Church Leadership and Disciplemaking
Greetings, friend! Welcome to the Blog of Michael McDonald. I am currently a Pastor and have been in ministry for 18 years. In God’s providence I helped to build a small struggling church into the largest church of five in our small rural town. Over the course of my time of service, I have developed some core ideas of how to go about making disciples.
My idea centers around 4 sets of basic concepts. None of the concepts are more important than the others, nor do they represent a particular theological emphasis that excludes other important theological concepts. The three basic concepts presume a present faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, and an acceptance of the Bible as foundational for a successful Christian life. The Christian life and the Bible are huge realities, and the concepts I am going to show should not be taken as the whole of the Christian life. Rather they should be seen as foundation and scaffold for a fully developed Christian life.
The four basic concepts are these:
The Transformational Paradigm
Three Critical Doctrines
Faith, Hope and Love
Two Commandments
Some of these are plain enough. Faith, Hope and Love are critical parts of the Christian life as noted most famously by Paul. Two Commands seems easy enough: love the your God and your neighbor as yourself. The others don’t lend themselves to an easy explanation simply by looking at the titles. Still, they form a practical core which forms a primary basis for my approach to disciple making. I hope you will find them so, too.
Keep coming back, and I will show you what I have found to be useful tools in growing disciples and churches.
