Disciple-Making Fuels Church Planting

Effective discipleship builds the church, not the other way around. We need to understand the church as the effect of discipleship and not the cause. If you set out to build the church, there is no guarantee you will make disciples. It is far more likely that you will create consumers who depend on the spiritual services that religious professionals provide. Now one of the buzzwords around today is the word "missional." People want to create missional churches or missional programs or missional small groups. The problem is that we don't have a "missional" problem or a leadership problem in the Western church. We have a discipleship problem. If you know how to disciple people well, you will always get mission. Always.—Mike Breen, Building a Discipling Culture