David Platt answers the question, “If I want to make discipleship more of a priority, where do I start?”
He says, “Well my encouragement is always first and foremost start personally. Disciple making is at the core, not a top down thing. It’s a bottom up thing. So, start making disciples in your life. Who are you intentionally pouring your life into? Who are you intentionally investing the gospel in? Who are you joining arms with and going into a lost community and sharing the gospel with? So, begin there…
[box type=”shadow” align=”alignright” width=”5″ ] Look at Jesus. When He began His ministry, He didn’t get together crowds and setup systems and structures. He poured His life into 12 men… [/box]
That’s what I would kind of call work on the ground level. Then, in the air, would be another way to describe some work a church leader can do to say are there systems and structures, things in the church that were doing, that are actually hindering that kind of relationship discipling making from happening…Not even hindering it from happening, but hindering it from being prioritized. Are there good things that were doing in the church that are keeping this best thing from happening? So, to begin to say, how can I in my leadership position in the church begin to rearrange things, take away things, eliminate things, add things if necessary, whatever it is, in order to more effectively fuel relational disciple making at the core level…It’s the Word that drives us to make disciples. Teaching and preaching the Word has to be central in that whole picture.”
[author image=”https://vergenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/David-Platt-230-close-bw.png” ]David Platt is the pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, AL, and author of Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (Multnomah, 2010). He and his wife, Heather, have two sons, Caleb and Joshua.[/author]
This video was reposted with permission from radical.net. Radical is a parachurch ministry that serves alongside the local church, providing multi-lingual biblical resources birthed in the context of a local church that we hope will support disciple-making in other local churches around the world. Radical serves these churches by providing resources in multiple languages, organizing events on multiple levels, and facilitating opportunities through multiple avenues that all aim to encourage followers of Christ in the global purpose God has designed for us as His people. Many of our resources come from the ministry of David Platt.