The discipleship gap in our churches has been exposed. What are we going to do about it? The more robustly we can connect our church re-planting efforts to making actual disciples of Jesus Christ, the deeper and wider and healthier our churches will be as we launch into the future.

Every church in America is now a church re-plant. This is a hard truth, but healthy churches will own it, while those who ignore it will be walking down the path towards a painful decline.

American Christianity has learned numerous lessons during the past 25 months: live stream, zoom meetings, and endless pivots to make worship happen. America has witnessed the further political polarization of our nation, increased tensions about racism, and heightened distrust of institutions which all have meant endless challenges for local churches and her leaders.

Yet the biggest takeaway for most churches regardless of size, denomination, or geographical location has been this: the coronavirus exposed a massive discipleship gap in nearly every church in America.[1] The discipleship gap, in my opinion, is the most pressing problem for leaders to reckon with in today’s world.

Over the last 20 years, American churches have mostly majored in “conducting worship services”. We have hoped (sometimes wistfully) that “discipleship would spontaneously happen” or that “attending a worship service” or “serving on a ministry team” would lead to discipleship. Much of this line of thinking has been exposed to be a pipe dream during the coronavirus.

I believe over the next 10 years, the people who (still) come to church will be disciples. The people in our churches who will come through the pandemic, giving sacrificially, serving selflessly, and worshipping robustly—despite every obstacle—will be the true disciples of Jesus Christ. Thus, if we want to re-plant our churches during and after this global pandemic, we need to get back to the life-on-life ministry of making actual disciples of Jesus Christ. How is your church doing this? What flourishing next step are you taking to make actual disciples of Jesus Christ?

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