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Welcome to this week’s unSeminary podcast. I’m excited to have David Putnam with us today. David spent many years as a church planter and executive pastor and today consults with churches as a lead navigator with Auxano. David has also founded the organization Planting the Gospel which helps transition churches from a weekend-only disciple-making culture.

David is with us to share simple tools that will help your church make disciple-making organic and accessible to everyone.

• What kind of disciples are we making? // We are all making disciples, but what kind? Much of the time, without realizing it, churches make organizational disciples rather than gospel-centered disciples who in turn make more disciples. Covid has revealed to us that when our programming changes, our organizational disciples can vanish. How can we equip people so that even when there are unforeseen changes in the church, our disciples are still fully plugged into Christ and able to follow Him, doing the work of the great commission?
• What is a disciple? // We’ve allowed religion to take over the gospel and make it more complex than it needs to be. We need to take it back to a place of simplicity as found in scripture. There are three fundamental questions that David suggests we take a look at: What is the gospel? What is a disciple? And what is the church? David defines a disciple as a follower of Jesus who’s learning to live out the realities and implications of the gospel by living like Jesus, loving like Jesus, leaving what Jesus left behind. What did Jesus leave behind? Disciples!
• Living on mission. // Churches that are focused on making disciples have practical tools in place for their people. This includes life on life, life in community, life on mission. Many churches might have life on life and life in community built into their rhythms, but they neglect the life on mission aspect. How can we maximize our impact by releasing people instead of simply gathering people? We need to be equipping our people to enter the “mission field” right where they are, teaching them to be missionaries where they live, work and play.
• Disciple-making is evangelism. // David identifies five types of disciples: pre-disciples, new disciples, growing disciples, multiplying disciples, and catalytic disciples. An unbeliever is a pre-disciple. We need to equip people in our churches to engage pre-disciples in disciple-making by providing tools so that they can tell their story, and tell God’s story.
• The Gospel Disciple Life. // David has created a free resource called The Gospel Disciple Life: A Quick Start Guide for a Micro-Group Strategy for Making Disciples that Makes Disciples that will help you introduce disciple-making to your church. Consisting of simple Bible reading and meeting in micro-groups, this practical tool uses an organic method which is accessible to everyone. Who is the next person you will invite into a disciple relationship?

You can get help with disciple-making at your church by visiting www.plantingthegospel.com.

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Chemistry Staffing

Great things happen when the right leadership is in place in a local church… lives are changed and churches thrive.

With all the craziness that has gone on in 2020, we know that many churches are beginning to ask hard questions about what their current team looks like and how ready they are to lead into our new reality. Download Chemistry Staffing’s Restructuring Playbook to develop clarity around where you need to be focusing your time, resources, and team.