Daniel Im: There Are No Silver Bullets in Discipleship

Daniel Im is the Director of Church Multiplication for NewChurches.com at LifeWay Christian Resources. Daniel also serves as a Teaching Pastor at The Fellowship, a multisite church in Nashville. Daniel holds a M.A. in Global Leadership and has served and pastored in church plants and multisite churches ranging from 100 people to 50,000 people in Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal, Korea, Edmonton, and Nashville. Daniel and his wife, Christina, have three children and live in Nashville.

Key Questions for Daniel Im

– What is the biggest mistake you see pastors and ministry leaders make as they step into a revitalization effort?

– What kind of self-awareness practices are helpful for ministry leaders and their churches?

– How does discipleship fit into church revitalization?

Key Quotes from Daniel Im

“A lot of times in ministry we spend so much time learning about ‘the other’ that we don’t actually know about ourselves. We don’t know why we lead the way we lead, we don’t know how we lead…”

“If we were just to take a quarter of the time we spend reading other people’s stuff and learning about other people’s contexts, to learn about how God created us and what’s happened in the unique context of our church and ministry, we’re going to be much better and much further down the road than trying to import any idea.”

“The [leaders] you follow are the ones you model.”

“If you are going into a new role in a church, I would start with a season of listening. And I would ask: ‘What do you hope never changes?’”

“I am pro-multisite and I am pro-church planting…I think a lot of churches can do both. I think a lot of multisite churches shouldn’t do multisite but they got into it because it was the thing to do.”

“Consider Seattle, for example. There’s nothing wrong with multisite as a strategy to reach the lost, but a multisite video-venue model in Seattle is probably not something I would encourage a new church to do…specifically because of what happened with Mars Hill there.”

“Typically in a rural context, it takes about seven years for the church and for the city to see you as their pastor and to see you as someone who’s going to stay.”

“We often teach the way we’ve been taught…We are by-products of our Western educational system.”

“A lot of churches will see discipleship as a program whereas in reality when you look at the Scriptures, discipleship is actually more about the direction you’re moving in rather than the destination that you’ve arrived.”

“A lot of church leaders are great at starting things, but we’re horrible at stopping them.”

“The more programmatic a church is, they just want higher numbers than last year.”

Mentioned in the Show:

No Silver Bullets

DanielIm.com