“The Holy Spirit is stirring in people’s hearts. Jesus, you know, he’s going after the one, and he’s the one that’s creating the interest in their hearts. He’s the one that’s moving them from sleepers to seekers, from the uninterested to the interested.”
“For the last 70 years we’ve tried to create interest, but what would it look like if we actually instead trusted the Holy Spirit to create that interest and stir that interest in people’s hearts, and our ministries, our strategies, our vision, everything we do in our church is more focused on the interested non-Christians and the interested Christians?”
“I’m not expending energy trying to make Christianity cool in a sense, right? I’m not trying to expend energy trying to hit the lowest common denominator and then expect them to come to a different environment for a deeper enrichment in their theology.”
“When it comes to actually preaching, it is actually, I find, quite freeing because I have the freedom now to go deeper. I have the freedom not to exclude non-Christians, but I have the freedom to go deeper and to ask these questions, to engage with the text and the applicability of the text to our lives.”
“In a sense, what you are giving your team and what you are doing with your strategy is you are focusing, and you’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re not going to do everything or whatever is cool and whatever is in vogue and new. No, we’re going to focus knowing that these people are interested.’”
“This strategy on focusing on the interested is not an excuse to just say, ‘You know what? It’s 100% the Holy Spirit’s responsibility to stir up interest in someone’s heart’…That’s not what I’m saying.”
“When you look at the interested Christians—the disciples—how do you minister to, how do you help them?”
“We’re going to invite everyone to neighbor. What does it look like to love your neighbor? To love them, to pour into them, to invest in them, to pray with them?”
“What [people] won’t say no to is a follower of Christ who is genuinely loving them like Christ loves them.”
“How do we neighbor well? How do we sow those seeds of friendship? And we do that not necessarily just me to my neighbor, but in community with one another.”
“Unfortunately, what has ended up happening is our discipleship strategies have gone toward meeting the needs of the consumers more than those who are disciples. So in the book I say…we need to equip the disciples and we need to challenge the consumers.”
“Unintentionally, if we think that all Christians are the same and we’re not making this distinction of the uninterested and the interested, what will end up happening, and I’ve seen this so often in churches, is that it’s the consumers that will drive the strategy of the church, because they’re the most vocal.”
“What I would say to everyone who’s listening is, what would it look like for you to challenge, disturb and disrupt the consumers in your context?”
Mentioned in the Show
“The Discipleship Opportunity: Leading a Great-Commission Church in a Post-Everything World” by Daniel Im
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