Bishop Keith Andrews strongly recommends these books to aid you in your development as a disciple-making church and as a disciple-making individual.
The book descriptions are taken from Amazon and Goodreads.
If you read nothing else, read these two:
The Master Plan of Evangelism by Robert Coleman. Copyright May 2010.
For more than forty years this classic study has shown Christians how to minister to the people God brings into their lives. Instead of drawing on the latest popular fad or the newest selling technique, Dr. Robert E. Coleman looks to the Bible to find the answer to the question: What was Christ’s strategy for evangelism? This convenient, portable format has an updated look for a new generation of readers.
Choose the Life: Exploring a Faith that Embraces Discipleship by Bill Hull. Copyright May 2004.
Many churches harbor harried congregations merely going through the motions–sleepwalking saints who fail to experience transformed living. Many are unable and unwilling to share the gospel, convinced that it’s not their “gift.”
True disciples do more than the minimum, explains Hull. They choose the life and commit to bringing Jesus to the lost. They live out their beliefs and walk the walk. Submission shows the doubting world that Christ is embedded in their character.
Continue your studies with:
The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship by Dallas Willard. Copyright May 2014.
Jesus’s Last Command—Ignored!
The last command Jesus gave the church before he ascended to heaven was the Great Commission, the call for Christians to “make disciples of all the nations.” But Christians have responded by making “Christians,” not “disciples.” This, according to brilliant scholar and renowned Christian thinker Dallas Willard, has been the church’s Great Omission.
The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
What can the call to discipleship, the adherence to the word of Jesus, mean today to the businessman, the soldier, the laborer, or the aristocrat? What did Jesus mean to say to us? What is his will for us today? Drawing on the Sermon on the Mount, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answers these timeless questions by providing a seminal reading of the dichotomy between “cheap grace” and “costly grace.” “Cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is the grace we bestow on ourselves…grace without discipleship….Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the girl which must be asked for, the door at which a man must know….It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
Cultivating A Life For God: Multiplying Disciples Through Life Transformation Groups by Neil Cole. Copyright March 2014.
The United States is a mission field in desperate need of the gospel. Somehow we have managed to lose sight of the prime directive given to us by Jesus to go and make disciples of all the nations. There is hope. We can still fulfill the great commission in this generation, but we will need to get back the power that spread the gospel across the globe in the first century. We will need to see multiplication of disciples occur among all those in the church. Cultivating a Life for God takes an in-depth look at a tool called Life Transformation Groups and explains how this tool can release the awesome power of multiplication in your Church.
The Disciple Maker’s Handbook: Seven Elements of a Discipleship Lifestyle by Bobby Harrington and Josh Patrick. Copyright February 2017.
Many people believe that discipleship is important, but they need help. In fact, the vast majority of Christians report that they have never been personally discipled by a more mature follower of Jesus. Is it any wonder that they have a difficult time knowing how to disciple others?
If making disciples of Jesus is the greatest cause on earth, how should we equip people to do it? This handbook is a practical guide for how to embrace the discipleship lifestyle – being a disciple of Jesus and how to make other disciples of Jesus. With contributions from pastors and teachers like Francis Chan, Jeff Vanderstelt, Bill Hull, Jim Putman, KP Yohannan, and Robert Coleman, the authors present seven elements that are necessary for disciple making to occur:
- Jesus—the original disciple maker and centerpiece of discipleship.
Holy Spirit—fuels the disciple-making process. - Intentionality—making disciples utilizing a strategy and a roadmap.
Relationships—creating a loving, genuine connection with others who trust and follow Jesus. - Bible—using the Word of God as the manual for making disciples.
- Journey—forging a traceable growth story from a new birth to spiritual parenthood.
- Multiply—reproducing the discipleship process so that the disciple becomes a disciple maker.
Discipleship That Fits: The Five Kinds of Relationships God Uses to Help Us Grow by Bobby Harrington and Alex Absalom. Copyright February 2016.
For far too long, the church has tried to make disciples using a one-size-fits-all approach. Some churches advocate 1-on-1 discipling, others try getting everyone into a small group, while still others training through mission trips or service projects. Yet others focus all their efforts on attracting people to a large group gathering to hear biblical teaching and preaching. But does one size really fit everyone?
Based on careful biblical study and years of experience making disciples in the local church, Bobby Harrington and Alex Absalom have identified five key relationships where discipleship happens in our lives. In each relational context we need to understand how discipleship occurs and we need to set appropriate expectations for each context.
Discipleship That Fits shows you the five key ways discipleship occurs. It looks at how Jesus made disciples and how disciples were formed in the early church. Each of the contexts is necessary at different times and in different ways as a person grows toward maturity in Christ:
- Public Relationships: The church gathering corporately for worship
- Social Relationships: Networks of smaller relationships where we engage in mission and live out our faith in community
- Personal Relationships: Small groups of six to sixteen people where we challenge and encourage one another on a regular basis
- Transparent Relationships: Close relationships of three to four where we share intimate details of our lives for accountability
- The Divine Relationship: Our relationship with Jesus Christ where we grow through the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit.
Filled with examples and stories, Alex and Bobby show you how to develop discipleship practices in each relational context by sharing how Jesus did it, how the early church practiced it, and how churches are discipling people today.
DiscipleShift: Five Steps That Help Your Church to Make Disciples Who Make Disciples by Jim Putman and Bobby Harrington. Copyright April 2013.
Over the last thirty years, many influential church leaders and church planters in America have adopted various models for reaching unchurched people. An “attractional” model will seek to attract people to a local church. Younger leaders may advocate a more “missional” approach, in which believers live and work among unchurched people and intentionally seek to serve like Christ. While each of these approaches have merit, something is still missing, something even more fundamental to the mission of the church: discipleship.
Making disciples—helping people to trust and follow Jesus—is the church’s God-given mandate. Devoted disciples attract people outside the church because of the change others see in their Christ-like lives. And discipleship empowers Christians to be more like Christ as they intentionally develop relationship with non-believers.
DiscipleShift walks you through five key “shifts” that churches must make to refocus on the biblical mission of discipleship. These intentional changes will attract the world and empower your church members to be salt and light in their communities.
Exponential: How You and Your Friends Can Start a Missional Church Movement by Dave and Jon Ferguson. Copyright April 2010.
Authors Dave and Jon Ferguson communicate a simple strategy that will engage millions of Christ followers and challenge every church leader to become a reproducing follower and leader. Exponential lays out a brief but solid theology for a reproducing strategy, giving practical “how-to’s” for reproducing Christ followers, leaders, artists, groups/teams, venues, sites, churches, and networks of churches. Weaved throughout this book is the amazing story of Community Christian Church, which was started by five friends who used the reproducing strategies found in Exponential to grow one of the most influential churches in the U.S. and develop a network of reproducing churches. Many of today’s Christians consider the missional challenge of Jesus—feed the hungry, comfort the lonely, bring people to God’s Word—as inspirational but not something that’s achievable. Or, they’ve heard the challenge of Jesus and are frustrated with how little they’ve done. Jesus gave his followers this mission because he wants them to hear it, be inspired, and then actually do it … Exponential will show them how. Exponential is the anchor book in the Exponential Series.
Transforming Discipleship: Making Disciples a Few at a Time by Greg Ogden. Copyright June 2003.
Many churchgoers complain that their churches lack a coherent plan for discipleship and spiritual growth. In turn, many church leaders lament their lack of resources to build and manage effective programs to help people become fully devoted followers of Christ. In Transforming Discipleship Greg Ogden introduces his vision for discipleship, emphasizing that solutions will not be found in large-scale, finely-tuned, resource-heavy programs. Instead, Ogden recovers Jesus’ method of accomplishing life change by investing in just a few people at a time. And he shows how discipleship can become a self-replicating process with ongoing impact from generation to generation. Biblical, practical and tremendously effective, Transforming Discipleship provides the insights and philosophy of ministry behind Ogden’s earlier work, Discipleship Essentials. Together, these ground-breaking books have the potential to transform how your church transforms the lives of its people.
Right Here, Right Now: Everyday Mission for Everyday People by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford. Copyright January 2011.
People in all walks of life are discovering what it means to be involved, concerned, missional Christians. But simply having block parties or spending more time downtown is not enough to describe what it means to be a missional people. What is needed is a reformation of the way we actually live our lives as Jesus followers. We need to see a way of living faithfully to God’s mission in the world, right here, right now.
In this inspiring yet practical book, Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford equip believers to live missionally regardless of situation, vocation, or location, making the concept of being missional accessible to the whole body of Christ. Touching on issues of discipleship, spirituality, and church at every level of experience, Right Here, Right Now calls readers to be the people God has made them to be.
You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K. A. Smith. Copyright April 2016.
You are what you love. But you might not love what you think.
In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. And while we desire to shape culture, we are not often aware of how culture shapes us. We might not realize the ways our hearts are being taught to love rival gods instead of the One for whom we were made. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices. He explains that worship is the “imagination station” that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. This is why the church and worshiping in a local community of believers should be the hub and heart of Christian formation and discipleship.
Following the publication of his influential work Desiring the Kingdom, Smith received numerous requests from pastors and leaders for a more accessible version of that book’s content. No mere abridgment, this new book draws on years of Smith’s popular presentations on the ideas presented in Desiring the Kingdom to offer a fresh, bottom-up rearticulation. The author creatively uses film, literature, and music illustrations to engage readers and includes material on marriage, family, youth ministry, and faith and work. He also suggests individual and communal practices for shaping the Christian life.
Conversion and Discipleship: You Can’t Have One without the Other by Bill Hull. Copyright January 2016.
Discipleship occurs when someone answers the call to learn from Jesus how to live his or her life—as though Jesus were living it. The end result is that the disciple becomes the kind of person who naturally does what Jesus did.
How the church understands salvation and the gospel is the key to recovering a biblical theology of discipleship. Our doctrines of grace and salvation, in some cases, actually prevent us from creating an expectation that we are to be disciples of Jesus. A person can profess to be a Christian and yet still live under the impression that they don’t need to actually follow Jesus. Being a follower is seen as an optional add-on, not a requirement. It is a choice, not a demand. Being a Christian today has no connection with the biblical idea that we are formed into the image of Christ.
In this ground-breaking new book, pastor and author Bill Hull shows why our existing models of evangelism and discipleship fail to actually produce followers of Jesus. He looks at the importance of recovering a robust view of the gospel and taking seriously the connection between conversion—answering the call to follow Jesus—and discipleship—living like the one we claim to follow.
Missionary Methods, St. Paul’s or Ours: A Study of the Church in the Four Provinces (Classic Reprint) by Roland Allen. Reprint Date June 9, 2017.
This study of Paul’s missionary work focuses not on the apostle’s doctrine or character but on the method by which he accomplished his task. Throughout, Allen compares Paul’s methods to modern missionary methods; he concludes by suggesting some ways the apostolic method might be usefully employed today.
The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It(Roland Allen Library) by Roland Allen. Copyright June 1, 2012.
If it were once believed that the freedom of churches should be restricted to bring greater control to missions, Roland Allen sets out to overturn this conception. Warning against the danger of imposing greater limits on churches, the Author advocates that all members of the church, ‘natives’ and foreigners alike, must take an active role in its establishment and daily life. The study divides itself into nine chapters; the first, introducing Allen’s standpoint, the second as an opening into the nature and character of Spontaneous Expression. The third chapter deals with modern attempts by ‘natives’ towards the liberty of their churches. The fear of the doctrine becoming weakened by natives taking it into their own hands is addressed by chapter four and this fear is widened into the realm of the Christian standard of morals in chapter five. Civilisation and enlightenment form the central themes of the sixth chapter. Chapters seven and eight tackle the distinction between the Church and missionary societies. It is in the final chapter that the future of Spontaneous Expansion is investigated and Allen puts forward his ideas which, as he rightly predicted, were broadly accepted fifty years and longer still after their original publication.
The Intersection Journal, Issue 1 This first issue tackles the issue of Christian Nationalism, the confusion of Christianity with the political entity. It offers four articles plus a variety of downloadable items for further exploration.
Disciple-Making & Leadership Development 