Celebrating 100 Posts, 2,000 Notes, and a Growing Community Learning to Multiply Disciples and Discipling Communities
💥 This week marks a milestone that feels far bigger than a set of round numbers. 💥
One hundred articles and more than 2,000 notes posted!
(if you don’t know what a note is click the button above)
But what we are really celebrating is not content. We are celebrating a growing tribe of people who are refusing to let disciple-making remain theoretical. 🎉 And who are chasing real-life, real-time, real-effective disciple multiplication.
This content is not meant to become a platform. It is meant to serve as a shared language for leaders and everyday believers who are quietly wrestling with the same tensions and working together to discover answers to our deepest questions and concerns.
We are deeply grateful for the church. And at the same time, we are unsettled by how little Jesus Pattern Disciple reproduction is happening through it.
Over the last 100 articles, a common thread has emerged
sometimes intentionally
sometimes through wrestling
sometimes through repentance
Jesus did not design His movement to be sustained primarily by performance, programs, or professionals.
👉 He designed it to be carried forward by ORDINARY DISCIPLES who are learning how to follow Him together. 👈🏻
✔︎ To mark this milestone, I want to revisit the ten long-form articles on this site that have most clearly shaped the conversation and the direction of this community.
These are not simply the most popular posts. They are the ones that most directly address the core questions we are learning to ask.
🔗 CLICK EACH HEADLINE TO READ THE ARTICLE 🔗
1. One 2,500-Member Mega-Church or One Hundred 25-Member Simple Churches? What’s the Difference?
With more than 3,500 views, this article has become the primary on-ramp into everything else written here. It sets the tone for the culture of fast multiplication and deep relationships. It wrestles with the expense model of the Western Church. It asks hard questions and leaves the reader contemplating.
😳 The question is intentionally simple 😳
Would you rather see one large, well-run, well-staffed congregation of 2,500 people—or one hundred simple, relational, reproducing communities scattered throughout a city?
This is not an argument against large churches.
It is a challenge to our definition of fruit.
The article explores how Jesus framed fruitfulness—not in terms of crowd size, but in terms of obedience and reproduction. When we examine the way the gospel moved in the first century, what stands out is not centralized gatherings, but decentralized, simple churches that met in homes and faced persecution well.
At the heart of this article is a quiet theological tension.
We have become highly skilled at gathering believers.
We have become far less skilled at forming disciple-makers.
The comparison forces us to ask what kind of future we are actually building. A church that grows larger and gets more bulky and expensive, or a movement that grows wider.
Why it resonated
Because it gently exposes a deeply rooted false assumption—that scale equals impact. And it invites us to imagine a different kind of faithfulness.
2. Salt and Light: The Identity of a Disciple-Maker
This was a collaborative article written for Paul Christopher and his amazing community of disciples at Salt and Light.
Before Jesus ever gives strategy, structure, or systems, He gives identity.
This article explores Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 and reframes salt and light not as inspirational language, but as missional assignment.
Salt preserves. Light illuminates.
Neither exists for itself.
The article challenges a subtle shift that has happened in much of Western Christianity: we have turned identity into something we receive privately rather than something we live publicly.
Disciples do not become salt and light after training. They become salt and light the moment they belong to Jesus.
Why it resonated
Because it grounds mission in who we already are, and not in what we are trying to become.
3. My Journey From the Meeting Room to the Mission Field
This is one of the most vulnerable pieces on the site.
It tells the story of leaving professional certainty and institutional ministry to pursue a calling that felt both clearer and far less controllable.
The deeper thread of this article is not transition.
It is surrender!
It explores how easy it is for leaders to mistake productivity for obedience, and how painful it can be to untangle our careers from our assignments, and our identities from our platforms.
For many readers, the story mirrors their own inner conflict: the growing sense that God may be inviting them into something smaller, slower, and more relational than the ministry structures they have known.
Why it resonated
Many leaders carry a quiet grief that their faith has become functional rather than formative. And that their ministry has become functional rather than transformational.
4. Discipleship Starts at Home
This was a collaboration with Maury Wood, and it was so good for him to speak into our disciple-making tribe. In this article, Maury confronts one of the most common blind spots in disciple-making strategy.
We often
Talk about the neighborhood
Talk about the city
Talk about unreached people
But we rarely examine our own households as the primary discipling environment.
This piece reframes family as the first laboratory of obedience
The place where forgiveness, confession, prayer, conflict, Scripture, and reconciliation are practiced daily. It quietly dismantles the idea that discipleship is something we outsource to church programming, replacing it with the biblical pattern of faith being formed in everyday life and among the people right inside our own homes.
Why it resonated
Because it restored dignity to ordinary, unseen faithfulness at home, amid distractions, among kids arguing and parents wrestling.
5. How Can You Make More Disciples by Partnering with Others?
This article introduces the APEST framework not as personality theory or leadership hierarchy, but as a biblical picture of how Jesus continues to form His church. It outlines the structure of The Great Team that God gave the church to both multiply and mature the believers.
Apostolic pioneering, prophetic alignment, evangelistic proclamation, shepherding care, and teaching formation are not competing approaches. They are complementary expressions of Christ’s ministry.
The article presses into a truth most movements eventually discover the hard way:
Disciple-making stalls when one gift dominates the system.
Multiplication flourishes when diverse functions are allowed to serve together.
Why it resonated
Because it offered leaders a language for collaboration rather than burnout, and a framework for disciple multiplication coupled with spiritual maturity.
6. Tracking Disciple-Making Movements: A Biblical Foundation and Practical Way Forward
Few topics generate more quiet discomfort than measurement in the disciple-making world!
This article explores why tracking disciple-making activity is not a modern managerial invention, but a deeply biblical practice of remembering, discerning, and stewarding what God is doing.
From genealogies in Genesis, to census language in Israel, to reporting patterns in Acts, Scripture consistently records spiritual movement. The article carefully distinguishes between control and care, between performance metrics and pastoral stewardship.
Why it resonated
Because it allowed leaders to hold both spiritual depth and practical accountability without shame.
7. The Simple Church Movement
This article examines why small, relational, reproducible expressions of church continue to emerge in vastly different cultural contexts.
Rather than positioning simple churches as a replacement for traditional congregations, the article frames them as an ancient pattern rediscovered. It presents a pattern centered on shared life, obedience to Jesus’ commands, and spiritual family.
It invites readers to reconsider what actually forms disciples: proximity, vulnerability, spiritual practice, and mission.
Why it resonated
Because Jesus-patterned discipleship is built on the principal of more time with fewer people produces greater results.
8. Jesus Might Not Hire Your Pastor
This article intentionally disrupts modern church leadership assumptions.
By comparing contemporary hiring practices with the way Jesus chose and formed His disciples, it exposes how easily competence, communication skills, and charisma become substitutes for character and obedience.
The article is not an attack on pastors. It is a call to recalibrate our true values toward the values of Jesus in spiritual leadership. Jesus shaped fishermen, tax collectors, and zealots, not through professional training programs, but through proximity and practice.
Why it resonated
Because many leaders sense that our leadership pipelines are producing managers more readily than Jesus-patterned disciple-makers.
9. APEST Series #4 – The Shepherd Among Us
This is one of seven articles in the APEST series. This particular article highlights one of the most misunderstood and undervalued spiritual functions in church culture.
Shepherding is often mistaken for niceness.
In Scripture, it is far more costly.
Shepherds protect people from harm, confront deception, sustain spiritual health, and cultivate relational depth over time. In movements that prize speed, innovation, and reach, shepherding can feel inefficient.
This article argues that without shepherding, movements eventually fracture and the people disperse for lack of both care and challenge.
Why it resonated
Because growth without care is not formation—it is expansion without maturity.
10. King David’s Lament After His Greatest Failure
This reflective narrative slows the reader down and sits with the emotional weight of sin, shame, and repentance. Rather than rushing to restoration language, the article allows space for grief, brokenness, and spiritual reckoning.
It invites leaders and believers to see themselves in David, not only in his calling, but in his collapse of character and restoration to redemption.
Why it resonated
Because many faithful people are quietly carrying wounds they do not know how to name.
What These Ten Articles Reveal About The Missional Disciple-Making Collective Community
Taken together, these ten articles form a theology of practice.
They are not primarily about models.
They are about spiritual and missional formation.
They reveal a shared hunger for:
identity before activity
obedience before innovation
relationships before structures
multiplication before scale
formation before platform
They reveal a community willing to examine deeply rooted assumptions about success, leadership, church, and mission. They reveal a group of people willing to ask slower, more dangerous questions.
What if disciple-making actually requires our entire lives?
What if Jesus actually meant obedience when He said “teach them to obey”?
What if the future of the church depends more on living rooms than conference rooms?
Thank You for 2,000 Conversations
Two thousand Notes do not belong to a writer.
They belong to a community.
They represent
Leaders who are trying again after failure.
Parents who are learning to disciple their children.
Missional servants who are re-imagining what faithfulness looks like.
Ordinary believers who are discovering that God can actually use them.
Thank you for reading slowly.
Thank you for disagreeing honestly.
Thank you for sharing generously.
Thank you for practicing courage in quiet places.
Here’s to the next hundred articles.
And far more importantly, here’s to a new band of disciple-makers who are learning how to dive headlong into the Jesus Pattern of disciple-making!
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Kevin, congratulations on this massive milestone! What stands out most in this recap is the consistent heartbeat behind every post: that Jesus didn’t design a movement to be sustained by professionals, but carried by ordinary disciples. The comparison between the 'One 2,500-member church' vs. 'One hundred 25-member churches' continues to be such a necessary challenge to our definition of fruitfulness. Thank you for consistently pointing us back to identity before activity and obedience before innovation. Here’s to the next 100 articles and the continued growth of this tribe!