Showing results by author "Bill Hull" in All Categories

Church leaders who focus on programs, strategy, and curriculum can easily miss what ties them all together: culture. Cultivating culture is the difference between churches who flourish and those who flounder at disciple-making. Leaders must cultivate a healthy disciple-making culture. But how? Brandon Guindon's book Disciple-Making Culture provides a how-to guide for cultivating a healthy disciple-making culture throughout your church.

In this new book, Bill Hull shows why our existing models of evangelism and discipleship fail to actually produce followers of Jesus. He looks at the importance of recovering a robust view of the gospel and taking seriously the connection between conversion - answering the call to follow Jesus - and discipleship - living like the one we claim to follow.

What is a Christian? At the most basic level, a Christian is a disciple of Jesus Christ. And yet many Christians today couldn't tell you what a disciple of Jesus Christ is, or would even think of themselves as disciples. And yet in the Great Commission, Jesus specifically called us to make disciples. Everything else is secondary. The Cost of Cheap Grace is an extended, sweeping, bold, and bracing call to repentance for where we've let secondary things subvert our commitment to discipleship, and a compelling vision for discipleship as the basis of the gospel.

Many today preach a gospel that makes converts, but not disciples. This is the result of "non-discipleship gospels," which exclude the necessity to follow Jesus from their message. The Discipleship Gospel challenges the church today with a fresh reading of Jesus' gospel—one that we must learn to preach again.

What if everything you've heard about leadership is wrong? Secular models of leadership rooted in pragmatic success dominate Christian leadership in the West. It makes our work impersonal and exploitive. And, at worst, it serves the leader rather than those the leader leads. We need a different style of leadership - one patterned after Jesus. We need to learn to influence others out of our character, for that is what Jesus did.