The Disciple Making Church and Pastor
So recently, I have been diving into discipleship and gettting to the heart of the matter in the church and the responsibility of the pastor. (It helps when you do research with Barna's Growing True Disciples and Bill Hull's The Disciple Making Pastor for your doctoral work) Here is the crisis: What kind of people is the church producing today? The American church (claims to be 350,000 evangelical churches) is weak, self-indulgent, superficial and has been transformed by culture. That's it; plain and simple. In the part of the NE Texas where I live, there are 7 evangelical churches for 3500 people in population and the church that I am called as pastor roughly has 125 in attendance every Lord's Day for worship. But the trend is several people dying each year that equals the number we have join either by conversion and baptism or by transfer. This staggering fact ought to alarm us!!! We are not reproducing......we are trying to multiply!! If we multiply, we are bei...