Dana Allin - Simple Discipleship: Grow Your Faith, Transform Your Community

The church exists to make disciples. Dana Allin issues here a desperately needed invitation to embrace our assignment with urgent grace and eager hearts. Listen and heed the sound of the trumpet.

JOHN ORTBERG, pastor and author

Helpful discipleship books are being published every month. But this one is different and rare. This book is linked with a very useful instrument that looks at your spiritual growth through the eyes of yourself and others a 360-degree view. Defined qualities (eight) and characteristics (twenty-one) of discipleship are listed. Through this book and instrument, a person can begin to assess the strong and stunted areas and find joy in serving and in growth. The best chapter might be the one on how to coach someone through the discipleship process. Dont miss this one!

JIM SINGLETON, director of mentored ministry at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

As a US denominational leader during a critical time for the church in this nation, Dana fully understands the strategic significance of discipleship for the credibility and authenticity of the movement that claims Jesus as Lord. He knows that the nondiscipleship of the church undermines everything we seek to do. We must correct this deficit or continue to decline. Pay attention!

ALAN HIRSCH, author of The Forgotten Ways and 5Q and coauthor of Untamed

In Simple Discipleship, Dana Allin brings together two of my favorite topics: coaching and discipleship. His thesis in this book that discipleship happens primarily through life experiences and relationship rather than listening to sermons and reading books is absolutely right. He also gives the reader practical tracks to run on: specific qualities and characteristics of a disciple, tips for creating a personalized disciple-making plan, and a path to implementation. Dana is clearly writing from a wealth of experience, and our churches would all be stronger if we followed his lead.

BOB LOGAN, coauthor of The Discipleship Difference and Becoming Barnabas

If it bothers you that the church in North America is overprogrammed and underdiscipled, start reading this book today. Dana Allin delivers on a clear and compelling way forward in a tool that will invigorate and accelerate real disciple making in your church.

WILL MANCINI, founder of Auxano and coauthor of God Dreams

Discipleship continues to be one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first-century church, both in the West and in the East. Simple Discipleship is a clear, passionate, and very practical account of who a disciple is and how to go about making one. It is a beautiful and timely gift to the church of the Master Disciple Maker.

REV. DR. MEHRDAD FATEHI, executive director of Pars Theological Centre

Christs mandate to the church is this: Make disciples. Do you have a method? Dana distills years of Christian leadership into a simple process. This book is a gift to any who wish to live their lives in the likeness of Jesus Christ or help others do the same.

TIM MCCONNELL, lead pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado

NavPress is the publishing ministry of The Navigators, an international Christian organization and leader in personal spiritual development. NavPress is committed to helping people grow spiritually and enjoy lives of meaning and hope through personal and group resources that are biblically rooted, culturally relevant, and highly practical.

For more information, visit www.NavPress.com.

Simple Discipleship: Grow Your Faith, Transform Your Community

Copyright 2018 by Dana Allin. All rights reserved.

A NavPress resource published in alliance with Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

NAVPRESS is a registered trademark of NavPress, The Navigators, Colorado Springs, CO. The NAVPRESS logo is a trademark of NavPress, The Navigators. TYNDALE is a registered trademark of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Absence of in connection with marks of NavPress or other parties does not indicate an absence of registration of those marks.

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Cover design by Nicole Grimes.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Some of the anecdotal illustrations in this book are true to life and are included with the permission of the persons involved. All other illustrations are composites of real situations, and any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-63146-713-4

Build: 2021-04-21 22:35:40 EPUB 3.0

To my wife, Beth, who is a constant example of what it means to love and follow Jesus.

To my children, Micah, Peyton, and Piper, who fill my life with joy. It is a privilege to be your father and watch you grow in life and faith.

THERES AN EXERCISE I LIKE to do early on with church teams that have asked for help in building a disciple-making culture. We apply the four quadrants of a SWOT analysis to answer the big question When it comes to discipleship in our church, what is going well ( strengths)? Where is there frustration (weaknesses)? Where is there opportunity (opportunities)? Where is there confusion (threats)?

Its fascinating how often the lack of a clear disciple-making process appears in the weaknesses and threats categories. Often, its the pastor who makes that observation!

I suspect most of us realize the need for a clear, robust, flexible, reproducible process for growing disciple-making disciples of Jesus in our context. It is usually in the practical implementation, however, where systems break down.

Part of the problem begins with our misunderstanding of what it means to be a disciple, and thus how we go about making them.

Discipleship is not primarily an exercise in information transfer (although, of course, in our discipleship we are to use our minds and intelligence to the utmost degree!). It is not a syllabus to master but rather a friendship to experience more deeply. When Paul says, Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), he reminds us that the biblical picture of discipleship is a journey far more than it is an event, and it requires other followers of Jesus around us, since the Christian faith is always lived out in community.

This is where the genius of Danas book comes in.

Through the big idea of growing disciples in heart, head, and hands, we gain a framework for teasing out our thinking and practices. As he describes eight qualities and twenty-one supporting characteristics of a disciple supported by a fabulous assessment tool we are given clarity of language to review our personal (and our churches) disciple-making efforts.