Help Bless College Students

Posted on August 22, 2009

Austin City Life’s missional intern, Justin Hroch, is heading up a new effort to bless students at UT with the Gospel.

What can the community of ACL do to help?
Continue to love new people as they show up. (especially the weird college student)  Many of these students are away from home and looking for a new family to join.  If you can, invite the students over for dinner.  Allow them to interact with your family.  Pour into their lives and push them to know Jesus better.  If you want to be apart of the College City Group on Monday nights contact Justin at justin@austincitylife.org

  • Pray for Justin
  • Consider joining his team
  • Read his new blog article on College City Groups

New Resources on Fight Clubs

Posted on August 22, 2009

It’s been encouraging to hear how many people have read Fight Clubs: Gospel-centered Discipleship and are beginning to start these small fighting communities. People are emailing and calling every week to share their stories, learn more about starting Fight Clubs, and to say thank you for the book. Thank you all. May these increase to God’s great glory!

More on Fight Clubs

  • I recently did a podcast interview on the book with Covenant Eyes. This will release soon, along with some articles to continue the equipping for discipleship. I’ll post a link when it goes live.
  • As we continue to field requests, we are developing a Fight Clubs Website that will allow for continued conversation, story sharing, and equipping for fighting the fight of faith well.

What People are Saying

Jonathan has done us a huge favour in writing this book. The best endorsement I can give it is simply that as I read it, a growing sense of wanting to fight sin grew within me. I want to be a card carrying member of a ‘Fight Club’ so that in community we can take sin seriously, encourage one another to believe the gospel deeply and pray for each other to respond to the Holy Spirit passionately. What else can I say? This is an excellent book. Buy it. Read it. Do it.

Steve Timmis // Co-author of Total Church and Co-Director of the Porterbrook Network

Fight Clubs is a timely book about gospel-centered accountability and age of anonymity and shallow relationships. Dodson has done a masterful job highlighting how the Holy Spirit uses gospel truth to give us new Christ-centered affections that dispel our thirst for sin…For those still playing at religion through surfacey pseudo-accountability, this book is a welcome killjoy. You’ll never look at accountability the same way again.

Luke Gilkerson // Internet Director for Covenant Eyes, Inc.

I just read your book, and I wanted to thank you for it.  I am a student at Southwestern Seminary, and for the last 6 months a serious lack of progress in my sanctification has been bothering me.  I seem to fall into legalism often, and I have always expected perfection from myself in every aspect of my life.  It has really caused me to question my salvation, and its just not a happy place to be in life.  Anyway, thanks for writing Fight Clubs…it is a very helpful book in rethinking my concept of what discipleship is about.

Travis, Seminary Student

Where to Get Fight Clubs

Training a Missional Core Team

Posted on August 21, 2009

Here are the Stages of Growth we followed as a Missional Core Team (see separate document Stages of Organic Growth for further explanation)

  1. Meals & Mission: time spent cultivating community over shared meals, missional conversation, and being on mission together socially and evangelistically.
  2. Vision & Mission: time spent in community discussions around vision and values, while continuing to practice mission.
  3. Commitment Night: an evening in which I gave a charge, we prayed for our city, had first communion over a meal, and celebrated God’s work in our Core Team.
  4. Bible Study & Mission: spent time teaching through Luke-Acts, identifying the themes and challenges of gospel, community, mission.
  5. Strategy & Missional Community: time spent in more strategic conversation and planning to be a church in the city and for the city through what came to be called City Groups (aka Missional Communities).
  6. Low Profile Public Gatherings: our first public gatherings which included preaching and primarily built up the existing Core Team
  7. High Profile Public Gatherings: our first attractional, public gatherings in a city centre location
  8. City Groups Multiply: existing City Groups multiply through mission and leadership development

Total Church Resources

Posted on August 21, 2009

If you haven’t read Total Church, buy it today. If you’d like some more resources on Total Church, check out the following:

My Series of Posts on Total Church. – excerpts and reflections on the book from when we were in Core Team stage. Also check out Three-Strand Evangelism

Total Church study guide. – This is a good tool to use when Building Missional Core Teams for church planting, and for helping re-orient existing churches around the gospel, community, and mission.

Resurgence Resources – includes helpful teaching videos by Steve Timmis and other blog posts.