the story I wanted to tell at length in my new book, The Greatest Christian Scientists, which is the first volume in The Greatest Christians Series.

It walks through the lives of believers like Newton, Boyle, and others who believed in God and so saw no conflict between Christianity and science.

If you’ve ever been told you have to choose between believing in God and thinking seriously about science, I’d encourage you to look at the actual lives of the people who built the scientific method in the first place.

Their lives are more compelling than any argument I could make for them.

Somewhere along the way, we started believing disciple-making belonged to the professionals, the pastors, the seminary grads, the ones with titles and microphones. But the Great Commission wasn’t a job opportunity for the qualified. It was a command handed to ordinary, plain-clothes, willing people.

• 🚣🏻 Unclean Fisherman

• 💰Tax-Collecting Traitors

• ⚔️ Violent Zealots

Here are eleven principles from my new book, Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers. There is one thought from each chapter that proves that disciple-making is for you.

Note: These 11 principles come straight from my new book, “Hand to the Plow.”
Each principle represents a chapter in the book.

Want to dig deeper?

Get the book at the link below and use SUBSTACK as a discount code to receive 20% Off (US ORDERS ONLY).

Get 20% Off Hand to the Plow!

Chapter #1. The Great Commission was a command to common followers of Jesus, not a job description for professionals.

You were sent the day you said yes. Stop waiting for

• 🫅🏻 a title

• 👩🏻‍🎓 a degree

• 🚦a green light

Start seeing the people already in front of you as your assignment.

Chapter #2. Disciple-making is a lifestyle woven into the life you already live, not a program you add to your calendar.

Don’t block out “ministry time.” Bring Jesus into the commute, the carpool line, and the lunch break. Leverage the rhythms already on your schedule.

Chapter #3. The gap between believers who multiply and those who don’t isn’t more intellectual information; it’s intentionality.

You probably already know enough.

Pick one behavior this week

• prayer rhythms

• intentional questions

• your story as a testimony

And actually do it instead of thinking about it, polishing it, or studying it.

Chapter #4. Anyone who has said yes to Jesus can be a disciple, and anyone walking with Jesus can make one.

No seminary, platform, or perfect theology required. If you know God loves people, and that Jesus is the only way to the Father, you have enough to share what you already have.

Chapter #5. Your oikos, the people where you live, learn, work, and play, is your God-given mission field.

Write the names down. Put yours in the center, draw lines to five or ten people, and pray for them by name, regularly! Prayer mapping makes the invisible field visible.

Chapter #6. Disciple-making was never meant to be a solo sport, it’s a team effort. 🏃‍♂️+🏃🏻‍♀️+🏃+🏃🏻‍♀️+🏃‍♂️

You don’t have to carry the weight of every leadership gift. Find a few others, let each play their part, and stop trying to be the whole body by yourself.

Chapter #7. A healthy team is built by honestly discerning who Gets it, Wants it, and is willing to create Capacity, then coaching the gap.

Assess honestly as you build a GREAT TEAM.

• Equip the willing

• Encourage the unsure

• Empower for the overloaded

The native culture of Disciple-Making is family and team.

Chapter #8. The goal isn’t to make disciples; it’s to make disciple-makers who make disciple-makers who make disciples.

Chapter #9. There’s a simple, reproducible pathway from a first conversation all the way to a self-identified simple church.

Start with one casual conversation. Let curiosity grow into a Seeker Group, commitment into an X-Group, and community into a church. Drop one stone after another until they become a church community.

Chapter #10. The best gatherings have no spectators, everyone participates, no one just performs.

Build your meetings around looking back, up, and forward. Let everyone share, discover Scripture, and leave with Spirit-prompted action goals.

Chapter #11. The movement doesn’t start in a strategy document, it starts in your next conversation.

Just one person. Just one question. Just this week. Pray for a name today, and ask God for one good question to carry into your next encounter.

None of this requires you to become someone else. It just requires you to see the life God already gave you as the ministry it always was.

• You have the mission field (Acts 17:24-27)

• You have the Spirit (Acts 1:8)

• You have the commission (Matt 28:18-20)

The only thing missing was a pathway, and now you have that too.

🚦So go.

🚫 Not someday.

🟢 Now.

If you want to get serious about developing disciple-making skills and engage with coaching and training, become a member of our Premium Cohort.

Click HERE for the Cohort

FIND THIS TOOL IN A DOWNLOADABLE PDF HERE. (Recommended for groups of 3-25)

Overview of the Three-Thirds Model

Three-Thirds simply means to divide your disciple-making group time into thirds and always treat each leg of the three-legged stool equally. Look Back → Look Up → Look Forward. If you are meeting for 1 ½ hours, each segment represents 30 minutes. If you are meeting for an hour, each segment lasts 20 minutes. This allows the group to give equal attention to each leg of the stool.

Think of the Three-Thirds process as a cycle repeating from meeting to meeting, not as a linear process that ends at the end of the meeting. Each “Look Back” section of the next meeting always points back to the previous “Look Forward” from the last meeting. This provides a robust rhythm of connection and accountability: we hear from God, commit to obeying what God guides, and then, at the next meeting, circle back to that connection and accountability.

In this diagram, each segment of the meeting is dependent and relevant to the preceding and following segments. When we focus on looking back since the last meeting, we are looking at it through the eyes of how God is working in us, therefore we are looking up.

When we look up in the second third, we are also asking God how he wants us to respond to Him in the third section. When we look back on the first third, we are reviewing how obedient we were to God’s leading in our previous meeting. And so forth. The meeting works like a cycle, and each segment should relate to the other two segments.

The Three-Thirds process is not a model, but a principle-based tool, so there is no set-in-stone way to lead the group. However, here are some sound principles that might help accomplish the goal of each segment.

Segment 1 - Look Back

Goal: The primary purpose of the “Look Back” Segment is to discuss how each person has progressed in their discipleship process since the group last met. It serves the purposes of accountability, encouragement, and edification. It never misses an opportunity to share spiritual conversations had in the places where the members live, work, and play since the last meeting!

Note: Depending on the length of each third and the volume of engagement with each group, you may need to adjust the following suggestions to ensure all three thirds receive significant attention within a manageable time frame.

Care

Before the group gets into the meat of the night, it is important to set the stage well. Depending on the group size and culture, it can be helpful to take a couple of rounds around the room and do some group pastoral care. Sometimes I’ll take one lap around and let each person share their highlight since we last met. Then we’ll take a second lap and ask what their greatest struggle has been since the last meeting. I’ll often ask each person to pray for the person to their left or right after each struggle is shared. This creates unity and care, but it can take time. Again, be conscious of giving each segment equal time.

For larger groups, you can divide them into groups of 2 or 3 to share their victories and battles since we last met, and let them follow the same process together in small groups. This is much more time-efficient and allows everyone to share more than they could in a large group.

You might also have an ice-breaker question that each person could answer in the larger group or in a small group. Be flexible and creative with this section. If you do the same thing over and over again, meeting after meeting, it will become stale and lose momentum.

Check-Up

The check-up segment is the most important part of the Look Back time! It is an opportunity for accountability and encouragement. Here are some questions that can drive the check-up time.

• How have you obeyed what the Holy Spirit spoke to you the last time we met?

• Who were you able to share with someone what you’ve learned since we last met?

• With whom were you able to share your story or God’s story since we last met?
  
  Again, keep this segment fresh and relevant so it doesn’t become a duty for people to share. If someone is uncomfortable sharing, just move on and give them grace.

Coaching Conversations (NEVER SKIP)

The most critical activity we engage in at Our Best Story is sharing spiritual conversations with the people in the places where we live, work, and play. There is a leadership principle called the Pareto principle, named after the guy who authored it, that says that 80% of any results come from 20% of the causes. In other words, 20% of the activity in any process produces 80% of the progress. Spiritual conversations is a 20 % factor in any disciple-making effort. If you have to skip anything, do not skip this section!

These are some questions you can use to coach spiritual conversations.

Have you had any spiritual conversations since we last met?

• What was the result?

• What questions did you ask?

• What milk vs. meat stories did you tell?

• What is your follow-up plan?

  ---

Segment 2 – Look Up

This segment of the three-thirds group is designed to explore the Story of God together. It is not intended to foster a teacher-pupil culture, but rather a group discovery process. Again, the three-thirds group is a principle-based tool, so don’t feel pressured to complete every step or ask every single question.

Follow the leading of the Holy Spirit.

The facilitator of the group should have a passage or a story selected to engage with the group. The most compelling story would emerge from a question or tension expressed in a previous meeting. “Just-in-Case” information is when we share a story just in case there’s someone who needs to hear it. Nine out of ten times, this is an ineffective method for discovering scripture together. “Just-in-Time” discovery addresses a relevant need in the lives of the disciples, and they will absorb the information and apply it to their situation.

A Three-Thirds Passage should be:

• Relatively Short

• Story-based in most cases

• Relevant to questions being asked by the group

• Can be chosen in a series of meetings, such as the “7 I-Ams of Jesus” or the “7 Miracles in the Book of John”

Some examples of great three-thirds passages can be found at the end of this document.

First Read Through

At the beginning of segment two, the facilitator asks who would be willing to read the passage aloud to the group. I recommend that no one else actually read their Bibles, but just set them aside and listen to the story. After the story is read, the facilitator asks the following two questions.

• Is there anything in this passage that you don’t like or that creates tension in you?

• What do you like most about this passage?

Tension

In OBS, we say, “There is no attention without tension.” That is the purpose of this first question. If members of the group are honest and vulnerable, this question will surface the internal conflict needed to find discipline-able conversations in the group setting. The group will do a good job discussing these tensions if trust and vulnerability are present in the group. It’s very important for the facilitator to set the culture by modeling an appropriate answer to the question, especially early on.

Likes

This question will surface what the Holy Spirit is trying to communicate to the member or the group from the passage being read. Make sure to press into “WHY” they like the principle and “WHAT” they like about it. What deeper message does it speak to them?

Second Read Through

At this point in the segment, have another person read through the same passage a second time. Make sure they have a different version of the Bible. Often, I’ll lean into a more palatable version, such as the Message or New Living Translation. This always surfaces new thoughts and feelings.

Then ask this set of questions.

• What does this teach us about the nature or heart of God or Jesus?

• What does this teach us about the nature or heart of people?

• * Where are you in this story?

• Who are you going to share this story with before we meet again?

This *third question is, by far, the most important one. This is the transition into segment three – the accountability leg of the stool, which is most often overlooked in group settings.

Segment 3 – Look Forward

In this segment, the goal is for each person to leave with 1-3 ACTION POINTS that they will accomplish before the group meets again. The facilitator takes notes so that in Segment One of the next meeting, they can follow up on these commitments.

The key to effective action points is that they don’t come from the facilitator, guilt, other members, or a sharp mind. They must come from the Holy Spirit.

So, how do we discern what the Holy Spirit is communicating to us?

WE ASK HIM!

This practice is the jet fuel for this segment of the group. If you miss this part, you’ll miss the power of the Three Third Process!

The Prayer

Pull out a timer on your phone or assign someone else to time the prayer. Tell the group that you are going to take 3 minutes to pray and ask God how He would like you to respond to this discussion –

What Does He Want You To Do About It?

This process began in the previous segment, but will be clarified here.

Sit in silence for three minutes to ask God what response He would like from YOU!

Each person asks themselves the question.

The Action Point Step

After the three minutes are up, let the group go around the room and share their accountability action point. Encourage everyone to share, but do so without being forceful. Make sure to write down the commitments so you’ll have them available in Segment One of the next group meeting. You will ask how things went with these action points next time!

Close the Group

After you have completed this step, you can have a prayer time to close the group. Make your prayers specific and powerful. God gives big answers to big asks. Believe together as a faith family. Don’t overdo it, but don’t take this act for granted or minimize it

The Following examples are series that you can do with your Three-Thirds Group, which have been time-tested and found to produce good fruit in disciple-making communities.

Disciple-Making Series

HOPE SERIES (FOR SEEKERS)

Use the following passages for the “LOOK UP” portion of your group. Your group may need more than one meeting for some of the passages.

1. Hope for the sinner: Luke 18:9-14

2. Hope for the poor: Luke 12:13-34

3. Hope for the runaway: Luke 15:11-32

4. Hope for the lost: Luke 19:1-10

5. Hope for the grieving: John 11:1-44

6. Hope for the seeker: John 3:1-21

SIGNS OF JOHN (FOR SEEKERS)

Use the following passages for the “LOOK UP” portion of your group. Your group may need more than one meeting for some of the passages.

1. Turning of water into wine: John 2:1-12

2. Healing of the royal official’s son: John 4:46-54

3. Healing of the paralytic: John 5:1-17

4. Feeding of the five thousand: John 6:1-14

5. Walking on water: John 6:15-25

6. Healing of the man born blind: John 9:1-41

7. Raising Lazarus from the dead: John 11:1-46

DISCOVER SERIES (FOR GROUPS THAT NEED BIBLE BACKGROUND & FAMILIARITY)

Use the following passages for the “LOOK UP” portion of your group. Your group may need more than one meeting for some of the passages.

Discover God- who is God and what He is like

1. Creation- Genesis 1

2. Creation of People- Genesis 2

3. Disobedience of People- Genesis 3

4. Noah and the Flood- Genesis 6:5-8:14

5. God’s Promise with Noah- Genesis 8:15 - 9:17

6. God Speaks to Abraham- Genesis 12:1-7; 15:1-6

7. David becomes King of Abraham’s Descendants 1 Samuel 16:1-13; 2 Samuel 7:1-28

8. King David and Bathsheba- 2 Samuel 11: 1-27

9. Nathan’s Story- 2 Samuel 12:1-25

10. God Promises Savior will come- Isaiah 53

Discover Jesus - who is Jesus and why did He come

1. Savior born- Matthew 1:18-25

2. Jesus’ Baptism- Matthew 3:7-9, 13-15

3. Crazy Man Healed- Mark 5:1-20

4. Jesus never Loses Sheep- John 10:1-30

5. Jesus Heals the Blind- Luke 18:31-42

6. Jesus and Zacchaeus- Luke 19:1-9

7. Jesus and Matthew- Matthew 9:9-13

8. Jesus is the Only Way- John 14:1-15

9. Holy Spirit Coming- John 16:5-15

10. Last Dinner- Luke 22:14-20

11. Arrest and Trial- Luke 22:47-53; 23:13-24

12. Execution- Luke 23:33-56

13. Jesus is Alive- Luke 24:1-7, 36-47; Acts 1:1-11 14. Believing and Doing- Philippians 3:3-9

For about the past year, my Premium Disciple-Making Cohort has included some fun and super helpful tools I’ve built for no extra cost. My favorite, by far, is the Simple Bible Notes App.

This tool goes a LONG WAY toward simplifying your Bible Study and Prayer Life.

AND THIS WEEK I DROPPED A MAJOR UPGRADE!

I just included the MY PRAYER PATHWAY tool to track and steward prayer life.

• Enter New Prayer Requests

• Determine How Often You Want to Pray for It

• Walk Through a Prayer Session with All Your Requests

• Mark and Report When It Has Been Answered

• Keep Notes as You Are Praying Through Them

• View Your Dashboard of Prayer History

  ---

  

  ---

You know how I’m wired—I’ve always got a Bible open, a notebook half full, and about eight tabs on my laptop of “something I mean to study later.” For years, I tried to capture what God was teaching me in a way that actually sticks. I’ve filled journals, used fancy Bible software, tried Evernote, Logos, Google Drive, you name it. Each one worked for a while… until it didn’t. I’ve lost more notes than I can count, remember, or ever hope to re-create.

What I really wanted was one safe and retrievable place to hold it all -

• My Bible Teaching Notes

• Personal Insights

• SOAPS studies

• Favorite Quotes

• AND My Prayer Life

✚ Plus, I wanted to do all of that without feeling like I was operating a nuclear submarine!

AND I needed it searchable and organized with categories and tags.

But the biggest problem was that I couldn’t find a solution that printed a batch of stuff based on a specific topic, keyword, or category!

ARGGHHH! 😖😫😣‼️

So last year, I finally FOUND THE PERFECT SOLUTION.

💥 I built it myself - REALLY! 💥

It’s called Simple Bible Notes, and it feels like the study tool I’ve always needed. It’s where I gather EVERYTHING the Lord’s shown me, those connections between verses (you can cross-reference), journal moments during prayer, ideas for future teachings, even half-baked sermon outlines that might grow into something more.

AND NOW I’ve Added a Prayer Request Tracking System!

Click HERE to Check It Out

It’s not flashy. There’s no noise or clutter. Just a simple space where I can

• Write or import Bible lessons I’ve taught or am preparing

• Keep sermon notes, both the ones I’ve preached and the ones I’ve listened to

• Store quotes, reflections, and favorite passages

• Use the SOAPS method (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer, Share) in the App as a fillable form

• Cross-reference verses and trace themes through Scripture

• Search everything later when I can’t remember which notebook I wrote it in

• Participate in Structured Bible Reading Plans

• AND NOW! Track my daily, weekly, and monthly prayers and which ones have been answered and still ongoing.

  ---

The longer I use it, the more I like it! I’m glad I spent the time on it. I can scroll through my notes and literally see how God’s been shaping me, how certain passages kept showing up in different seasons, how prayers evolved into stories, and how lessons from years ago still echo today.

It has become part of my rhythm, like sitting down with coffee, opening my Bible, and knowing every note I write actually has a home. And reminding me on a daily basis to pray for those I love and hope for.

I decided to make it available for others who study and teach like I do. It’s $5 a month or $50 a year, but if you’re part of my Premium Cohort on Substack, it’s already included, a little “thank you” for being part of this community that’s chasing disciple-making and spiritual depth together.

When you UPGRADE to PREMIUM, find the discount code in your welcome email.

CLICK THE BUTTON TO UPGRADE 👇 at 25% Off! (a discount code for Simple Bible Notes will be in your welcome email)

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If you’ve ever felt like your spiritual insights are scattered or hard to find later, I think this might be a quiet blessing to you, just as it has been to me.

You can check it out here: simplebiblenotes.com ‼️

Here’s to staying rooted, reflective, and organized as we walk this journey with Jesus—one note, one conversation, one Scripture at a time.

Click HERE to Join the Premium Cohort!

Part 1 of this series broke down the math. $3.5 million or $1,400 per person per year to run a megachurch of 2,500. $40 a person to run 100 simple churches of 25. The response was overwhelming. Dozens of you restacked it, argued with it, and asked the same question in the comments over and over:

“Okay, but HOW?”

Click Here to Read Part 1

How does a guy with no seminary degree and a full-time job actually multiply a church? Fair question. So let’s answer it.

Here’s what most church growth books don’t tell you: multiplication isn’t a strategy problem. It’s a relational problem. And relational problems have relational solutions.

🎯 Simple churches don’t multiply because they’re clever. They multiply because they’re small enough to truly experience the 59 one-anothers of scripture. And to share that with others who join their community.

Let’s talk about why.

The Relational Ceiling Nobody Talks About

In Part 1, we mentioned the Dunbar Number, the idea that human beings have a hard biological ceiling on the number of meaningful relationships they can maintain. But we didn’t talk about what happens when a church tries to grow past it without ever addressing it.

Here’s what happens: the church doesn’t actually get bigger. It gets more crowded.

A 2,500-member congregation isn’t 2,500 relationships. It’s maybe 150 relationships surrounded by 2,350 strangers who happen to park in the same lot on Sunday. The size grows. The oikos doesn’t.

Compare that to Jesus’ own math. He had access to crowds of thousands (Matthew 14:21). He could have built the first megachurch in human history with a single afternoon of miracles.

Instead:

• 👉 He had dozens, and maybe hundreds, of followers.

• 👉 He chose twelve.

• 👉 He poured into three (Peter, James, John) more than the twelve.

Jesus wasn’t limited by a lack of resources. He was following a relational law of the universe: depth requires proximity, and proximity has a ceiling.

Every megachurch pastor knows this instinctively, which is why they build small groups inside the big group. But that’s the thing. If the real spiritual growth happens in the small group anyway, why do we keep building (and funding, and staffing, and insuring) the big container around it?

The One-Anothers Can’t Happen in a Crowd

Here’s a phrase we use constantly in the Disciple-Making Collective: the 59 “one-anothers.”

Click Here for the One-Anothers

Fifty-nine times the New Testament tells believers to do something to and for one another, love one another, bear one another’s burdens, confess sins to one another, encourage one another, stir up one another to love and good works, forgive one another, serve one another.

Try to obey those commands with 2,500 people.

You can’t.

You physically, relationally, and logistically cannot. So what happens instead? The one-anothers get delegated.

• Confessing sin becomes a pastoral counseling appointment.

• Bearing burdens becomes a benevolence fund.

• Encouragement becomes a greeting-time handshake.

The commands don’t disappear. They just get professionalized, and something is lost every time obedience gets outsourced to a staff member.

✔ In a simple church of 12-25, the one-anothers aren’t a program.

🔥 They’re Tuesday night simple church.

Multiplication Is Easy When the Unit Is Small

This should genuinely excite you.

• Small isn’t just more relational.

• It’s more reproducible.

Think about it like cell biology. A single cell doesn’t grow to the size of a building and then explode into a thousand new organisms. It reaches a healthy, sustainable size, and then it divides. Growth by multiplication, not by mass.

The church in Acts operated the same way. Nobody in Antioch was trying to build the biggest gathering in Syria. Paul and Barnabas planted, appointed elders “in each church” (Acts 14:23), and moved to the next city.

The Discipling-Making Collective pathway follows that same biological logic:

♻️ Seeker Group → X-Group → Discipling Community → Simple Church → Seeker Group → Etc.

Click Here for the Disciple-Making Pathway

Each stage is small enough that everyone in it can be known, and small enough that everyone in it can lead. And then it replicates.

That second part matters more than people realize:

✔️ A megachurch trains leaders for years before handing them responsibility, because the stakes of a platform mistake are enormous.

✔️ A simple church can hand a Three-Thirds meeting to someone who trusted Christ six months ago, because leadership here isn’t about performing for a crowd; it’s about faithfully facilitating a conversation among people who already know and trust you.

Low relational stakes = low leadership barrier = fast multiplication.

That’s not a compromise on quality.

That’s the apostolic design.

Your Oikos Is Already Sized for Multiplication

Let’s stop being theoretical and start being personal.

You already have a relational network sized exactly for this kind of multiplication. It’s called your oikos, the Greek word for the people connected to where you Live, Learn, Work, and Play. Most people, when they actually sit down and list it out (try the List of 100), discover they have 80-150 people they have real relational access to.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s Acts 17:26-27, God has “determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” so that people “should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” He didn’t just place nations strategically. He placed you strategically, in the middle of a web of relationships sized perfectly for one person to steward well.

A prayer map (or oikos map) takes that invisible network and makes it visible: your name in the center, 5-10 names branching out, and then, if you’re praying and paying attention, their names branching out from them. Green for the ones making disciples. Yellow for the believers not yet living like missionaries. Red for the ones still far from Jesus.

That map is your simple church before it exists. It’s the relational soil the whole multiplication pathway grows out of.

The Persecution Test

One more relational advantage simple churches have that megachurches structurally cannot: antifragility.

When persecution hit the church in Jerusalem in Acts 8, the believers scattered. A megachurch model would call that a catastrophe: the building’s gone, the staff is displaced, the “ministry” is over.

But look at what actually happened: “Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went” (Acts 8:4). Scattering didn’t kill the movement. It multiplied it because the “church” was never the building or the brand; it was the relationships and the disciples carrying the mission in their own bodies.

A network of 100 simple churches can absorb a hit that would flatten a single 2,500-member institution. Not because simple churches are more resilient people, but because the mission was never centralized in one fragile container to begin with.

Helpful? Click the Button and Buy Me a Coffee.

So What Do You Actually Do Monday Morning?

Not “go plant a church.” Start smaller than that.

• Pull out a piece of paper and build your prayer map. Name 5-10 people in your oikos.

• Color-code them honestly—green, yellow, red.

• Pick one red or yellow name and pray the BLESS prayer over them this week (Body, Labor, Emotions, Social, Spiritual).

• Have one spiritual conversation before Friday.

That’s it. That’s the whole “strategy.” Because the multiplication math from Part 1, 100 churches planting one new church every two years, reaching 80,000 people in a decade, doesn’t start with a building fund or a five-year plan.

It starts with twelve people.

It starts with one name on a piece of paper.

It starts with you.

If you want to learn more about Simple Church, prayer mapping, and the tools that make relational multiplication actually work, DM me or go to disciplemakingcollective.com!

And stumbling out of the tree line, a company of soldiers is making their way back toward camp. Some are holding their shoulders. Some are limping. One man has his arm draped around his buddy just to keep upright. The others are moving on nothing but willpower and a desire to find some measure of relief.

🚫 They’re not looking for a meeting.
🤕 They are hungry and bleeding.
🔥 They’re looking for a fire.
❤️‍🩹 They are looking for support.

🚶‍♀️🚶🚶🏽‍♂️They need each other.

Somewhere in the distance, a large bonfire burns on the horizon, visible through the smoke and the confusion. Leading them to rest. And battle-weary soldiers who have lost their bearings know exactly what it means: that’s where safety is. That’s where food is. That’s where the people who know what I’ve been through are waiting.

They walk slowly but urgently toward it ready for support and healing.

That image is one of the most clarifying pictures of what the gathered church is actually supposed to be.

Not a performance, or a program to be managed, or a service to be attended.

🔥 A fire. A beacon. A place where the weary come home so they can go back to the front line tomorrow armed, healed, rested, and ready for the MISSION.

Dig Deeper In My Latest Book - Click HERE.

You’ve Been to Battle. Did Anyone Ask?

If you’ve been doing the real work of disciple-making, walking into your oikos, having spiritual conversations with your neighbors, praying over your workplace, and showing up as a sent one (missionary), you know what the soldiers coming out of that tree line feel like.

· It’s exhilarating.

· AND it’s exhausting.

Some days, the Spirit moves in a conversation that rips a discipling relationship wide open. Other days you come home feeling like you got punched in the gut, and the ground didn’t move an inch. This is the frontline life of a disciple of Jesus. It is not a passive life. It’s a life on the grounds of a raging battle in the heavenlies.

So when you finally make it to the gathering , the Tuesday night simple church, the Friday afternoon small group, the Sunday morning gathering, the question is: does it actually feel like the safety and security of the campfire? Or does it feel like another meeting to sit through just to say you did? This is not a judgment statement, but an exploration that may lead to a Great Adventure!

🔥 IT WAS MORE LIKE CIVIL WAR CAMPFIRE! Where safety, healing, rest, and security were found by the weary soldiers lingering in from the front lines.

The Twelve Things Every Campfire Does

Greg Getz and a handful of disciple-makers put words to something most of us in simple church circles were feeling but couldn’t articulate almost 15 years ago. They identified twelve distinct experiences that happened around a Civil War campfire, and every single one of them has a direct parallel in a healthy gathered disciple-making community that is sending missionaries back into the front lines.

Here’s what your campfire is supposed to do.

1. Security.
The first thing a soldier felt when he stumbled into the firelight was this: nobody here is shooting at me. The people in your gathered community need to feel the same thing. They have been navigating workplaces where their faith is mocked, neighborhoods where spiritual conversations get awkward fast, and internal battles nobody else knows about. Before they can receive anything, they need to know they are safe. No judgment. No gossip. No weaponizing vulnerability. Build that culture or nothing else on this list will work.

2. Food.
Soldiers were hungry. So is your community, physically and spiritually. The early church ate together constantly, and it wasn’t just strategy. Food slows people down. It removes status. It creates the conditions for real conversation. Don’t skip the physical table.

But food also means spiritual equipping, truth your people can carry back into the battle. The best spiritual food in your community might not come from the loudest voice. Paul said it plainly in 1 Corinthians 14:26: when you gather, each one has something. Make room for it in your gathered community.

3. First Aid.
Company surgeons didn’t ask whether a soldier deserved treatment. They treated him. Some of the people walking into your gathering this week are bleeding.

• Marriage trouble.

• Anxiety and depression.

• Grief.

• Old wounds that never fully healed.

Your community is not a hospital, but it should have the equivalent of a field surgeon. Someone who knows how to apply pressure to a wound, recognize when professional help is needed, and create enough safety that people can admit they’re hurt at all. The 59 one-anothers in the New Testament are a first-aid manual for exactly this.

4. Unwinding.
There was always a period after the soldiers arrived when the adrenaline drained away. The hypervigilance of the battlefield began to release. Maybe some laughter. Maybe long stretches of silence that didn’t need to be filled. Most of our gatherings struggle with this. We are addicted to productivity. We fill every moment with content and treat silence like a problem. And in doing so, we rob our people of the single most important social lubricant in the entire gathering: the chance to be themselves before things get started. If people don’t have space to unwind, they’ll carry their armor through the whole evening. And armored people don’t tell real stories.

5. Camaraderie.
This is what unwinding becomes when it goes deep. The soldiers around that fire weren’t bonded by compatible personalities. They were bonded by shared suffering, liminal experiences, and they had been in the same fight, seen the same things, survived the same chaos. Real camaraderie in your gathered community isn’t manufactured by icebreakers. It is forged in shared mission.

When your people are actually doing the work together, serving the same neighborhood, praying for the same lost friends, celebrating together when someone finally comes to faith, the bond builds itself.

6. Stories of the Day.
Around the Civil War campfire, soldiers told the raw, unfiltered stories of what happened out there. Moments of courage and cowardice. Things they couldn’t process alone. Make room for this in your gathering.

When someone shares a gospel conversation that went somewhere unexpected, that story does something in the room no sermon can replicate. When someone admits they chickened out of a conversation they knew they should have had, and the room responds not with judgment but with recognition, that is formation happening in real time.

Protect the stories. Ask for them.

💥 The Spirit of God is as active in our confusion as in our clarity.

7. Reports of the Day.
After the stories, the camp captain asked questions.

• Where were you?

• Did you hold the line?

• What happened when things broke?

This is accountability built into the rhythm of gathering. We have so overcorrected against legalism that we’ve swung to the opposite extreme, where asking whether someone followed through on what they said they’d do feels invasive.

It isn’t.

Disciples who know they will be asked next week whether they acted on their commitment are more likely to act. Not out of fear. Out of the holy pressure of being genuinely known.

8. Re-Directing.
Based on the reports, the captain re-directed, told his soldiers which ground to take tomorrow. In your gathered community, re-directing is the art of helping people see what their specific next step is. Not generic advice. Specific, responsive, earned by actually listening to where people are. Based on what you just shared about your neighbor, here’s what I think you should try next. This is why attentive leadership matters. You cannot re-direct someone you haven’t truly heard.

9. Re-Arming.
Soldiers didn’t leave the campfire with the same depleted resources they carried in. Cartridge pouches were refilled. Broken weapons replaced. Rations re-supplied. Re-arming in your gathered community means your people leave with something they can actually use tomorrow.

🎤 Not information they heard passively.
🧰 Tools they can deploy.

BLESS. The Prayer Map. The 3-Minute Story. Whatever the battle in your specific mission field requires. Responsive, just-in-time equipping that answers the question: what do these soldiers need to fight better in the next seven days?

10. Rest.
The soldier who stayed up all night wasn’t ready for battle the next morning. Getting adequate rest was his own personal responsibility. There is a Sabbath theology buried in this that the Western church has nearly forgotten. We have confused busyness with faithfulness. The most effective disciple-makers aren’t the busiest ones. They’re the ones who’ve learned to stop, trust God to keep working, and come back to the mission refreshed. A soldier who refuses to rest becomes a liability.

So does a disciple-maker who never stops.

11. Return to Battle.
Any soldiers still lingering around the campfire the next morning were out of place. Nobody dragged them back to the front lines. It was their own responsibility to return. This is one of the most neglected implications of the entire campfire metaphor. The gathering is not the destination. It is the launching pad 🚀. The fire is not where the mission happens. The fire is where you get ready for the mission to happen everywhere else, in your oikos, in your neighborhood, in your city.

The most important question you can ask in your gathered community isn’t always about spiritual content. Sometimes it’s questions like this:

❓ Who are you going back to?

❓ What are you doing in your oikos tomorrow?

❓ Name it here and these people are going to ask you about it next time.

12. Flexible Expectations.
The battle lines were never in the same place twice. Soldiers who returned to the exact same position expecting the exact same fight were in danger of fighting an engagement that no longer existed. Disciple-making communities or gathered Sunday events that become rigid, having found what works and refusing to adapt, are fighting yesterday’s battle.

Your format is the wineskin.

The twelve elements are the wine.

Hold your form loosely. Build enough flexibility to follow the Spirit rather than manage a program.

This Is What the Church Was Always Supposed to Be

Acts 2 is not a model to replicate. It is a gift to unwrap.

The apostles’ teaching - that’s the food and the re-arming. The fellowship - that’s the camaraderie and the unwinding. The breaking of bread - that’s the security of the shared table. The prayer - that’s the posture of dependence on the One whose campfire this actually is.

The details vary. They always have.

The Holy Spirit hasn’t stopped designing gatherings for specific people in specific places on specific missions. Your campfire doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. But it needs to look like something, and what it needs to look like is a fire that battle-weary people can spot on the horizon and walk toward, knowing that when they arrive, they will be safe, fed, healed, heard, held accountable, re-equipped, and then sent back out.

Because the campfire is not home.

⚔️ The battle is the MISSION.

🔥 Rest at the campfire.

🏃‍♂️ And then get back to the field.

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When you picture a disciple-maker, the kind of person who walks with others toward Jesus, who builds into people’s spiritual lives, who actually multiplies the Kingdom in the places where they live, learn, work, and play, what do they look like?

How do you know if, and when, someone is qualified to be a disciple-maker?

Now, I remind you that I am not talking about someone walking in their own internal disciple-SHIP pathway; I’m talking about one who is fully committed to walking with someone else on their journey toward Jesus.

• Does the disciple-maker have a seminary degree?

• Do they know Greek?

• Do they preach well?

• Are they the kind of person who has a gift for public speaking and a way with words that makes a room go quiet?

• Have they been in ministry for twenty years?

• Do they have a title in front of their name or letters behind it?

If you checked any of those proverbial boxes and the person you imagined looks more like a pastor than a plumber, more like a theologian than a middle school teacher, more like a professional than an ordinary person living an ordinary life, then let’s talk. Because the assumptions we carry about who qualifies to make disciples are quietly slowing down the Jesus movement. And those assumptions are not coming from Scripture.

They are coming from a system we built.

🧱 And it is time to dismantle them, brick by brick 🧱

The Qualification Problem

Here is what most of us were taught, either explicitly in a class or implicitly by watching how things work in most legacy churches: ministry belongs to the professionals.

• The pastor makes disciples.

• The youth leader makes disciples.

• The one who grew up in church and has read the whole Bible more than once makes disciples.

The person with the platform, the microphone, the title, and the theological training, that’s the disciple-maker. Everyone else is the audience and plays supportive roles, and invites the crowd to worship services, and takes up offerings, or parks cars.

When you internalize that long enough, a particular kind of paralysis sets in. You start to genuinely, sincerely believe that you are not qualified. That you haven’t arrived yet. That you need one more class, one more year of spiritual growth, one more confirmation from a leader you respect before you can step into the Great Commission.

I have watched this happen over and over again. Men and women who are deeply in love with Jesus, who carry a genuine burden for the people in their oikos, who feel the tug of the Holy Spirit toward missional living, and who are sitting still. Waiting for a green light that is never coming. Because they’ve been told, in a hundred different subtle ways, that someone more qualified is supposed to do this.

Let me say this as clearly as I can. That is not what Jesus taught. That is not what Jesus modeled. And that is not who Jesus chose to do the significant work of launching the movement He founded two thousand years ago.

The Least Likely Led the Charge

When Jesus launched the most impactful and world-wide transformational movement in human history, He had options. He had a lot of them. Historians estimate that at the height of His ministry, Jesus had access to somewhere around six to eight million Jews in the Roman Empire.

Conservatively, six million people who shared His heritage, His Scripture. And from those millions, He could have hand-selected the finest theological minds of His generation. He could have recruited the graduates of the best rabbinical schools in Jerusalem. He could have gone straight to the scholars and the Pharisees, who already knew the text inside and out, and to the priests who held positions of religious authority. He could have even picked from the 70-ish most qualified religious leaders of his time from the Sanhedrin.

💥 He Didn’t 💥

Read that slowly.

He. Did. Not.

🐠 He walked to the water’s edge, where rough-handed fishermen were doing the less-than-glamorous work of sorting fish and mending nets, and He called them to follow Him. The unclean fisherman who touched dead fish every day and couldn’t show up at temple without cleansing rituals.

💰 He showed up at a tax collector’s booth, the desk of a man most respectable Jewish society considered a traitor and a thief, and He said, “Come with me.” And then He threw a party with all his friends!

⚔️ He recruited Zealots with violent political agendas. He called Simon Peter, who would later, at a campfire on the worst night of his life, swear up and down that he never knew the man.

Most of these guys had probably been rejected from advanced rabbinical study. In the Jewish education system of the first century, young boys who demonstrated exceptional promise were invited to continue in the study of Torah under a rabbi. Those who didn’t make the cut, even as young teenagers, went home and helped with their family business or learned a trade. They became fishermen, tax collectors, and craftsmen. They went back to ordinary life.

❤️‍🔥 And Jesus walked right past the elite and chose the rejects.

The movement that would turn the known world upside down within a couple of generations did not launch from the most credentialed, respected, and powerful people in the room. It launched from unclean fishermen and social outcasts. It launched with flawed, impulsive, sometimes cowardly human beings who had one thing in common: they said “YES!” to following Jesus.

👉 So, when you sit quietly in those pews and think you’re not qualified enough, not educated enough, not spiritually mature enough to make disciples, I want you to hear this clearly: Jesus is not asking for your résumé. He is asking for your obedience.

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The Rabbi and the Talmidim: What “Follow Me” Actually Meant

To understand who can be a disciple and who can make one, you need to understand something about how discipleship actually worked in the world Jesus lived in.

In first-century Jewish culture, the rabbi was the advanced-level teacher. The talmidim were his students. But the relationship was not primarily academic. It was not a lecture or a test. It was not a curriculum completed in a classroom. The talmidim FOLLOWED their rabbi, literally and everywhere.

• They watched how he prayed.

• They observed how he treated people.

• They saw him when he was tired.

• They heard how he handled conflict, navigated difficult conversations, and responded when things went sideways.

The goal of a talmid was not to master the rabbi’s content. The goal was to become LIKE the rabbi. They “walked in His dust,” as one of my favorite teachers, Ray Vander Laan says. This is a phrase taken from ancient Jewish instruction, which said a student should walk so closely behind his rabbi that the dust the teacher’s sandals kicked up would settle on the student’s own clothes. That was the aspiration. Get close enough to be marked by the life of your teacher.

And then, the rabbi’s ultimate act of investment was to look at his students and say, “I believe you can do what I do.” The greatest affirmation a rabbi could give was to release a talmid with the authority and the responsibility to go and make their own disciples.

🚶🚶‍♀️🚶🏽‍♂️“Come, follow me,” Jesus said. 🚶🏽‍♂️🚶‍♀️🚶

Three words.

But they were not an invitation to a class. They were an invitation into a life. They were a declaration. Walk with me, watch me, do what I do, and eventually lead others to do the same. “Follow Me!”

✔ That is the model.

And notice what is not in the model. You will not find a degree, a platform, a building, or a budget. What is in the model is proximity, obedience, and the willingness to be shaped by the life of the one walking ahead of you.

Now, here is the question that matters to you and me.

❓If that is what Jesus meant by “follow me,” then who can step into that call❓

Every single one of us.

🚫 Not someday.

🟢 Now.

Discipleship and Disciple-Making Are Not Sequential

Here is one of the most liberating truths in this entire book: you do not graduate from being a disciple into making disciples. You grow in both at the same time. Read that again, because I know some of you are already building a case against it.

I am not saying that brand-new followers of Jesus should immediately attempt to teach a theology class or lead a missional community. What I am saying is this: the moment you begin following Jesus, you are equipped to invite someone else to start the same journey alongside you. You don’t need a complete map to be a guide. You just need to be a few steps further down the trail.

Jesus himself illustrated this when He sent the twelve on mission in Luke 9, and then the seventy-two in Luke 10, before they fully understood who He was and before they had witnessed the resurrection.

He sent them in the middle of their own growth journey. He sent them incomplete and in process and still making mistakes.

And they went.

And things happened.

And they came back having seen the Kingdom move.

Once again, Paul put it plainly to his young disciple Timothy:

As I said early in the book, this is four generations of disciple-making embedded in a single sentence, and it was written by a man who simultaneously had a thorn in the flesh, relational conflict with Barnabas, and a long list of personal struggles he was working through in real time.

Paul was not finished growing when he wrote that. He never finished growing. And neither will you. That is not the standard Jesus set. The standard is faithfulness, not perfection.

🛑 So, stop waiting 🛑

The green light Jesus gave at the utterance of the Great Commission has not expired. The moment you surrender your life to Jesus is the moment you are called into the work of helping others do the same!

So Let’s Go!

Let’s put our Hand To The Plow and not look back!

👉 Not everyone in your circle is ready for the same investment right now. And not everyone who says “I want to make disciples” actually means it, 💥YET💥.

If you’ve ever poured hours into someone who never moved an inch, or overlooked someone who was quietly hungry for more, you already know the problem. You weren’t lacking effort.

You were lacking a tool to assess THEIR READINESS.

I want to give you the best tool I’ve found to find the most disciple-able people in my disciple-making world. Those who assess ready on this tool become my network’s most effective multipliers of disciples. It’s called GWC — Get It, Want It, Capacity to do it.

I didn’t invent this. I borrowed it and contextualized it, happily and without apology, from Gino Wickman’s book Traction, where he uses it as part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System to evaluate whether someone is right for a role in a business.

The moment I started applying it, I couldn’t unsee its application to disciple-making. If it helps a business owner figure out who belongs in what seat, it can absolutely help a disciple-maker figure out where someone actually is on the disciple-making pathway, and how to appropriately invest in them and coach them to be more effective disciple-makers advancing the best news that ever has been, that Jesus died and rose again, that we might have life to the fullest.

🔥 IT DOESN’T GET ANY MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT!

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Three Questions That Change Everything

GWC asks three simple, non-judgmental questions about a person:

1. Get It — Do they understand the Great Commission not as a verse to quote, but as a lifestyle to live? Have they had the paradigm shift where they see their oikos, the people where they live, learn, work, and play, as an appointed mission field?

2. Want It — Do they have the will, the urgency, the willingness to pay the cost? Understanding something intellectually and wanting it enough to reorder your life around it are two very different things.

3. Capacity — Do they have the bandwidth, in this season of life, to engage? A single mom working two jobs may Get It and Want It with everything in her, but simply not have the margin right now. That’s not a spiritual failure. That’s real life.

None of these three questions is about someone’s worth, their salvation, or their spiritual maturity. They’re diagnostic, not judicial. GWC isn’t a tool for ranking people. It’s a tool for being honest about where they are, so you can invest the ❤️‍🔥 right way, at the ⏰ right time, in the 📐 right measure.

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The Eight Combinations — Read the Map

Once you start asking these three questions honestly, eight combinations emerge. Learn them. They will change how you spend your time.

✔ 3-Stars: Get It + Want It + Capacity = Launch. This is your green light. This person is ready right now to launch an X-Group, lead a Discipling Community, or initiate a movement. Don’t wait for more ideal conditions.

👉 Get with them and go.

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✔ 2-Stars: Get It + Want It, No Capacity = Procrastination. Tread carefully here. What looks like a capacity issue might actually be a priority issue in disguise. Walk with them. Ask honest questions. Help them discern whether life genuinely has no margin or whether busyness has become a convenient place to hide.

👉 Keep investing and keep being honest.

✔ 2-Stars: Get It + Capacity, No Want It = Never Launch. This person understands the mission and has the time, but keeps pulling back from full commitment. This is usually a comfort or cost issue. It doesn’t need a guilt trip; it needs a deeper conversation about counting the cost of following Jesus. This is often your “disciple-teacher,” the person who can talk brilliantly about disciple-making principles but never quite lives the lifestyle.

👉 Pray for the Holy Spirit to light the ❤️‍🔥 fire!

✔ 2-Stars: Want It + Capacity, No Get It = Disciple First, Disciple-Maker Later. Heart and margin are both there. The vision just hasn’t clicked yet. Your job is investment and modeling. The commission will eventually become their own.

👉 Bring them along, show them what it looks like in real life, give them language and handles.

✔ 1-Star: Want It, No Capacity, No Get It = Theorizing and Dreaming. They love the idea. They just can’t yet translate it into reality. Be patient. Be present.

👉 Keep the vision in front of them, and be ready to move the moment their season shifts quickly.

✔ 1-Star: Capacity, No Want It, No Get It = Busy With No Fruit. This one is sobering. The life looks completely full, but nothing is multiplying. Nothing is reproducing. This person needs a prophetic voice who loves them enough to say plainly: you have capacity for things that aren’t advancing the Kingdom. What would it look like to redirect some of that?

👉 Challenge them with hard questions that catalyze introspection.

✔ 0-Stars: No Get It, No Want It, No Capacity = Not Yet. This is not rejection. Hear that clearly. This is a person who needs consistent, patient, incarnational investment from someone in their oikos, someone who will pray for them, love them, and keep showing up without an agenda.

👉 The timing belongs to God. Your job is faithfulness.

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The Principle That Changes Where You Spend Your Time

Here’s where GWC stops being an interesting framework and starts being a strategy:

😳 More time with fewer people produces greater results.

Since that’s our primary principle in disciple-making, the practical application of GWC is unavoidable: spend most of your time with your 2-star and 3-star people. These are the ones who are Get It and Want It, the ones whose only barrier is capacity, or whose vision just needs sharpening.

• 💦 Pour into them.

• 💪 Coach them hard.

• 🏃‍♂️Send them out.

This is where multiplication actually happens, and this is where your time produces the greatest Kingdom return.

That does not mean you abandon your 0-star and 1-star people. It means you stop mistaking activity for fruitfulness.

🛑 You stop spreading yourself paper-thin trying to manufacture readiness in someone who isn’t there yet. You keep loving them. You keep praying for them. You keep the door open. But you stop making them the center of your disciple-making strategy, because right now, they aren’t ready to multiply what you give them.

💥 You’re not rejecting your 0- and 1-star people. You’re simply waiting on them.

And that waiting is not passive. Scripture is clear about what usually moves someone from “not yet” to “ready.” Generally, it happens in one of two ways:

• through pain and loss

• or through the activity of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes it’s both at once.

• a job loss

• a health scare

• a broken relationship

• a wake-up call

These things have a way of stripping away the illusions that kept someone comfortable in spiritual consumerism. And sometimes it’s simply the Spirit doing what only the Spirit can do: opening eyes, softening hearts, creating hunger where there was none.

You cannot manufacture either one.

You cannot rush pain into someone’s life, and you certainly cannot substitute yourself for the Holy Spirit. What you can do is stay present, stay faithful, and be ready to move the moment the door opens.

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Why This Matters More Than It Seems

This isn’t about efficiency for efficiency’s sake. It’s about stewardship. Jesus himself modeled selective, intentional investment

• He had crowds

• He had seventy-two

• He had twelve

• He had three

He didn’t pour His limited time equally into everyone who followed Him. He read where people were, and He invested accordingly, all while never writing anyone off.

GWC gives you permission to do the same, without guilt, without guessing, and without wasting years hoping someone’s readiness will simply appear through your sheer effort. It replaces vague frustration (”Why isn’t this person moving?”) with clear diagnosis (”They Get It and Want It, but their capacity really is maxed out right now, let’s walk with them and watch for the season to shift”).

So here’s your assignment.

Take an honest look at your oikos, your Discipling Community, your church. Run the people God has put in front of you through Get It, Want It, Capacity. Find your 2s and 3s, and go all in with them. Keep loving your 0s and 1s, and keep waiting on the Lord to do what only He can do.

This is not rejection.

This is wisdom.

This is the field guide Jesus gave His disciples.

And it still works today.

Beyond the Diagnosis: Why GWC Is a Moving Target, Not a Label

Most people use GWC once, slap a star rating on someone, and file it away like a permanent record. That’s a misuse of the tool. GWC isn’t a label — it’s a snapshot.

📸 And snapshots change.

A 1-star today can be a 3-star in six months. A 3-star can slide back to a 2-star the moment life throws a curveball:

• a job loss

• a newborn

• a season of grief

If you’re not re-assessing regularly, you’re coaching a ghost, not a person.

This is why the tool has to be relational, not administrative. You don’t run GWC on someone from a distance. You discern it with them, in conversation, over time, through the actual context of walking with them in Seeker Group, X-Group, or one-on-one discipling.

The moment GWC becomes a spreadsheet exercise instead of a relational lens, you’ve killed the very thing that made it powerful.

The Coach’s Real Job: Moving the Middle

Here’s where it gets practical.

Your 3-stars don’t need much from you, they need release, not management. Get out of their way and let them lead. Your 0-stars need patience and presence, nothing more. That leaves the real coaching work sitting in the middle: your 2-stars and your 1-stars.

This is where disciple-making actually gets skillful. A 2-star who Gets It and Wants It but lacks Capacity needs a different conversation than a 2-star who Gets It and has Capacity but doesn’t Want It. Collapse those into one generic “keep encouraging them” strategy, and you’ll miss both. The first needs help discerning priorities. The second needs a cost-counting conversation, not a guilt trip.

This is the muscle DMC coaches have to build: reading which combination you’re actually standing in front of and refusing to default to a one-size-fits-all pep talk.

The Holy Spirit Still Runs This

Next-level GWC use also means staying honest about your lane. You can cast vision (Get It). You cannot manufacture desire (Want It) or create bandwidth (Capacity) for someone else; that’s the Spirit’s territory and the disciple’s own responsibility. A coach who tries to do the Spirit’s job burns out fast and produces dependency instead of disciples.

Tie It to the Send

Don’t forget, Jesus sent the Twelve and the Seventy-Two in Luke 9 and 10 before they had it all figured out. GWC isn’t a gate that keeps people from mission until they’re perfect. It’s a lens that tells you how to send someone, not whether. A 2-star still gets sent, just with a different kind of coaching wrapped around them than a 3-star gets.

That’s the next level: GWC is not used as a filing system but as a living, Spirit-attentive, relationally-discerned map that changes how, not whether, you invest.

What are your thoughts?

❓ How do you envision implementing this into your disciple-making strategy❓

✏️ Leave me a COMMENT and let’s talk!

• The Great Commission
  Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. - Matthew 28:19-20

• The Great Commandment
  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. - Matthew 22:37-39

• The Great Rule
  Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. -Matthew 7:12

• The Great Target
  You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. - Acts 1:8

But, there is one GREAT that we often miss that teaches us about God’s strategy for how He intended (and intends) His Kingdom to multiply throughout planet Earth! And without it, we’ll slow down and miss the exponential power of disciple-making multiplication!

Ephesians 4:11 lists the five distinct functions God gives His Church through the leaders He calls to equip: Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher.

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APEST. The five-fold ministry.

Call it what you want, it’s not a hierarchical org chart. It’s not a structure where one leader has the authority and power to call all the shots. It’s the skeleton of a servant-leader team of ministers bound together to fulfill the Great Commission. It’s the Kingdom DNA of every healthy disciple-making community and movement that God puts together to reach and unreached people groups and lead them to full disciple-making maturity. This team was designed to function as one under the headship and authority of Jesus Christ.

And guess what? You can’t get that beautiful expression of faith family that is described in Ephesians 4:12-16 UNLESS you have a full expression of these equipping gifts represented in your ministry team. They work together to equip the saints for the work of the ministry and take beachheads among people groups in the places where we live, learn, work, and play!

How Does This Great Team Function?

For this team to work together, it’s important that each member knows their God-ordained function. There are a ton of assessments and tools. As a matter of fact, I built my own at thegreatteam.org (click to take it). But with all those tools, here’s the picture that finally made it click for a lot of people in our disciple-making network.

• A simple grid.

• Two questions.

• Four quadrants.

• One Cross in the middle.

1. Where do you prefer to work? Outside the church or inside the church?

2. How do you prefer to work? Structured or unstructured?

Plot those two questions on a graph, and suddenly the five functions stop being abstract theology and start being a map to your specific “GREAT TEAM” function in your mission field.

Two Ways to Read Ephesians 4:11

There are two ways to read that verse, and the one you choose determines whether APEST becomes an interesting theological footnote or a transformational framework for how you build a disciple-making team.

You can read it as a list of job titles. Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Shepherd, Teacher.

✅ Box checked.
🏃‍♂️ Moving on.

Or you can read it as a mission architecture. Five distinct, irreplaceable functions that together produce the full picture of the mature, multiplying leadership community we read about in Ephesians 4:11-16.

Learn more in My Book
“Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers.”
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💥 Here’s the key shift💥

The APEST is not describing five types of professional ministers. These are not roles to be filled on a staff org chart. Verse 11 describes a leadership team representing five kinds of Kingdom DNA that exist in every healthy disciple-making community. The community best reflects the Kingdom of God when all five are present and active, not when they’re all crammed into a senior pastor’s job description.

🤯 And not when only two of the five ever get developed because they’re the ones that make Sunday morning run smoothly.

Think of it this way. A body needs more than one organ to function. A lungs-only body would not last long. A heart-only body would not get far. The body works because every system is present, connected, and doing its part. The APEST is the organic, Spirit-given ministry anatomy of leadership in a community of disciples. The APEST functions best when the church is on the move, both gathered AND scattered. And each of those five functions plays a 💪POWERFUL role in both spaces.

❓The real question is whether we’re developing all five, or just the two that make our Sunday morning wheels keep spinning.

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The Four Quadrants

In this diagram, there are four quadrants. The X-axis represents whether a person thrives outside or inside the church walls. So the left half of our quadrant represents outside, while the right reflects those who prefer to work AMONG the believers. In other words, are you a gathered minister or a scattered minister?

The Y-axis represents whether you operate in a more structured pathway or if you prefer to work spontaneously and unstructured. Do you create pathways or operate in one-off relational encounters?

So let’s meet the team, and let’s put them on the map.

Top Left: The Apostle: Structured + Outside the Church.

The word apostle comes from the Greek apostolos, meaning “one who is sent.” The sent-ness is the whole point. The Apostle is the boundary pusher. 🤠 The pioneer. The person wired to look beyond what already exists and ask, “What is God doing over there, and how do we get there?”

They are missional visionaries by nature, drawn toward unreached people, uncomfortable with the status quo, compelled to expand the Kingdom into spaces where it does not yet exist.

Apostles see what is possible before anyone else does, and they have the courage and catalytic energy to go first. They see forests, not trees. How do we reach this city? And they think in movements, not maintenance.

They also have a God-given ability to connect different parts of the Body with one another; Paul wasn’t just planting churches; he was building a network of churches that served and strengthened one another.

💥 But the same drive that makes Apostles extraordinary pioneers can make them difficult teammates. They get frustrated with anything that feels like it’s slowing the mission down, which, in their view, is almost everything. They can leave a trail of unfinished things behind them in the rush toward the next frontier, and they can undervalue the shepherding and teaching that keep the people they launch connected and maturing.

• Without the Apostle, a team turns inward.

• The mission shrinks.

• The community starts serving itself instead of expanding the Kingdom.

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Top Right: The Teacher — Structured + Inside the Church.

This is the one who grounds everything in the Word. [Grk. didaskalos] one who instructs others in the truth of Scripture.

The Teacher can accurately handle the word of truth, break down the fundamental truths of the Bible, and communicate them in a way disciples can both understand and apply, moving people toward mature faith. They also protect the community from false teachers who show up with their own agenda.

An Apostle with a strong theological foundation is a far more sustainable pioneer than one flying on vision alone. A Prophet grounded in Scripture is far more discerning than one whose impressions answer to no one. The Teacher is what adds that balance to the whole team.

👀 But Teachers can mistake information for transformation. Explaining a passage is not the same as leading people to obey it, and their deep respect for tradition can calcify into a reflexive resistance to anything unfamiliar, exactly when a fast-moving Apostolic team needs to try something new.

Bottom Left: The Evangelist — Unstructured + Outside the Church.

This is the one who can’t sit still while people are far from God.

• They proclaim.

• They share the good news.

They scatter gospel seed into every relational soil they can find, and they thrive in unstructured, organic, outreach-shaped environments. They run ahead of everyone else, leaving a trail of gospel seed scattered everywhere, sometimes without sticking around to see what grows. Sometimes they seem flaky, or overly radical, or embarrass the rest of us by their boldness in public. Maybe they lead someone to the cross and then leave them in the dust.

• Is that irresponsible?

• Or is it by design?

Listen to it.

Bottom Right: The Shepherd — Unstructured + Inside the Church.

This is the nurturer and the caregiver.

That’s the gift everyone loves, until they realize the Shepherd has loved the flock into a holy huddle that forgot the world exists, or has failed to speak hard truth because their compassion overshadowed their truth-telling.

When the Shepherd goes silent, you’ve lost the heart of the mission. Don’t dismiss the compassionate heartbeat.

Listen to it.

The Center: The Prophet

Now look at the middle of the grid. Not a quadrant, a crossroads.

That’s the Prophet.

The Prophet doesn’t care about your categories. They couldn't care less about being inside or outside the church, or proclaiming to the whole flock, or sitting with one sheep at a time.

The Prophet can move into any quadrant, in any context, and ask the one question nobody else wants to ask: Is this actually what God said, or is this just what’s working right now?

That’s why the graphic puts the cross of Christ right at the Prophet’s center. Every function answers to the same Lord. The Prophet just refuses to let anyone forget it. And let’s kill the bad teaching right now, the Prophet isn’t a fortune teller or a doom-and-gloom guy in the corner. The Prophet is the one who sees and speaks truth in any environment, bringing insight, discernment, and direction wherever they go.

Of the five, this is often the most misunderstood and silenced, usually because it makes everyone nervous in meetings.

❤️‍🔥 But when they speak, the mission gets realigned.

Pathways, Trees, and Forests

Here’s a dynamic to pay attention to, because it shapes everything about how a real APEST team functions together.

About 80% of the believers you’ll encounter are not designed to create disciple-making pathways. They’re not wired to see the forest. They’re gifted at seeing and engaging the trees and the sheep,

• the individual people,

• the specific conversations,

• the one-on-one relationships that make up the actual substance of the mission.

They need someone to cut a pathway through the forest. They need someone to create reproducible tools that give all that individual-level engagement direction, structure, and a destination. They need someone to answer the question: “Where are we going, and how do we get there together?”

That’s the apostolic function, not just pioneering new territory, but creating clear, reproducible trails into that new forest. Not just casting vision, but building the road that makes the vision accessible to the 80% who are ready to walk it but cannot yet see it on their own.

You need all five.

Most disciple-making communities that are struggling are struggling because nobody has created a clear pathway, everybody is in the trees. And without a pathway, even the most gifted tree-level workers eventually get disoriented and discouraged.

Why Most Disciple-Making Teams Stall

Most disciple-making teams stall,

• 🚫 Not because the people in them don’t love Jesus

• 🚫 Not because they aren’t working hard, not because the vision isn’t compelling,

• 🚫 And especially not because they lack gifted leaders.

Some of the gifts are functioning, while others are absent, underdeveloped, or actively suppressed.

And the parts of the Body that are missing cannot simply be compensated for by working harder with the parts that remain.

Paul was explicit about this in 1 Corinthians 12.

• 👁️ If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?

• 👂 If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?

Every member is essential. Not every member is interchangeable.

A body that is missing members or treating certain members as unnecessary is operating at a fraction of its potential.

What does a broken body look like?

Here’s how it usually plays out.

🤕 A team led by Apostolic and Evangelistic voices expands rapidly, starts lots of things, reaches new people, but leaves a trail of relationally wounded, theologically confused, spiritually un-tethered disciples behind them.

⚠️ A team led by Shepherding and Teaching voices produces genuinely cared-for, well-grounded disciples who never actually go anywhere. The community turns inward, the front door quietly closes, and in five years, they’re a very mature club of already-convinced believers.

🔥 A team without a prophetic voice simply drifts. The prayer life becomes perfunctory. The discernment dulls. The gap between what the team is doing and what God is specifically calling them to do widens, and nobody names it because nobody on the team is wired to name it.

Every one of those configurations produces real fruit where their functions are strong. And every one of them fails where their functions are absent.

Picture a neighborhood soccer scrimmage. One team has players who are fast, aggressive, and can all shoot, great athletes, every one of them sprinting toward the ball the moment it’s kicked, leaving the rest of the field wide open.

• Nobody holds position.

• Nobody sets up plays.

• Just eleven kids chasing the same ball.

They lost 7-1.

The other team had one kid who hung back and held the defensive line,

• one who orchestrated passes from the middle,

• one whose only job was to see the field and communicate,

• one natural scorer who got the ball in the right spot every time because the right people put it there.

They won, and it wasn’t even close.

The difference wasn’t talent. It was team.

That’s the picture of every well-meaning, passionate group of disciple-makers running toward the same ball and burning out in the process.

Building a “GREAT TEAM,” Not a Club of One

The Apostle is frustrated with the Shepherd for slowing things down. The Shepherd is anxious about the Apostle moving too fast and leaving people behind. The Prophet is waiting for everyone to stop and pray, while the Evangelist is already out the door, meeting the next person. The Teacher is worried that nobody is reading deeply enough, while the Apostle wonders whether the Teacher is overthinking what should be a simple yes-or-no.

Sound familiar❓

Every one of those tensions is real. And every one of them is a gift, not a problem. If we know how to steward and disciple them to maturity.

The Kingdom doesn’t advance through lone rangers and spiritual superstars, but through a unified team: apostles pioneering, prophets discerning, evangelists reaching, shepherds nurturing, and teachers grounding, all five functions working together the way Christ designed them in Ephesians 4:11, so the whole Body is equipped for the whole mission.

We tend to build teams by affinity instead. We find the people who think as we do, who are wired like we are, who share our vocabulary and pace, and we pour our investment into those relationships because they’re comfortable and energizing.

Before long, we’ve assembled a group of people who are deeply aligned, and deeply incomplete. Five Apostolic people in a room is fast, visionary, and a lot of fun. It is also a house with no foundation, no walls, and no roof because the functions that provide them were never invited to the table.

And here’s the good news buried in the tension: the apostle and the shepherd, in productive tension, build communities that both expand and sustain. The prophet and the teacher, in productive tension, build communities that both discern and ground. The evangelist, held in healthy check by the shepherd and the teacher, builds an outreach that is warm, relationally rich, and doctrinally solid.

Know Yourself. But Don’t Stop There.

Every person reading this is wired primarily toward one or two of these five functions. Identifying your primary function isn’t optional; it’s the foundation of healthy team contribution. You cannot give what you do not know you have. You cannot develop what you cannot name. And you cannot build a team around giftings you’ve never clearly identified.

But don’t stop at self-discovery. Knowing about the APEST is not enough. Identifying your primary function and then retreating into your lane misses the whole point. The goal is not to figure out which one you are and operate exclusively out of that function while merely tolerating the others. The goal is to function as a genuine, collaborative, mutually submitting team where every voice is heard, every gift is deployed, and the result is the mature, unified, equipped Body Paul describes in Ephesians 4:12-16.

Jesus himself was not half a team. He pioneered new territory (apostolic). He heard and declared the Father’s word (prophetic). He sought and saved the lost with the message of His relentless love (evangelistic). He laid down His life for His sheep (shepherd). He taught with an authority that transformed lives (teacher). He was the whole team in one person.

But you, friend, are not the savior of the world. You need a team of co-laborers, and they need you.

So What Do You Do With This?

First, find yourself on the grid.
Are you wired for structure or for flexibility?
Inside the walls or outside them?
That’s not a value judgment.
It’s a calling.

Second, stop building your disciple-making team by affinity.
Go find the function you’re missing and invite that person to the table, even when their instincts feel like friction against yours.
The friction is the feature, not the bug.

Third, when the Prophet in your group says something that makes everyone squirm, don’t check your phone. Listen.
They’re not trying to derail the mission. They’re trying to keep it pointed at the Cross, which sits right in the middle of the map.

Hand to the plow, friend.

But know which row you were built to plow, and who else needs to be standing in the field beside you.

❓Where do you land on the grid — structured or unstructured, inside the church or outside it?

❓And which function is missing from your team right now?

✏️ Drop it in the comments. Let’s map this out together.

If you are interested in making disciples where you live, learn, work, or play in a way that is natural and effective, join the Missional Disciple-Making Collective Premium Cohort. Click Here to learn more.

😳 Spiritual conversations can get awkward!

You’ve had that talk before. From “that guy” at work who can’t get off his soapbox. Let’s call him Tinfoil. The topic is irrelevant. You just know it was uncomfortable. You were thankful he cared enough to strike up a conversation, but he didn’t know when to stop. Or how to avoid crossing the line into your personal space. So you silently avoided him, hoping he wouldn’t think you were just being rude. You heard his voice in the breakroom and quickly walked the other way. You caught a glimpse in the corner of your eye over by the coffee maker and decided you didn’t need to fill your cup after all. You know what I’m talking about!

Maybe you’ve also instigated that conversation. We can be so anxious to have spiritual conversations that we go a bit overboard. It’s wonderful! It’s a beautiful thing to share Jesus with your neighbor, or co-worker, or the parent at the basketball court.

But if you are not wise and strategic, it could be your last opportunity at a discipling relationship with your new friend. You may limit your chance to share Jesus with him to a one-shot deal. And in light of a huge credibility gap you have with that perfect stranger, it’s unlikely that you’ll make an impact with one meeting.

Back in the day, we could have spiritual conversations and get away with it. Faith wasn’t such an awkward topic, and most people had some understanding of God and the story of Jesus. But not anymore! Now, most people relate any faith topic to their awkward relationship with Aunt Suzie, who always brings up how they should be living differently or going to church.

When the leap from non-faith to faith was more unattainable, we used the analogy of a non-believer standing on one side of a canyon and Jesus on the other. All we had to do was drop the cross and bridge the gap, and the unbeliever could have a casual stroll right over to the opposite cliff. Effortless!

That model served us well. But the world changed.

It’s more like her standing on one side of a river and Jesus on the other. And what she needs is simply the first stepping stone. Then she has to make a decision whether she’s going to hop on the stone. The job of the one leading her to Jesus is to observe whether she hops on. If she does, then he can drop the next stone. And the next. And the next. Until she gets to the other side and falls into the arms of her Savior.

So if this is how it works these days, baby steps to faith, then what tools do we use to replace the canyon cross?

Let’s talk about the stepping stones of conversations.

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Three Types of Conversations - Stepping Stones Toward Faith

Let’s talk about three types of conversations and some tools to bridge the gaps that will help your friend get to the other side. The differentiator between those talks relates to the depth they go. And the pathway they take leads your friends to Jesus.

You’ll find yourself in many discussions throughout the week that we call casual conversations. A few of those will drive a bit deeper and become crucial. And if you ask the right questions and tell the right stories, some of them will become spiritual conversations. And spiritual conversations lead to faith decisions over time.

Casual Conversations

The conversation that we categorize as casual happens many times on any given day. It could be as simple as a quick conversation about the weather or how well a kid has played in the local sports league.

These conversations lack real depth and usually elicit no emotional response. For example, you might lean toward a parent and say, “Wow! Johnny is really shooting the ball nicely today.” Although they may seem totally surface and purposeless, they are the conversations that become the doorway to deeper talks.

On average, you will have about 85 of these casual conversations per week. Dan Grider encourages us to increase this number to about 200 or more. As you engage in more casual conversations, you’ll see an increase in crucial and spiritual conversations.

More Casual Conversations = More Opportunities to Take Them Deeper

Crucial Conversations

Conversations we categorize as crucial are those that delve deeper and carry emotional or relational significance. These conversations move one step closer to becoming spiritual conversations.

For example, the conversation about how well Johnny is shooting the basketball may transition to crucial with a question such as, “By the way, how is Johnny doing with the loss of his Grandfather?” This engages the person at the next level and shifts the talk from casual to crucial.

And crucial questions are the bridge to spiritual conversations. They engage a different part of a person’s brain and require a different response that requires trust.

Spiritual Conversations

The goal of the disciple-maker is to lead to the most significant category of conversation – the spiritual conversation. These prompt your friend to reflect on faith, eternity, or another spiritual issue. A spiritual conversation is usually not a church invitation. In the Disciple-Making Collective, Dan Grider taught us to call this “going church” on someone. That will likely cause your friend to change their afternoon walking route or break time at the office to avoid the awkwardness.

Stay focused on asking questions that are timely and relevant to the user. Ask those that make them think about spiritual matters without feeling like they just stepped in a pile of poop when you asked them. We call these “just in time” questions instead of “just in case”. They are the questions asked right when a person needs to consider them. Don’t rush to these questions. The Holy Spirit will lead you when the time is right. If they don’t come naturally, pray for a future opportunity to dig deeper.

As Johnny’s mom tells me that Johnny is struggling with his transition, I may ask something like, “How are you doing, Amy? Do you have the support you need during this time? Would it be okay if I pray with you right now?”

Relevant Questions and Genuine Stories – The Conversation Bridges

There can be a wide gap between the three types of conversations. It may seem like the gap is so vast that it’s challenging to get from one to the other. But remember, the stepping stone to closing the gap is often a relevant question or a genuine story.

We’ve already talked about relevant questions. The genuine story is an experience you’ve had that offers hope for a person to resolve spiritual conflict. It could be a story about how you overcame a similar obstacle. Or it may be a story that illustrates a passage of scripture that speaks to the internal struggle.

“Amy, I remember the months following my dad’s car accident. Sometimes it felt like I couldn’t even get out of bed. Over time, I trained myself to rest in the fact that God knew exactly what I was going through and would help me overcome the pain I was experiencing. Over the course of a few months, things got better”.

Spiritual Conversations Take Practice

Each of these types of conversation takes practice. Even the simplest one requires us to get out of our comfort zone and initiate the talk. The more we force ourselves to ask the first question, the easier and more comfortable it gets.

• What can you do this week to practice moving casual conversations to crucial❓

• Crucial to Spiritual❓

• And how can you increase the number of casual conversations to open up opportunities❓

👉 If you’d like to learn more about spiritual conversations, check out my new book called Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers (click here and use SUBSTACK to get a 20% discount). And also make sure to pick up Dan Grider’s book, Crucial Conversations.

“Do you have an apartment that you rent out on your ranch?”

I asked at the end of a fifteen-minute phone call from my South Nashville desk in the busy office at Groove Life. It was our fourth call in six weeks. We were planning our upcoming trip and video shoot in Colorado. He answered slowly as he processed the question, “Why do you ask?” That started a conversation I’ll remember for the rest of my days.

One Answer to a Crisis of Faith

About this time, my youngest son and I had been reading about the macro-mysteries of a universe with no end and the micro-mysteries of DNA's blueprint in living beings. He’d been having a bit of a struggle with his faith, and somehow, when we are completely overwhelmed with things that we can’t explain, our faith is reignited. So we talked about things we can’t explain.

Something about realizing how small, fragile, and infinitely complex we are awakens the reality that a Creator may be the only solution to our belief problem. It’s like we begin to grasp the truth of an infinite God because of our inability to understand the mysteries of that very Creator. Sometimes the very questions that threaten to destroy our faith may be the only things keeping it alive.

I Found a God Big Enough

The first time I stood below the 18,000-foot mountains of the Wrangell-St. Elias peaks in eastern Alaska, I was face-to-face with the realization that there was nothing I, nor any other human, could do to rival the beauty that stares back at us when we open our eyes to creation. A simple sunset or a newborn baby awakens curiosity and wonder. Creation really does reveal the glory of God, and as Romans Chapter 1 teaches, we are stopped dead in our tracks on our path to find another answer apart from an intelligent designer.

The Call

On the last call before the trip, something made me ask the question. I didn't plan it. The street address landed, and something shifted, something quiet and instinctive. It was the kind of familiarity you feel toward certain people without being able to name why. I'd had that feeling about Ty for a while. I just couldn't trace it back to anything. Until the moment he told me the address.

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About eight weeks before the phone conversation, my boss had asked me to scour the internet to find a coach for an episode of an adventure show we were filming. “If possible, I’d like to use someone who works with the Lyle Sankey school.” That was his only request in my random Google search for a coach.

I found a bull-riding trainer who worked with Sankey. Ty Rinaldo of TZ Bucking Bulls in Larkspur, Colorado. Larkspur is a small, out-of-the-way town halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. It’s one of those towns that seems like it’s just there to bridge the gap. Hardly anyone knows where it is. But “coincidentally,” I did. I actually lived there for a short time, about twenty years ago. “Of all places,” I thought. “Randomly searching for a bull riding trainer, and he happened to live just a few miles from where I started my adult life.”

It took me a couple of tries to get in touch with Ty, but I soon knew that he was the guy we were looking for. Respectful, excited, and animated, he would be perfect for filming this episode. I didn’t think much about going back to Larkspur; time was short, and we were busy. We just spent the next couple of weeks planning the shoot.

“Why do you ask?” Ty said. As soon as he said it, I knew it wasn’t the first time I’d been to TZ Ranch. My wife and I had lived in a temporary home for the first few months after we moved to Larkspur, just after we were married. When we had to find a new home, I came across a short classified ad describing a small studio apartment on a ranch. Julie and I headed out to see if this little apartment would be for us. After three miles of dusty dirt road with twenty-mile-per-hour winds, we arrived at the ranch. We both decided it was too much dust and wind to work for us, but we enjoyed a few minutes with a man named Ty and his wife. They told us about their two boys, and their cowboy-friendly, charismatic hospitality stuck with us.

Twenty years later, a random Google search that could have turned up a trainer anywhere in the 3.8 million square miles we call the United States of America, among the 327 million people who call it home, led us to a man and his 2 boys that we had stood face-to-face with approximately 7,300 days earlier.

“Why do you ask?”

“This is going to be hard to believe, but I’ve been to your house before.” I honestly couldn’t quite get the words out. I was in awe. You can believe what you want about chance, but that was too ridiculous to call anything other than “on purpose.” Two men meeting, with no obvious connection, no common friends or family, and nothing at all to make sense of the mystery. We met again after a chance, short-lived, inconsequential handshake twenty years earlier.

More to the Story

I can’t know God’s full intentions for the 2nd chance meeting. No one can see the full story God is writing of our lives. But I can tell you that probably both Ty and I needed a slap-in-the-face reminder that God hasn’t forgotten us. I needed to remember that the marriage relationship is one of the most sacred (and fragile) gifts on this side of a restored creation. Ty needed to feel the embrace of a heavenly father in the midst of one of the loneliest and most confusing seasons of his life. God still loves to make his care tangible to us with occasional surprises that can’t be written off as chance.

I’m sure there is much more to this story. Only God determines when we get to peer through the window of our finite time-bound barriers to His yet-to-be-seen reality. But it was an honor to glimpse the power of His authorship. Maybe, in hindsight, it wasn’t just my youngest son who needed a rekindled faith. Maybe God knew that the boy’s struggle was so that his dad might see the unexplainable mysteries and once again…

BELIEVE.

Adapted from an Article Written for the June 2026 Issue of the Priority Newsletter of the Missionary Church, USA.

😳 37 years now 😳

Thirty-seven years in various forms of ministry.

You might say that I’ve tried it all.

• Sunday church services.

• decentralized disciple-making communities.

• marketplace ministry.

• faith-based non-profit and for-profit.

• traditional and contemporary services.

You could certainly call me a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. But if there is one thing I’ve mastered in almost four decades of service, it’s flexibility. In other words, my experience has trained me to partner with Jesus’ Great Commission in each of those ministry contexts.

That must have blossomed from the proverbial ”School of Hard Knocks.” Raised in a community of cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents in rural Alabama, I only attended church for the occasional wedding or funeral. And that was often in the extravagant Catholic cathedral in our German-influenced closest “big city.”

Church, for me, was inaccessible amid financial, relational, and spiritual challenges.

Although I lived in the buckle of the Bible belt, I didn’t know the language or the stories. Once, when I was around 11 years old, a neighbor picked me up for VBS. The teacher asked my friend John Haynes (I still remember his name) to share how he was “saved” in the church parking lot. All I could imagine was John being pushed from in front of a moving car. For a couple of years, I thought I would only be ready for heaven when something happened that physically saved my life.

Give me a break, I was only 11!

And then at 15, I got it good. I embraced the only answer to my deepest need, Jesus Christ. I never turned back! I was mesmerized by this person who gave me incredible hope. But my new life of faith didn’t mean that I understood or “fit in” with the other half of the folks in my neighborhood who understood the Sunday culture. They would spout off big Bible words as if they were household knowledge. I felt like I had arrived at a movie an hour late.

Obviously, I caught up over the years (mostly), and I love a great sermon or seminary-level Bible class. But I also understand why there is a chasm between the Sunday gathering and the rest of culture.

The week after I moved to Spring Hill, Tennessee, I went to lunch with a Christian co-worker and asked about the town’s spiritual climate. He looked up and said, “Oh, everybody in Spring Hill goes to church.” The very next week, I went with another guy, who answered the same question with, “Oh, no one goes to church in Spring Hill.”

🤯 Seven days apart, same restaurant, same company, perfectly opposite perspectives.

Why? Because, just like that gap in my childhood experience, there is a chasm between our Sunday church culture and the uninterested “nones.”

As missionaries in the places we live, learn, work, and play, we must recognize that the river is too wide in our current culture for those far from God to jump. We must discover how to drop one stone at a time and see who hops on. And when they do, drop the next stone.

Drop ➠ wait ➠ repeat ➠ drop ➠ wait ➠ repeat.

Until our friends, co-workers, and neighbors make it to the other side and embrace the Savior who is waiting for them.

How Do We Do This?

How do we, as missionaries, equip Joe and Mary to drop stones and bridge gaps?

And more importantly, how do we model for our people to do the same despite the differences we carry in how we prefer to experience “church”?

Step #1: Embrace the actual GREAT COMMISSION, not only some form of it.

We all read the Great Commission through the filter of our ministry experience. We often think, “How do we do this through worship, teaching, and pastoral care?”

Or, in Simple Church settings, we are always looking for the silver-bullet tool to accomplish this.

Those are not bad things; it is actually good stewardship to think of the commission in the context of our comfort zones. But the problem is that we often limit the command to those obvious places and tools and fail to bridge the gap between the contexts all around us.

🚫 That’s not at the heart of the Great Commission 🚫

Jesus didn’t point to a form of ministry, but a set of ministry behaviors. He didn’t tell us WHERE to make disciples or even HOW. He didn’t tell us to “plant a launch-large church.” And He didn’t tell us to start a “simple church” or “micro-church.” He didn’t tell us to move overseas or to start a Bible study at our workplace. He knew if He gave us a form to build, the form would be the focus.

🔥 Instead, he told us WHAT to do.

WHAT NOT WHERE

In order to bridge the gap for that co-worker at lunch, we must be about the BEHAVIORS of making disciples in whatever FORM God assigns us to. And we must equip and train others to do the same. Making disciples is the command. The place and method we use to do that is simply the context.

If you want to read more like this, check out my new book, Hand to the Plow: The Field Guide for Everyday Disciple-Makers.

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Step #2: Activate both disciple-SHIP and disciple-MAKING in your faith community

We have used discipleship and disciple-making as if they were the same word with the same meaning. They are not. They are related. They are both critical to walking like Jesus, but they are not the same.

✔︎ Here’s the clearest way I know to draw the line:

• Discipleship is primarily inward.

• Disciple-making is primarily outward.

• Discipleship is the process of sanctification.

• Disciple-making is the process of multiplication.

The suffix, “-ship” changes the meaning of a word to reflect the “act or state of being.” So, in other words, discipleship is the act or state of BEING a disciple. Of course, making disciples first requires one to BE a disciple, so it is a critical part of becoming a disciple-maker.

We have taught people that once they get their disciple-ship right, once they have grown enough, read enough, matured enough, gotten enough of their stuff together, THEN they will be ready to make disciples. That is not the Jesus model. Of course, there was teaching and training as they journeyed together, but they assisted in the ministry of Jesus as they grew toward readiness to be sent.

Jesus called His disciples while they were still in process.

✔ Simon Peter had an anger problem.

✔ Thomas had a doubt problem.

✔ The Sons of Thunder had a power problem.

These were not polished, put-together spiritual giants. These were works in progress.

• Just like you.

• Just like me.

And Jesus sent them out to make disciples anyway. Before they had it all figured out. Before they fully understood the resurrection. He sent them on mission in the middle of their own growth journey.

💥 The closest person to those on the other side of the river is the one who has most recently become a follower of Jesus 💥

Discipleship and disciple-making are not sequential.

They are simultaneous. That’s a game-changer. You do not graduate from discipleship into disciple-making. You grow in both at the same time. Don’t wait for a perfect disciple before you send them to the mission field in the places where they live, learn, work, and play.

Step #3: Provide a pathway to make disciples in their mission field

We can preach the Great Commission in our congregation churches and disciple-making hubs, put it on the wall, write it in our vision statement, and still have a community full of people who have no idea how to actually do it.

Intention without a pathway is just inspiration. And inspiration, without direction, creates great disciple-teachers, but not true disciple-makers.

We believe in disciple-making. We celebrate it in theory. But when the one among us who genuinely wants to reach a neighbor, co-worker, or college roommate asks how to actually do this, the answer they get can be too complicated, too institutional, or too vague to act on.

Jesus gave His disciples a pathway by walking with them. He modeled the conversations. He formed the small group. He created the community. And then in Luke 9 and 10, He sent the 12 and then the 72 to simply do what He already modeled for them on the road and in the villages.

That’s the pattern.

And it STILL works.

What your faith community needs isn’t another program. It needs a clear, reproducible, Jesus-patterned pathway that anyone, not just the spiritually gifted few, can follow in the places where they already live, learn, work, and play.

🚫 That’s not a strategy.

🟢 That’s a movement.

And it starts when we model a set of behaviors for them.

Have you and your co-laborers spent the time and energy to model behaviors that work in your context and equip your people to follow the model of Jesus and to incarnate themselves in their workplaces and neighborhoods to bridge the gap?

Conclusion

👉 Here’s what I’ve learned after almost four decades of watching what works and what doesn’t.

The river is too wide to jump. You cannot get the guy who told me “no one goes to church in Spring Hill” from where he stands to where Jesus is waiting in one giant leap. The gap is too wide, the credibility is too thin, and the discomfort is too real for that to work. But you can drop a stone. And you can do that whether you worship in a building or a coffee shop.

The river between two guys eating lunch at the same restaurant seven days apart is not an obstacle to multiplication, but an opportunity for mission. Not a mission to build a bridge for people to admire, but a mission to drop stones for people to navigate the gap.

And that’s the movement we’re after.

Let’s work together in every ministry and mission context to embrace the behaviors of the Great Commission and not cling tightly to the forms of ministry that are most comfortable to us. No matter the context, let’s lock arms and commit fully to the work of Loving Like Jesus and Living Like Missionaries.

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Stay focused on your passion and call, disciple-making multipliers!

I am not bitter. I am not anti-Sunday church, despite what some might think or say.

I am pro-Jesus and for His people, including all forms of church gathering that are committed to obedience and mutual submission.

I am subject to spiritual authority and held accountable by a community of followers of Jesus who walk together in faith and in biblical principles.

With that said, I have struggled for 21 years with the fire in my bones to explore new forms of church that respond to the reality around us. And for the sole purpose of advancing the BEST NEWS of the Gospel of Jesus.

The disengagement of men, and now women (see this), in the prevailing form of church has been the motivating factor in my life’s work. My primary passion is to walk with others to restore the transformational ethos of the 1st-century church and see a viral welcoming of those far from God into the Kingdom and to the feet of Jesus. And then to invite them into a life of missional living for the advancement of the Gospel.

Along with that commitment…

• It has been intellectually and emotionally painful.

• It has meant being misunderstood by leaders, churches, and ministries.

• It has required tremendous effort to pay the bills while remaining engaged on the front lines.

• It has meant painful conversations with people whom I looked to for affirmation.

• It has, at times, led to confusion with my wife and kids.

• It has led to tension in my own heart about whether I am hearing God or misunderstanding His leading.

And I wouldn’t trade it for anything the world has to offer!

When we ask ourselves hard questions and examine our hearts, we make sure we are doing our best to pursue the calling God has placed deep inside our hearts and not from a place of rebellion. We are not victims. We have been called by God to be reformers and revitalizers.

And sometimes that is HARD! Be at Peace.

• Love those who don’t get it.

• Stay pure and keep your motives checked.

• Remain humble and teachable.

• Band together with those who understand your call.

Co-Laborers who are committed to following the Jesus Pattern in a multi-generational disciple-making movement, let us be among those who are counted in the number of those who say YES when Jesus calls!

Let’s do this!

This excerpt below is from a book by Dee Hock that comforts me in a very deep place and helps me turn my bitterness and hurt into hope and compassion.

I hope it helps you, too!

Note: Dee Hock is not a follower of Jesus. As a matter of fact, I’d suspect he is a pantheist of sorts. But, he came way before his time and pioneered a change movement that collided with an institutional, top-down, command-and-control culture of industry that was just as stressful and challenging as the one we face as church form “re-formers.” He feels what we feel when we lie in bed at night and wonder if we are unholy rebels.

From Dee Hock’s “One From Many” Page 199-203

When our internal model of reality is in conflict with rapidly changing external realities, there are three fundamental ways to respond:

First: We can cling to our old internal model and attempt to impose it on external conditions in a futile attempt to make them conform to our expectations. That is what most institutions compel us to attempt, and what we continually dissipate our ingenuity and ability trying to achieve. It is futile.

Second: We can engage in denial. We can refuse to accept the new external reality. We can pretend that external changes are not as profound as they really are, deny that we have an internal model, or that it bears examination. When the world about us appears to be irrational, erratic, and irresponsible, it is all too easy to blame others for the unpleasant, destructive things we experience. It is equally easy to abandon meaning, embrace fantasy, and engage in erratic behavior. Denial is also futile.

Third: We can attempt to understand and change our internal model of reality. That is the least common alternative, and for good reason. Changing an internal model of reality is extremely difficult, often terrifying, and always complex. It requires a meticulous, painful examination of beliefs. It requires a fundamental understanding of consciousness and how it must change. It destroys our sense of time and place. It calls into question our very identity. We can never be sure of our place or our value in a new order of things. Changing our internal model of reality requires an enormous act of faith, for it requires time to develop, and we require time to grow into it. Yet it is the only workable solution.

Those with the greatest power and wealth and the most prominent place in the old order of things have the most to lose. It is, therefore, understandable that so many of them close their minds to different possibilities and cling tenaciously to the old order of things. It is understandable that they engage in cosmetic change to palliate their discomfort and placate critics. It is understandable that they seek one another and merge the institutions they control to amass more and more power and wealth in order to perpetuate that to which they cling. It is understandable that they blind themselves to the fact that they are attempting to preserve the form of things long after form no longer serves function, a certain formula for failure, since the closest thing to a law of nature in the organizational world is that form has an affinity for expense, while function has an affinity for income.

Those in positions of power, wealth, and prestige who tenaciously cling to the present order of things deserve understanding, not condemnation, for they intuitively sense what Machiavelli discovered five centuries ago when he wrote: “Nothing is more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain of success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.”

No one should be condemned for failure to welcome change. This pervasive problem plagues us all. Dostoyevsky put it into perspective in the last century when he wrote: “Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most.”

But, what if those with the greatest power, wealth, and position were to open their minds to new possibilities, loosen their tenacious grasp on the old order of things, abandon the palliative of cosmetic change, open their eyes to new forms of organization, seriously question and change their internal model of reality?What if they were to cage the four beasts that devour their keeper-ego, envy, avarice, and ambition-and take the lead in a new order of things? What if they were to go before and show the way? Now there’s a challenge worthy of both the best among them and the best within them. I know that they can. And I will never give up that belief, or hope, that in time, enough of them will.

Hock, Dee. One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization. Kindle Edition.

“Before the spies lay down for the night, she came up to them on the roof and said to them, ‘I know that the Lord has given you this land and that a great fear of you has fallen on us... for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.’” - Joshua 2:8-9, 11

I am Rahab.

My name means the proud one, and it was almost enough to mask what was happening on the inside. Below the surface, I was anything but proud.

You’ve known people like me. I was the talk of the town. Every woman in Jericho knew my name. Not because of anything worth being known for. But for the kinds of things that turn every eye when you walk by. The kinds of things that only happen with women like me when more acceptable women have settled in for a quiet night’s sleep.

I had learned early that the world would give you what you needed as long as you sold yourself for what they wanted. That kind of survival required you to decide what you were willing to give and what you would protect at any cost. I had already decided. I had drawn my lines. And I had built a life inside the walls of the most fortified city in Canaan, in a house embedded in those very walls. Somehow, I thought they might just be thick enough to protect my heart.

After the spies left my house, a red rope hung from my window. But before they left, it wasn’t a rope, but a reputation that hung over my head. It made religious men cross the street and kept safe ones at a distance. Despite my name, I was not proud of it. I want you to understand that clearly.

No, I was not proud.

I was surviving.

There is a difference, though most people who have never had to survive don’t bother to try to understand it.

The Stories of the Coming Army

You have to know what it was like inside those city walls. The stories moved through the market stalls and down the alleyways of Jericho like wind before a storm. And before the spies arrived, those stories focused on Israel's strength. A wandering nation that should have been about as threatening as an ant in a trap.

• The Red Sea? Parted.

• Two kings east of the Jordan, Sihon and Og? Destroyed utterly.

• The God of their strength? Unstoppable!

Those realities couldn’t be explained by human strength.

An entire nation of slaves, wandering the wilderness for a generation, being forged into something none of us had a category for. An army that didn’t fight as other armies fought. A people who carried their God with them in a box and followed a pillar of fire through the night.

Our king reinforced the gates. He doubled the guards on the wall. He held councils and drew up strategies and spoke publicly about the invincibility of Jericho’s defenses. But it was obvious to us.

He was terrified. We all were.

But in my heart, somewhere underneath the fear, something else had taken root. Because the God of these people, this God who split seas and swallowed armies, He was not like the gods of Jericho. Our gods demanded. They consumed. They were hungry and unpredictable and as indifferent to human suffering as the sun is indifferent to what it scorches. We were required to serve them.

But this God was different.

I couldn’t have explained it then with the words I have now. But even before the two strangers climbed the stairs to my roof, something in me had already begun to point to belonging to a story I had no right to be part of.

I knew who they were the moment I saw them. Not because they necessarily looked like Israelites; all varieties of travelers came through Jericho. But there was something about the way they moved. The way they watched. And the particular nervousness of men who know that the city they’ve walked into is looking for them.

My life had trained me to read people quickly. It was a survival skill. I had a choice in that moment that I’ve rehearsed in my head a thousand times since. I could have sent word to the king’s men. I would have been rewarded. I would have been safe, another year, another negotiated season away from a life of living in fear and rejection.

Instead, I heard a small voice say, “There’s a better way.”

I hid them beneath the stalks of flax drying on the roof. And when the king’s messengers came to my door, I looked them in the eye and lied. Let’s rest there for a moment. As broken as I was, I am not a liar. But I lied. I chose these strangers over the king, who owned every stone of the city I lived in. I chose a God I had only heard rumors about over what I could see with my own eyes.

I’ve asked myself many times since, “What compelled me?”

I had already seen enough of how the gods of Jericho treated women like me. And the stories I had heard about this other God, the way He moved through history, the way He remembered His people, the way He made a way where there was absolutely no way, something in the most calloused corner of my heart whispered that a God like that might be worth the risk.

Desperate people make desperate choices.

And perhaps the most desperate thing of all is deciding to believe in something you cannot yet see. Risking it all that He is real. And that He cares about me. And that He would also make a way for me, a lost woman in a brutal culture, serving cruel and punishing gods.

When I went back to the roof, I didn’t pretend.

I told them what I knew. I told them that the fear of their God had fallen on all of us like a heavy stone. And then, with my heart pounding in my chest like a fist banging on a door, I asked for the only thing that mattered to me.

I asked for the protection of my family.

Not wealth. Not status. Not even my own life, I had long since stopped valuing that the way I should have. My mother. My father. My brothers and sisters. The people who had never quite known what to do with me but who were all that I had. The only people in my known world that I still trusted.

“Swear to me by your God,” I said. “Swear that you will show kindness to my family as I have shown kindness to you.”

There is something extraordinary about that word. Kindness. In their language, it is the word that means covenant love. Loyal love. The kind that doesn’t evaporate when circumstances change. I was asking strangers, in the name of a God I didn’t yet fully trust, for a promise that I couldn’t believe until it could have been too late to matter.

They swore it.

And I let them down from the window by a rope.

A scarlet cord.

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The same color as blood. As a sacrifice. As the mark on a doorpost (they have told me since) that tells the destroyer to pass over. I didn’t know all of that then, not with the fullness of understanding I carry now. But I tied that cord in the window, and I looked at it every day, with intense anticipation, as the sound of a marching nation grew louder on the other side of those walls.

Six days of grinding it out. Thinking that it was all a myth. But the shaking began on the seventh day of their march around the city.

I had gathered my family in that room. My mother was weeping. My brothers were pacing. We pressed ourselves into the center of the floor as the walls of Jericho, walls wide enough to build houses in, walls that had stood longer than anyone in the city could remember, began to crack and groan and give way in a roar that I felt in my chest more than I heard with my ears. My blood was pumping, and questions were screaming at me.

• Would they be trustworthy?

• Would they follow through with their promise?

• Were they even still alive?

And then.

Every wall fell.

Every wall.

Except the ones that, for years, had hidden my shame and fear.

I don’t have adequate words for the moment I realized that. I don’t have words for what it does to a person when the thing they staked everything on, a promise, a scarlet cord, a God they’d only heard rumors about, is fulfilled. And in a way that human reasoning cannot explain.

When the dust settled, two familiar faces appeared at my doorway. They took us out, my mother, my father, my brothers, my sisters, all of them. I wept in a way I hadn’t let myself weep in years.

I wasn’t a weeping of grief.

It was something rawer, and stranger, and better than grief.

The feeling of being known and remembered.

Of having been seen, across the distance of my worst decisions and my longest nights, by a God who apparently had been keeping track of a woman in a window with a scarlet cord and a desperate prayer.

They brought us outside the camp of Israel first. As a Gentile, ceremonially unclean. Not yet fully in. I understood that. I didn’t rush it. I sat in that in-between space and let it settle over me that I was alive, when many of my friends and acquaintances weren’t.

My family was alive.

And the God who split seas had somehow thought it important to look after a woman from Jericho who had no business being in this story at all.

I’m told that is how He works.

Finding the ones that the rest of the world has already written off and writing them into something they couldn’t have imagined for themselves.

I have a new family now. A new home.

A name that is being slowly redeemed from everything it used to mean. They tell me that my name will go down in their record books as one who helped them take Jericho. That their… wait… that OUR people will remember my name forever.

Me? A prostitute in a foreign land and belonging to a foreign people?

How could it be?

I still think about that scarlet cord in the window. The desperate, reckless, barely-believing act of hanging it there and trusting that someone on the other side of the wall would see it and keep their promise.

And I want to ask you, today…

• What wall have you been hiding behind, convincing yourself you’re too far outside the camp to ever truly belong, and what would it cost you to hang the cord anyway and find out if He sees it?

• What if you just took a chance and risked seeing if He would be faithful to you, too?

• Why not?

• What have you got to lose?

I am Rahab. I was a prostitute and a Gentile.

And my name will go down in His story for the ages to know that I chose to trust Him when there was no way.

Although I’m in a foreign country that speaks a foreign language and transacts life with a foreign currency, the gap is paper-thin from here. Language doesn’t matter through a window. And we paid our bill at the front desk last night with our credit card, which knows no boundaries between pennies and centavos.

As I look out the window at 7:30 AM, the traffic is building, and people are scurrying to find a place to park. People are walking hurriedly down the sidewalk. Some are in suits and others in jeans. A horn here and a siren there. The guy at the parking garage just thumbs-upped a woman in a car as she slid her identification card through the slot.

And I’m sitting five floors up on a window ledge watching it all happen without the privilege of ears to hear their conversations. And if I hadn’t taken three flights to get here over the last two days, I wouldn’t be able to discern a single difference between them and me. Or their city and mine.

They say this is literally the most dangerous city in South America. That’s why I’m sitting on this window ledge, waiting on the commuter flight to my final destination. Otherwise, I’d be at the coffee shop and bakery a few doors down. But, I was told, not only by my friends, but also by my government, not to leave this hotel.

This is not how it is supposed to be!

It’s a strikingly beautiful hotel with a name on it I’d find in every city back home. It’s nicer than my average stay because safety was important since I have my entire family here. And between us and whatever lies on the other side is a fifth-floor window. I feel so safe. And yet I feel so present here as the streets produce this low rumble five floors down.

It’s funny how, sometimes, we distort both sides of reality. We keep our eyes focused on the extremes. And it’s not all bad. There is some measure of healthy survivalism in doing so. Our soul couldn’t handle the constant stress of how much danger we are really in when we drive 80 miles per hour down a stretch of interstate just a few feet from a 37-ton machine six times larger than us, trusting that he got a good night’s sleep last night. And it is good that my defensive awareness was sharpened as I walked through the airport in the most dangerous city on this continent. Those things either enable me to face danger or sensitize my survivalist instincts, helping me steward my family well.

But, this is not the Gospel!

No, they are not even shadows of the Gospel.

Those things are consequences. Ramifications of the brokenness of human imagers of God. One suggests that I am in control. That I am good enough to protect myself in the face of mortal danger. The other is an awareness that there are people around me who would harm me for their own gain. Both are equally dangerous and are rooted in a fractured world that operates from the pain of the first human’s failure to submit to their identity and to trust the Maker. And all of this led to the two behaviors and mindsets that have left me stuck in this room, sitting on this ledge, and looking out this fifth-floor window like a kid at the zoo, hoping to steal a peek at the elusive lion behind the glass.

And, this is not the end!

No, it’s not, friend. As I’m peering down at the chef adorned in her white digs, the homeless guy in his tattered walking shoes, and the businessman in his fancy suit, I know that whatever pain is hidden behind their eyes will someday soon be washed away by the redemption that comes with the restoration of the original plan fully envisioned by the One who spoke all this into motion. There is a day coming when we will dive headlong into the fullness of the vision the Creator has for a new city and a restored people in a place called New Jerusalem.

Paul gave us a foretaste of how the people might see one another.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. - Paul in Galatians 3:28

And God Himself, through the mouth of Isaiah the prophet, offers us a taste of how opposing forces who live in fear of one another will submit to the ways of the Maker.

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the young lion and the fattened steer will be together; And a little boy will lead them. - God in Isaiah 11:6

And John the Revelator, in his great vision of what is to come, pulls back the curtain on what it might look like.

I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. - The Apostle John in Revelation 21:2

I long deeply for that coming City!

That’s the Gospel. That all things are being made new again. That the original dream that was birthed in a beautiful garden will return from the ashes of what it has become in this broken city that I am overlooking from this room in the sky.

Oh friend, it is TRUE! The stories are true.

There will come a day when all will speak in one tongue. Where we will “come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost” (Isaiah 55:1) because the currency of the entire world will be the love of God. Where we will sit with our former enemies, and war will be no more. Where every tear will be wiped away, and every fear washed clean because the heart of humanity will be made right.

As Sam Gangee says in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, it will be a place

Where, “All Sad Things Will Become Untrue”

In that city that will appear in the sky and come to rest on this wartorn planet, I will not be sitting on this fifth-floor window ledge peering down into the streets, stuck inside to protect my children from dangerous people. You will not be toiling from dawn to dusk simply trying to pay the bills and stay afloat. We will not be visiting our friends and family in hospital rooms and hospice beds. No way, friend. All will be made right.

• Wars will be silenced.

• Violence will be no more.

• The lamb will lie with the lion.

And I will be drinking coffee and eating pastries in that quaint little coffee shop just around the corner.

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done, On Earth As It Is In Heaven!

Adapted from the stories of Paul and his letters to Timothy.

Twenty years.

That’s how long it has been since Paul was dragged from the Mamertine prison and led beyond the walls of Rome to die. Twenty years since the sword flashed in the sunrise light and the voice that once thundered through synagogues, marketplaces, prison cells, and storm-tossed ships finally went silent. At least in the form of spoken words and proclamations.

Voices like Paul’s do not stop speaking when they die. These voices become words in the mouths of those they leave behind. And men can’t help but proclaim them boldly despite his absence.

I am an old man now. My beard has gone white, and my hands quiver when I write. Ephesus has changed. Rome has changed. The churches he left behind have changed. Some of the young eyes never landed on the face of Paul, but knew him only through fragments of parchment read aloud in gatherings. To them, he is adjacent to myth now. The apostle. The church planter. The man who stood facing governors and kings.

But I knew the man when his feet were in chains. I knew the sound of his groans after floggings. I knew the look in his eyes when mobs turned against him. I knew what it was like to watch him pray through tears for churches that would later wound him deeply.

And I remember the exhilaration I felt when he called me “my true son in the faith.”1

Sometimes I still wake before dawn and imagine his voice quoting the Scriptures from memory while chains rattled against cold stone walls.

“Timothy,” he would say, “My true son in the faith. Persevere even in trouble. You will see God.”2

I have always believed him. But I have not always understood him. Not fully. You understand a man differently after you survive long enough to shoulder the weight he carried. After you face some of the same struggles he endured

I was young when we first met in Lystra. Half-Jewish, and he pursued me still. Timid, quiet, and afraid of disappointing those around me. Paul saw something in me I could not yet see in myself. That frustrated me sometimes. He kept calling strength out of me while I was still playing around with fear. Sometimes I just wanted to take my time. I always felt safer when I had space to process. I was slower than him.

I remember that day he asked me to join him. No grand speech or manipulation. Just VISION. Purpose that was grander than where I was. His body already carried scars from stones and rods and prisons. Most men would have slowed down after suffering like that, but Paul burned hotter. And that fire in his belly felt irresistible to a young, purposeless wanderer like me. Although I was quiet on the outside, there was a fire burning on the inside that couldn’t be quenched.

“Follow me,” he said.

When Paul said those words, you felt as if Jesus Himself were calling.3 I followed him into riots and miracles. Into hunger and holy moments I cannot explain. I watched demons scream and leave bound-up people. I saw hardened jailers collapse in repentance and put their lives on the line for the good news he carried. Entire households would enter baptism waters and weep with joy. And Paul could absorb pain like an anvil under the pressure of hammer blows.4

What kind of man keeps singing after being beaten nearly to death?5 What kind of man keeps loving those who constantly misunderstand him?6 Who walks back into cities where mobs tried to kill him just hours earlier?7 Only a man utterly possessed by the vision of Jesus and the passion of this great commission. It wasn’t intelligence, charisma, or grit that drove him. It was His uncompromising love of Jesus Christ, the Holy One. Paul never missed a moment of passionate service after meeting Him on the Damascus road.

Most of us slowly adapt Jesus into our lives. For Paul, it was in a flash of time that he abandoned it all. He never turned back from the moment he encountered our Messiah on the dusty, dirty road. And honestly, that terrified me sometimes. Because walking with Paul meant there was no safe version of Christianity left available to you. No half-hearted obedience. No compartmentalized faith. No serving Jesus on the Sabbath and building your own kingdom the rest of the week. Paul forced you to confront the possibility that Jesus actually deserved EVERYTHING.8

I remember one night after everyone else had fallen asleep. We were exhausted, hungry, and hiding. Again. I asked him quietly, “Do you ever wish for a normal life?” He softly laughed. Not mocking. Just tired. “Timothy,” he said, staring into the small fire between us, “I had more than you can imagine, and I was miserable. My life was garbage.”9

That sentence has haunted me for decades. I think many believers secretly want enough of Jesus to feel safe but not enough to ruin their plans. Paul had no such interest. Jesus ruined ALL his plans. And Paul considered it a gift from his Creator. He viewed the abandonment of his life as an honor. He expected nothing in return and held nothing back.

NOTHING.

I have buried friends now. So many friends. Some were killed. Some abandoned the faith. Some simply drifted into contentment and disappeared slowly into ordinary life until the fire in their belly went cold. Demas still hurts to think about. Paul saw it coming before I did. I’ll never forget the shocking plea in his letter to me. “Timothy, come quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica.”10 The pain of that line stays with me even these twenty years later. He could always discern when love for the world was creeping into someone’s heart.

Near the end, Rome felt darker than ever. Nero’s madness poisoned the empire. Christians were hunted. Fear grew through the churches. People became cautious about their association with Paul once prison became a reality. I hate admitting this now, but even I wrestled with fear. Not fear of death exactly, but fear of suffering the way I had seen my friends, and even my family, writhing in pain. Martyrdom sounds noble when discussed in safe rooms around warm fires. But suffering makes the clock tick slowly, grinding out long nights. It wears down the soul. It attacks the resolve of the most loyal followers of the Way.

Paul understood this better than anyone.11 That is why his final letter to me was not so much a manual of strategy and instruction as it was of endurance in the face of challenge.

• “Do not be ashamed.”12

• “Share in suffering.”13

• “God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear.”14

• “The Word of God is not chained.”15

I can still feel the texture of the parchment. I can still see my tears falling onto it. It was as if I sat beside him and shared the pain of loneliness with him.

“Only Luke is with me.”16

The great apostle. The church planter. The miracle worker. Sitting in a cold Roman prison with only one friend beside him.

We secretly think faithfulness should eventually produce comfort. Paul’s life taught us the truth that shattered that lie into a million shards. Faithfulness produces resemblance to Jesus, nothing more, nothing less, and that is enough. That is the truth our hearts long to hear.

Twenty years later, I understand Paul far better than I did when he walked with us and admonished us with pen in hand. At times, I resented how hard he pushed me. How directly he confronted weakness. How unwilling he was to settle for shallow discipleship.17 Now I thank God for it.

The churches today face different pressures, but the temptations remain the same.

• Fear.

• Comfort.

• Compromise.

• Endless distractions.

Many want the benefits of the Kingdom without the surrender required to carry it. Paul would grieve that. But he would not despair. He never despaired of the gospel. Not once. Even chained in prison awaiting death, he still believed the Word of God was more valuable than the wealth of this world. And that lives of faithfulness would lead to ultimate fulfillment.

And somehow, for me, it has.

Nero is dead. Rome is fading. But the gospel keeps moving from household to household, city to city, nation to nation. Just as Paul said it would.

Sometimes those younger ask me what Paul was really like. I usually pause before answering. Because how do you explain a raging wildfire to someone who has only seen flickering candles? How do you explain a man who loved Jesus so completely that incredible suffering became secondary to faithfulness?18

I often think about his final moments. Did he quote Scripture as they led him away? Did he pray for Nero? Did he bow his knee to Jesus before the sword fell?

I do not know.

But I know this: Paul was never the hero of the story. He would never want us to make him one. No, Paul was a WITNESS. A blazing, relentless witness to the reality that JESUS CHRIST IS ALIVE.

And now my own life is nearly spent. I feel it. The race is drawing nigh before me. Soon I will be with Paul again. And together, we will be with the Rabbi. The One who was worth shipwrecks and scars. Worth prison and rejection. Worth loneliness and death. Worth throwing our entire lives away in order to accept the mission to make Him known above all rulers and royalty.

Paul taught me many things over those years on the road. But perhaps the greatest was this: The Kingdom of God is not carried forward by impressive men.19 It is carried forward by wholly surrendered followers of Jesus.

Twenty years ago, I walked with him. I saw his abandonment. I benefited from his example. Although the context is different, the words of Christ stand. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”20 The further we move away from the story, the more likely we are to lay down the cross and embrace another pursuit. One that is easier and seems to bring more promise. But stop and reflect on the life Paul lived for us to see. I dare you to dream of what it must feel like to die for the sake of a mission that has eternal consequences for a multitude of people living without the knowledge of our God.

Twenty years later and beyond, how do we respond to a radically submitted life like that? We do what he instructed us to do, and we do it with full abandon. He said it in that last letter I received.

“Now teach these truths to other trustworthy people who will be able to pass them on to others.” 21

Think about it. Count the cost. I beg of you, consider the payoff and the consequences of radically turning toward the mission and linking arms with Jesus.

What might that mean for your tomorrow❓

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Footnotes:

Although these are not always directly quoted in the story, we can assume that Paul would have spoken these things to Timothy, as he had many other disciples throughout his ministry.

“Adam made love to his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, ‘God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.’” - Genesis 4:25

He is sleeping peacefully now.

Seth. His name means granted or appointed. The Father granted me this gift. Even though I did not deserve it. Even though I rejected His original and perfect plan for us.

I am watching the rise and fall of his tiny chest in the lamplight, and I cannot stop the tears that have been gathering behind my eyes since the moment he was placed in my arms. They are not tears from a single source. They never are, not anymore. Joy and grief have become such close companions that I am no longer able to distinguish them sometimes. They arrive together now, always together, like two rivers merging into an ocean of forward-facing hope.

I have been sitting here for what must be hours. Thinking. Remembering. I do that more than I should.

There was a morning. The morning. The only morning that truly matters in the recounting of all my days, when the world was different. When we were different. The air smelled like something I no longer have a word for. Clean is too small. Whole is closer, but still not enough. The light fell through the leaves without effort or obstruction, and the sound of His voice moving through the garden was the most natural sound we heard in the garden teeming with life.

I had everything. Everything. And I sat on that rock and looked at the one thing I had been told I could not have. As infatuating as the ideas were, I decided that I knew better. Better than to desire. Better than to fantasize. I shouldn’t have allowed my curiosity space to breathe. But I did. Far past the point of no return. I stood up, unable to retreat to safety.

I have turned that moment over in my mind ten thousand times since we were sent out of Eden. I have pressed it and examined it from every angle, trying to understand how I could have been so completely, catastrophically deceived. The serpent was convincing; that much is sure. His words had a logic to them that felt like wisdom. “You will be like God,” he said. As if I were not already made in His image. As if what I was already given was not enough.

But I cannot credit the serpent with all of it. That would be too easy. I wanted it, no, I craved it in the depths of my soul.

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That’s the part that still burns. I saw the fruit, and it pulled at me from the inside. And I took it. I made the choice with both hands open. I handed it to Adam, and he took it without argument, without hesitation, without asking a single question of the One who had given us everything we needed for wholeness and simply asked us to trust Him with this one thing.

We both knew the moment it happened. There was no dramatic announcement. No booming voice to condemn us. Just an awful, sudden awareness. The presence of ourselves, of each other, of the distance that had not been there a moment before. We scrambled for fig leaves like children caught in a lie, trying to hide the evidence of our crime.

And then He called out quietly.

“Where are you?”

He knew where we were. He has always known. That question was not for His benefit. It was for ours. It is still for ours, I think. Where are you? Where have you gone? How far have you run from the perfection I gave to you? Why are we distanced?

I have been asking myself those questions ever since.

The ground in our new home is hard and unforgiving. I know every stone of it now. My hands are not the hands I was given, they are cracked and calloused from pulling and planting and fighting for things that once required no effort. Adam labors until the sweat drips off his chin, and still the thorns come back. The earth resists us now. It was not made to resist us. That is the part that breaks my heart again and again, not that the work is hard, but that it was never meant to be this way..

I did that. We did that. Adam and I. And somehow, you too. We did this TOGETHER.

And then Cain. Oh, my firstborn. Oh, the weight of his choices in my chest.

When he was born I thought, well, I genuinely believed, that he was the promised one. The seed who would crush the serpent’s head. I held him up, and I declared it out loud. “I have brought forth a man with the help of the LORD.” I, as if any good thing could come from me. I was still believing I had something to offer more than what He had given me.

Cain. I thought he was our hope. I wanted so badly for the story to begin its redemption with him.

And then Abel.

And then the field.

And then silence, the kind of silence that has no answer, the kind a mother falls into and is never entirely the same when she climbs back out. The kind that changes you in ways you wish would never be known.

I have grieved in ways that I cannot explain to anyone who has not stood over the body of a child they held as an infant. I have screamed at the sky. I have gone days without eating. I have looked at Adam and seen in his eyes the same hollow place that lives in mine and found neither of us had words sufficient for it.

Two people who broke the world together, now sitting in the wreckage together, with nothing to offer one another but presence. And a mutual embrace of the One who can redeem our failures. Who can make all things new and begin again, although different this time.

But Seth. This boy sleeping beside me. “God has granted me another child in place of Abel.” I said. When I said those words aloud, I tasted something I had almost forgotten existed. Not Eden, I am not confused enough to think I can go back to Eden. That road is closed and guarded, and I have made my peace with that. No. It was something else. Something new.

Seth will grow up in a hard world that we, Adam and I, perpetuated. He will feel the ground resist him, and fight the grief of what this family has carried. He will know what his brother did in that field. He will know the weight of what his parents lost and what it cost every generation that will follow.

But he will also know this. That his mother sat in the lamplight and watched him breathe and chose, again, to believe that God does not abandon what He loves. That the God who came walking in the garden, who called out to two people hiding in shame, did not walk away and leave us there.

He clothed us.

He covered what we could not cover ourselves. And He spoke a promise over us before He sent us out into the hard and beautiful and grief-soaked world we had broken. I did not deserve that. I have never once, not for a single morning, deserved that.

And that is precisely the point. He chooses not to give us what we deserve! He chooses to replace it with an incalculable measure of unearned and unadulterated Grace.

Seth is stirring now, his tiny fingers stretching wide and then curling back. His eyes open for just a moment, dark and searching and new, and then closed again. I pull him close and feel the warmth of him against my chest, as pure and innocent as that gift of redemption, and I weep. Not from despair. From the staggering, reckless grace of being given again what I forfeited on that wretched morning.

You have been handed things you didn’t earn. You have stood in the wreckage of choices you cannot take back.

So here is the question Seth is asking you just by breathing:

Do you believe the story is still moving toward something good, and are you willing to live like it is?

Adapted from Matthew 9:18-26, Mark 5:21-43, and Luke 8:40-56.

Jairus, Archisynagogos of Capernaum, Ruler of the Synagogue.

A man could get drunk on a title like that, and I did. Granting or denying access to the courts. Representing the congregation to outside authorities. Ordering or stopping floggings. Excommunicating. That kind of power feels invigorating to a mere man.

Until his daughter is dying.

I knew the Scriptures. I stood in the synagogue week after week, overseeing the reading of the Law, making sure everything was in order. I knew where people sat, who carried influence, who needed correction. I was respected. Deferred to.

When I spoke, people listened.

There’s a certain rhythm to that kind of life. You begin to believe you can manage things. That if you just stay faithful, stay sharp, stay disciplined, you can keep the world from unraveling.

But death doesn’t respect your position.

Her decline started small. A fever. Nothing alarming at first. We had seen it before. Children get sick, and they recover quickly. Every parent knows that and expects it. My wife tried to stay calm, but I could see it in her eyes before she said it out loud. This time it was different.

The fever lingered, and it climbed. Then it consumed until it grew out of control. All my authority, all my clout and power, all my strategically built reputation meant nothing in that small room where my daughter lay burning and fading away right before my haughty eyes.

I remember standing there, watching her chest rise and fall, uneven and shallow. I remember thinking, “I oversee the synagogue. I am one of the most powerful men in town, and I cannot help my own child breathe. I can’t command her body to do what it is supposed to do without thinking.” That’s when control started slipping through my fingers.

At first, I did what any man in my position would do. I sought out help within my circles. I have the ear of EVERYONE who can bring answers for ANY problem. The best doctors and healers. But the more I reached, the more I realized that I was grasping at air.

There’s a moment every man faces, no matter how much we try to avoid it. The moment when you realize your strength has a ceiling, that your influence has limits, and that your authority means nothing to the uncontrollable circumstances of life. I faced that moment standing beside her bed that morning.

Helpless.

Clueless.

Powerless.

And then there were whispers about Him. I had heard them before, of course. Everyone had. Stories of healings. Of authority that didn’t come from training or position. Some of us were cautious. Some skeptical. A few outright opposed. You don’t build a system of order and then easily embrace someone who disrupts it. But desperation has a way of cutting through your defense mechanisms.

When your daughter is dying, you stop debating. YOU ACT. Even if it is contrary to everything you built for yourself. I didn’t announce my decision. I didn’t gather a council. I didn’t ask permission.

I LEFT TO FIND HIM!

I remember the walk, or was it a run? I was out of my mind. It felt longer than it should have. Every step carried the weight of what I was risking. Not just my reputation, though that was certainly on the line. It was more than that. It was everything I had built my identity on. Independence. Capability. Self-reliance. The confidence of knowing I could make things right.

How would I approach Him? If I went to this wandering teacher, this disruptor of order, and begged, then I was admitting something. That I wasn’t enough. That everything I had relied on wasn’t enough now.

I found Him in the crowd. Of course, there was a crowd. There’s always a crowd when hope shows up in a place that’s been suffocating under oppression and tyranny.

As I approached Him, I didn’t even think about it, as a matter of fact, I did the unthinkable. I fell down before Him. Right in front of the crowd. Not as a leader or a man of status. Just as a desperate father trying to seek help for an unsolvable problem with his precious little girl.

“My little daughter is dying. Please come. Put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.”

On my knees at His feet, I didn’t dress it up. No formal language. No theological framing. No leaning into my authority. Just raw, unadulterated desperation. And He said yes. That should have been enough. That should have settled everything in me. He was coming. But if you’ve ever walked through a crisis, you know, faith doesn’t always feel like confidence. Sometimes it feels like holding onto a thread while everything inside you is scratching for hope and finding doubt.

We started moving toward my house. His eyes turned in the direction of my daughter’s sick bed. He heard my cry! He joined my pursuit to save my little girl.

And then He stopped and turned his head to look down behind Himself.

“Wait. Please. Don’t Stop. Let’s keep moving.” My words were respectful, but my gut was wrenching and screaming to take control.

He looked back at a lady I had seen lingering outside the Synagogue walls many times. An unclean beggar is not allowed into the presence of the religious. A woman who had been an outcast for years due to her chronic pathological bleeding. She was prohibited from entering the worship and synagogue life. She was perpetually unclean, and no one would touch her in order to protect themselves.

Here she was, a socially and religiously rejected outcast. And my daughter, the daughter of the Ruler of the Synagogue, lie at home in her deathbed waiting for the Healer. And he was taking time for the vagabond! How could this be? How could this happen to a man of my stature? At the point of my greatest desperation.

On the inside, the father in me raged for control. But standing before the only hope for my daughter’s life, I was forced to silence as I watched Him divert his attention to this hopeless beggar. How could He do this to me? Didn’t He know who I was?

She had touched Him, and He turned to find her. He asked questions. He listened. He spoke to her as precious seconds passed and my daughter’s life grew more fragile and fleeting.

Didn’t He know that EVERY second mattered? Didn’t He realize that this woman had been bleeding for 12 years? It could wait one more day! Just one more day, while He hurried to save my daughter’s life! I wanted to grab Him. To say, “Please! You don’t understand! She doesn’t have years as this woman did. She has minutes!”

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t risk losing Him. So, I watched.

And something strange happened in that pause. As frustrating as it was, as unbearable as it felt, I saw something in Him. He wasn’t rushed. He wasn’t anxious. He was fully present with her.

As I stood watching, I heard a commotion from behind me. The voices became more familiar as they moved closer.

“Step aside, I’m getting to the ruler of the Synagogue. Move to the side. We have an urgent message.”

“Sir, leave Him be, your daughter is dead.”

Even in the midst of the shouting crowds and the weeping woman, my world became dead silent. The kind of hush that only comes with news like that. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of hope. Everything inside me collapsed in that moment.

It was over. He was too late. My one hope for a miracle was wasted on a beggar! He turned to me. Not to the crowd. Not to the messengers. To me.

“Don’t be afraid. Just believe.” His voice was some mixture of tenderness and confidence.

“Believe what? She’s gone.” I thought. “You cold-hearted healer.”

But there was something in His voice that softened me. It wasn’t urgency. Not panic, but authority. A kind of steady certainty that didn’t match the situation, but overshadowed it.

I turned toward home and started walking. One hundred paces, and for some reason, I looked back. Maybe to say one last goodbye to my daughter’s last chance for life. And when my eyes met His, I realized He was following me. Why? It was too late. Is he mocking me?

When we arrived, the house was already filled with mourning. The wailing had begun. Professional mourners, neighbors, and family. Everyone was doing what we do when death comes. Making noise around the silence. As the mourners and the family came running to see Him, He said something that made my blood boil all over again.

“She is not dead, but asleep.”

They laughed at Him. Of course they did. We always laugh when the situation is beyond belief. We laugh to relieve the tension of being confronted with something too good to be true.

Why would He put me through the agony of insisting on going to her room to see her? Why would He make this harder? Why would he pierce me with having to see Him standing over her body when He could have treated this with more urgency when I fell at His feet two hours ago?

He asked everyone else to leave. And then it was just us. Me. My wife. A few of His closest followers and Him.

And her.

Lying there.

Silent and Still. LIFELESS!

He took her by the hand. Such a simple act. Such a gentle gesture. No performance. No ritual. Just a comforting touch.

“Talitha koum. Little girl, I say to you, get up.”

I don’t know what I was expecting to happen next. I really had no framework for seeing her breathe in life after the last breath had left her lungs. I really don’t know what I thought was coming. But what I saw was nowhere in my realm of possibility.

Her chest rose. She gasped. She heaved as she inhaled deeply. And her eyes opened!

She rose from a posture of death to sit in a posture of life. Everything I thought I knew about power, about authority, about control shattered in that moment. The most powerful man on the planet cannot command life into a dead body. This was something far from the natural system by which we rule.

Her mother screamed. Then she fell into her daughter’s arms and wailed. Tears of rejoicing began to fall from my eyes for the first time in decades. What we saw Him do was more than I could have ever asked or imagined just a few minutes earlier. Life itself bent to His voice. And somehow it didn’t just flow back into our daughter, it spilled out into the hearts of her parents in a way that I can not put into words.

As I reflect back on that day twenty years back, I feel like it was just a day ago. The life that He breathed into her still flows through my lungs. Things are different now. Power and influence have new definitions. Life and death look different. I have surrendered my existence and purpose to His glory and honor.

And through this whole experience of life and death and life again, there’s something that still grips me as I’m lying in bed at night thinking about what I saw that day.

He wasn’t in a hurry. Even with death on the line, He wasn’t rushed. Because what feels final to us isn’t final to Him. An interruption by a bleeding beggar on the road doesn’t have to wait to defer to a situation that was literally life or death. I thought I needed Him to move faster. But what I actually needed was to trust Him more deeply.

Most of us are still trying to control outcomes. Manage timelines. Protect what matters most to us with whatever authority we think we have. But sooner or later, you’ll face something that strips all that away. And in that moment, you’ll have a choice.

Cling to what you can control? Or fall at the feet of our savior and trust what you can’t? I’ve done both. I’ve tried to power my way through problems and solutions, relying on my ingenuity and skill. And I’ve failed in the face of the uncontrollable. And I’ve come to the end of my influence and power and been forced to fall before the feet of Jesus in humility, risking my reputation and relinquishing my control.

And I will tell you without reserve that, either way, you will fall hard and be forced to trust deeply. So do yourself a favor and fall into His arms as my wife fell into our daughter’s. And let your self-sufficiency and willpower drain from your head to your toes and out of your existence and lean deeply into the One, the only One who has the authority to conquer death and breathe life into a lifeless soul.

When He seems distracted by the beggar and slow to embrace the urgency of your situation, give Him the freedom to take the situation into His own hands. Grieve, but don’t lose hope. Question, but don’t doubt. Walk toward Him and not away.

Right now. This very moment. As you read this last paragraph. What is it you are holding on to? Where is your life out of control? What are you waiting on, and what seems to be distracting Him from running with you?

He knows. And He cares.

Trust Him With the Delay.

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