Like many of you, my day-to-day world has a lot to do with church planting. The irony is that I am looking for a new word to use for church planting because the real facts are that God doesn’t call us to plant churches. One of the primary problems in the church is that we think He did. And we act like it; to the exclusion of the thing Jesus did tell us to do—make disciples. The honest fact is that most church planters don’t plant churches…they plant worship services.  Face it. Its true.

I hear the stories (and can tell them)—Joe Cool came into town, started Bling Bling Community Church and they had 300 people at their first service. These are the guys who write and are written about in most books and articles, and speak at the conferences. When is the last time you attended a church planting event where the main speaker shared how he labored for three and a half years and was only left with 11 guys?

I am well aware that plenty of deconstruction has taken place in our conversations over the last ten years and we don’t want a lot more of it. The systemic issue as I see it though is that we still do not view discipling as the primary focus and needed activity within the life of our faith communities. Jesus said “I”—hear that—“I will build MY church…”  Funny huh? God told David the same thing, “I don’t need you to build a house for me…I’ll take care of that.”

Discipling takes a different type of commitment and yields slower growth. But wow, what fruit it yields once it’s taken root.  Discipling happens primarily away from the pulpit. It doesn’t happen simply by transferring knowledge from one head to another. It happens by apprenticing others to the ways and means of Jesus. My buddy Alan Hirsch says it constantly, “We don’t think our way into a new way of acting. We must act our way into a new way of thinking.” If we have to wear a WWJD bracelet to remind us what Jesus would do in a situation then we’re toast. If when Payton Manning drops back, with four 320 pound dudes pressing in on him, looking at a Zone 2 coverage scheme, and he has to look at a note card to know what to do…he’s toast. This is why he studies (head knowledge) and this is why he practices constantly facing those situations, so that he will not have to think on game day. He will simply react because his coaches (disciplers) have prepared him.