Following Jesus

The church in North America is in serious trouble. Most churches are not growing. Many are losing their young people. Churches are desperately looking for something new, but maybe what they need is something old.

Discipleship is not attending a Bible study. It is not meeting with a mentor. It’s not even going to church. In its essence, discipleship is following Jesus. It’s not asking, “What would Jesus do?” It’s not trying to do what Jesus did. Discipleship is not a belief system. It’s a relationship with a person who invites you to follow him. Just like Peter, Andrew, James, and John, a day may come when you find Jesus standing beside your fishing boat, inviting you to follow him. The problem for many Christians is that they want to follow Jesus, but they don’t want to get out of the boat! Unfortunately, for many Christians, “following Jesus” has become a metaphor, not a daily reality.

Get ready! When you start following Jesus, he may lead you to do things you never thought you could do, go to places you never dreamed of going, and attempt things you never thought were possible. And along the way, he might just change your world.

Dr. Richard Blackaby, son of famed Christian author Henry Blackaby, and co-author of Experiencing God, shares profound yet simple truths about how Jesus trained twelve disciples and how he continues to use those same methods today. Jesus hasn’t changed his approach to making disciples. It is just as effective today as it was two thousand years ago. Perhaps if we returned to the disciple-making methodology Jesus employed, we might experience the results he enjoyed.

The great opportunity that lies before the Church today hinges on whether it will return to the discipleship taught and modeled by Jesus. Merely “doing church” the way it has been done in recent years is woefully inadequate. The truth is: We don’t need something new. We require something old. Two thousand years old, in fact.