Great for pastors and teaching leaders, this book shares God's pattern for discipleship which He used with the people of Israel (reflected in the Feasts) and which Jesus used with His disciples. Understanding this pattern will improve your preaching and teaching. These stated illustrations of the Lord’s seven steps to make disciples of His people are merely scratching the surface of the number of times the pattern appears throughout the Scriptures. There is, indeed, a biblical pattern for discipleship. I pray that this book will serve as a tool to establish the pattern in your own life and in the lives of those to whom you minister!
I am not aware of anyone else sharing this exact pattern in Scripture.
Grasping where your congregation, Bible study group, or even your own children are in this journey can truly help you as you seek to guide them on their path. Also the charts and checklists are very helpful. This is a great gift book for your pastor!
By God’s grace and according to His good purposes, I began my days of pastoring with the firm conviction that the only verb in the great commission was to make disciples. The baptizing and the teaching were merely activities to accomplish the goal to make disciples. But as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, and the months into years, I began to realize that every program of discipleship that I had been taught was merely hit or miss teaching. I recognized my need for a plan with measurable goals that would bring my congregation to spiritual maturity. I desired a plan that would avoid the pride of knowledge and the competitive spirit of disunity. With a cry to the Lord, I made my way to the local Christian bookstore – the Siri of my day. As I perused the discipleship shelf filled with books that were already on my shelves at home, I came across the book that would set me on a path that would shape both my life and my discipling method. The book’s title intrigued me: With Christ in the School of Disciple Building. Its author was Carl Wilson who had been used of the Lord in work with both Billy Graham and Campus Crusade. He had recently started his own campus ministry with Worldwide Discipleship Association. Carl’s thorough knowledge of the Gospels had allowed him to discover a distinct pattern that Jesus used in making His original twelve disciples. Jesus and the disciples employed the exact same pattern when they began to disciple the 70 and then again with the 120. When I began to apply Jesus’ seven steps of discipleship with both the small group of men with whom I met in a more spiritually intimate setting and with my congregation through my preaching, I began to see spiritual growth in leaps and bounds comparable to the weeds in my front yard! I no longer had to struggle with where to go next in my preaching topics. I could easily determine the appropriate books of the Bible that would bring my congregation to the next step of their discipleship journey. I allowed the seven steps that Jesus had used to make disciples to govern my annual cycle of sermon topics.