Over the next three days, The Resurgence will run three excerpts from my forthcoming book Fight Clubs: Gospel-centered Discipleship. I’m excited to announce that on August 1st the booklet will be available in three forms:
Check out the first excerpt here. Keep an eye out for the Fight Club website. Also, check out the unrelated but a similar vision of gospel-centered discipleship among men at the Fight Club conference.
Here is a description of the LEAD 09 Conference, which I will be speaking at with Tim Chester:
The main theme of “gospel | community | mission” Lead09 is open to people of all ages. We are excited to see the Church come together for Lead09, with people from high school to retired pastors; college students to pastors; lay leaders to paid staff. Lead09 strives to not only talk about community, but display it.
If you sign up now, get a free copy of Total Church and entered into a drawing for an ESV Study Bible. I’m looking forward to returning to New England, working with the Josh’s, and speaking alongside Tim. I am just about to send the titles of my talks to LEAD.
Hope to see you there!
After a two month delay, I was able to pick up the Fight Club: Gospel-centered Discipleship manuscript again. I have now finished the first draft. Several people are reviewing it. I will then edit it and we should be about two weeks away from going live with it. We will epublish it free first at The Resurgence, with a print on demand option. We are also working on a website that will expand upon the book through interaction, blogs, and articles. Then we’ll look to publish it hard copy. Here is a description of the chapters from the Introduction:
Chapter One lays out a biblical case for fighting the fight of faith, which I hope stirs you up to fight the fight of faith. Once the fighting begins, it is easy to slide into fighting people instead of sin. We start beating one another up with judgment, fighting the wrong things with the wrong motives. We fight against the church instead of with her.
Chapter Two explores where we go wrong in our fighting by uncovering legalistic and licentious patterns in discipleship.
In turn, Chapter Three calls us away from these extremes into a gospel-centered discipleship. With the gospel at the center of discipleship, we can live as Jesus intended—fighting the good fight of faith which leads to true change. However, if weren’t not careful we’ll start to fight on our own. Failure to grasp the community focus of the gospel can cut us off from the grace God gives through his people, the church.
Chapter Four reminds us that discipleship is a community project because the gospel is community focused. Jesus created and redeemed us as people in relationship, people who need one another in the fight of faith. Instead of fighting against the church, we can fight with her, to live a life that is motivated by all that God is for us in the Spirit and the Son.
In conclusion, Chapter Five offers a practical way to apply the gospel to everyday life. It is a call for Fight Clubs—small, simple, biblical, reproducible groups of people who meet together regularly help one another keep the gospel at the center of their discipleship. Fight Clubs have been crucial in my life and my church. I hope and pray that you’ll find them helpful too, that you’ll form a Fight Club and start fighting with the church, in the gospel, on mission, for the glory of God.
Boundless is running a new article (Failed Disciple), a version of a post I wrote a few weeks back on Creation Project called Confessions of a Failed Disciple. This article was adapted from the introduction to my forthcoming book Fight Club: Gospel-centered Discipleship, which is getting very close to being finished! An excerpt from the article:
“Along the way, I’ve come to understand that following Jesus alone is not really what it means to be a disciple. Both the church and the parachurch taught me that being a disciple means making disciples. I was told that this meant two primary things. First, I should be active in “sharing my faith.” Second, I should find Christians who are younger in the faith to tell and show what it means to be older in the faith.
It took me quite a while to realize that this practice of making disciples was incomplete. Making disciples requires not only “sharing my faith,” but also sharing my life — failures and successes, disobedience and obedience.
Making disciples is not code for evangelism, nor is it a spiritual system whereby professional Christians pass on best practices to novice Christians.”
