How many disciples have made disciples? Great challenge from Alan Briggs in his new book Guardrails: Six Principles for a Multiplying Church.

Reproducible discipleship looks beyond numbers to count generations – it measures how many disciples have made disciples… When we aim at mere numbers, we will rarely multiply disciples, but when we aim at generations, numbers come naturally.

Love this thinking! If church is about making disciples and one thing disciples do is make other disciples, we should be able to begin measuring generations within the first few years of our church. Take a look at your church roll and see how many generations deep you can go. If not far, examine your goal for people. Are you making disciples or just attenders? This is a mistake I have made in ministry. Attendance makes pastors feel good and populates the chairs on Sunday’s. Disciple making makes the kingdom grow and populates heaven. 

Guardrails is a great book to help you get back to the simplicity of discipleship. Here’s a few other great quotes:

• healthy ministry always centers around making disciples.
• Our mission is to make disciples. That’s what missional people do.
• Spiritual leadership is not about gaining followers; it’s about making disciples.
• Disciple-makers are very ordinary people who take God’s mission seriously.
• Discipleship is a beautiful and rugged journey into living like Jesus.
• Discipleship is not something to be comprehended and mastered by something to be lived out and passed on to others.
• Every follower of Jesus has the capacity to become a multiplier of the message.
• When we portray discipleship as complicated, ordinary people leave discipleship to the experts, and reproduction is killed before it starts.
• We simply cannot afford to choose building our churches over making disciples. We must follow the progression of making disciples, developing leaders, and leading churches – in that order.

Grab a copy of Guardrails. Refreshing, challenging book to fuel the mission of making disciples. See the Trailer for the book HERE. Looking forward to having Alan Briggs as one of our Equippers in 2017 & 2018 for our Multiply Louisiana Church Planting Network! More info soon.