Mike Breen vs. the CGGC on what a Disciple is and How Disciples are Made

Yesterday I read the Mike Breen interview on discipleship in the new issue of The CHURCH ADVOCATE.


Good stuff. Very good stuff.


What Breen says seems profoundly biblical to me.


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One of the problems the CGGC has had with making disciples in the last 25 years has been that we employ a horrifically corrupt definition of what a disciple is, one that is entirely disconnected from the teaching and way of Jesus.


MORE AND BETTER DISCIPLES: 35,000 in Worship by 2000.


That program has long since been thrown on the trash heap of CGGC failures but the essential idea that a disciple is someone who goes to church has never been challenged nor replaced.  And, that idea is, very simply, biblically corrupt.


Hence we decline, even by our own standards. And, the Spirit does nothing to empower us.


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I encourage everyone to look at Breen's idea of what a disciple is and to repent of the reigning CGGC idea. Repentance, after all, is a change in thinking.


Breen uses 1 Corinthians 4 as a touchstone and points out that in the way of both Jesus and the early apostles discipleship involved three realities: Passing on INFORMATION, IMITATION of Christ and of other disciples, and INNOVATION, or the freedom to try, risk and make mistakes in the process.


Breen says that the place we fail in the Western church these days is that we ignore the imitation component.


And, looking around me in the CGGC, I agree.


As one example, the theme of ERC sessions in 2015 was, "Simply Jesus." The work product of the Conference that year was a revision of the Strategic Plan. That revision amounted to little more than the restructuring of the Conference Commission structure.


Imitation of Christ? Imitation of Christ!


Check out Breen as a place to begin a CGGC conversation on discipleship.


And, if it is not already too late...


Repent.