In the book Small is Big Slow is Fast: Living and Leading Your Family and Community on God’s Mission, Ceasar Kalinowski paints a picture of the kingdom of God that makes you believe anybody can be a part of expanding it. That’s the belief we need to go viral in the church today if we’re going to see a movement of evangelism & discipleship in North America, so I want to highly recommend this book to you. The book challenges popular notions that have slowed multiplication including church has to be made up of big crowds & buildings to be real, discipleship should be scheduled in the midst of the busyness of everyday life, & only a few highly trained people should develop the skills to lead churches. Here’s a few of my favorite quotes:

• A disciple is someone who has reoriented his or her life around another to become, in essence, who that person is.
• We don’t live on mission because we are supposed to. It is our birthright. We get to do this.
• We will never lead another group of friends or anyone else father and deeper into discipleship and mission than our own family.
• If we are not careful, we can end up being the nicest, friendliest people in the neighborhood but fail to lead anyone one step closer to walking in the ways of Jesus.
• multiplication doesn’t just happen accidentally. Everything we do must be intentionally simple, scalable, and reproducible.
• the secret to increasingly living our lives together on God’s mission is to move away from seeing discipleship as something that needs to be tacked onto an already busy schedule, toward seeing all the normal stuff of life as full of opportunity for discipleship and growth in the gospel.
• This is not a call to life plus mission, rather, it is a call to life on mission.
• When looking to develop leaders, we initially have to identify who wants to lead. We do this by looking at who is ready first to be a follower.
• Some days are packed with very obvious kingdom activity, while others feel like nothing special… until you look back.
• Not everything happens as quickly as or in the way we want it to. People drop off the radar and out of community. This is messy stuff! On this journey, you must trust that God is filling your lives with opportunities for discipleship and kingdom expansion every day. Some you will notice; others you may not.
• Do we need to have larger gatherings… No. But you get to.
• Our identity is found in Christ, not the frequency of size of our gatherings.
• The mission of the church is discipleship, not creating church services.

The book also includes a very helpful chapter outlining what life on mission may look like in the typical week & a great appendix outlining the first 3 years or so of steps to launching a missional community movement, as well as a great list of tools & resources for multiplication of groups. Great resource for anyone looking to simply multiply & bear fruit for God’s kingdom.