“The Lord began to show me something, that it’s one thing to reach people, and praise God, we have to. But many people in America, many church pastors, don’t have an infrastructure, a pathway, if you will, to move people through a process, to create them into the image of Christ…They don’t know the kind of disciple they’re trying to make, and so they’re just throwing things and seeing what sticks against the wall in a sense.”
“One of the things that the Jewish culture has taught me is how to hold two paradoxical ideas that appear to be against each other in tension at the same time, right? And one of the things we don’t do well in America is we don’t hold discipleship and evangelism together in tension.”
“We thought we were equipping the Saints to do the ministry, but actually I was equipping a staff to do the ministry.”
“We realized that we were actually doing the ministry for our people and making disciples. And we weren’t creating hero makers. We were the heroes of the discipleship ministry…we weren’t empowering our people to be the hero makers.”
“What I’m seeing is a lot of pastors saying, ‘This is how you make disciples’…I don’t see a lot of people saying, ‘This is what will happen when you have a church on fire for Jesus.’”
“From the end of December 2020 to the first first 15 weeks of 2021, we saw over 1,000 people baptized. And let me just say, at 15 weeks, 1,000 people baptized. And in the year of 2021, we saw over or right around 1,600 people baptized.”
“I used to preach a sermon on Acts Chapter 2, and I’d say, ‘What if this Sunday God pours out his Spirit like Acts 2 and you have 3,000 people saved in your service? Do you have a process—think about this—to baptize them?…And I would jokingly say, not only do you not have a process, but we don’t have a process for that. Well, God almost called our bluff in a sense.”
“Until a disciple makes a disciple, they haven’t made disciples.”
“What you celebrate, gets replicated. If you’re only celebrating evangelism, which we try to celebrate, then you’re only going to produce evangelists. If you only celebrate making disciples, you’re only going to produce disciples. You want to celebrate both.”
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“Church leaders have to have options. Because the context is different, right? California is different than Nashville. Chicago is different than Florida. So you have to have a context.”
“You have to have some kind of plan and process to make disciples. Jesus never left discipleship to chance.”
“If you’re listening, I would find four to six key catalysts, changing, shaping men in your church that if Jesus gets a hold of their heart, there will be a ripple effect in the congregation…Those men became the greatest billboard of apologetics for discipleship working in the church.”
