In Part One of my conversation with Todd Wilson, we spent most of our time looking backward. Todd walked us through seventy years of the Church Growth Movement, from Donald McGavran’s missionary imagination around people movements and gospel saturation to the attractional, consumer-driven operating system most of us inherited without ever really choosing it.

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Part Two gets more personal.

I asked Todd if there was a moment in his own journey when he took the proverbial red pill and began to realize something was fundamentally wrong underneath the system. His answer took us back to around 2015, when Exponential was growing, the conferences were thriving, and from almost every normal measurement things were moving up and to the right. Yet Todd had this growing angst that simply helping large churches get larger was not going to produce the kind of multiplication movement he wanted to give the rest of his life to.

That eventually led Exponential to begin measuring reproduction and multiplication more intentionally. Todd became convinced that healthy reproduction had to become a normal measure of success for the American church, not some strange thing happening on the margins among a few unusually apostolic people. But then he discovered the problem was deeper than simply changing the scoreboard.

There was a magnet underneath the scoreboard.

Todd describes it as a kind of Level Three magnet, a gravitational pull toward growing the organization. Churches can move from declining to plateaued to growing and feel like they have arrived. And why wouldn’t they? In the system most of us inherited, growth is the destination. More people. More programs. More capacity. More resources.

Then Todd said something that will make you stop in your tracks: You don’t even have to be a Christian to make the system work.

Given the right leadership gifts, enough charisma, good communication, strong programming, effective marketing, and a well-executed strategy, the machinery itself can produce organizational growth. That realization forced him beneath the model to the operating system controlling it.

This is where his statement from Part One comes roaring back: How you add makes all the difference.

If our primary mechanism for growth is creating programs people consume (i.e. we add via the weekend services), then even our healthiest version of that system can unintentionally form consumers. If our primary mechanism for accomplishing ministry is recruiting volunteers to run those programs, then our definition of mobilization can slowly shrink to helping people support the institutional machinery.

That does not mean people can’t or won’t experience change or meaningful engagement. Of course many do. It does not mean pastors leading these churches secretly do not care about disciple-making. Many do.

Todd makes an important point in the conversation: virtually every pastor you survey would tell you they are trying to make disciples. The real question is how. Is disciple-making primarily something a gifted person does from a platform, supplemented by excellent programs and small groups? Or is it job one to shape an ordinary way of life that can be reproduced relationally and incarnationally by any follower of Jesus in the everyday places where they already live?

Those are different growth engines and the difference matters enormously if your dream is bigger than growing a congregation.

When the Question Changes

At one point in the conversation I tried to describe how profoundly this changed the questions for us in Kansas City.

If our mission is to fill Kansas City with the beauty, justice, and Good News of Jesus, and if our longing is for every man, woman, boy, and girl to have everyday opportunities to encounter Jesus through his people, then suddenly a congregation gathered in one location is not nearly enough.

You cannot build enough church buildings, hire enough pastors and church planters, create enough programs, let alone stfund enough of them. The math eventually becomes absurd…the following post actually runs the math for you. Check it out.

Instead, you begin imagining the church as a decentralized missionary network. Ordinary people abiding in Jesus, surrendering to his Lordship, learning to make one, two, three, or four disciples among people they already know, not primarily inside church programs but inside the everyday spaces of their lives.

That requires something different underneath the hood.

Todd and I ended up using the image of a smartphone. Churches can become obsessed with models, but models are basically apps. Attractional church, multisite, missional communities, microchurch, house church, small groups, disciple-making programs, they can all function like apps.

The operating system underneath them determines what those apps are actually allowed to do. Which means you can install a very cool new missional app and still be running the old operating system.

I have seen that movie. I have also helped produce that movie. There may be a collector’s edition somewhere.

The Financial Test

One of the more uncomfortable parts of Part Two is money.

Todd suggests that finances can function almost like taking the blood pressure of an operating system. One diagnostic question is simple: Is the number of people we can reach directly constrained by how much money we can spend?

In the predominant church growth system, the relationship is fairly predictable. More people normally require more staff. More staff requires more money. More people require larger facilities. Larger facilities require more money. More programs require more staff, more infrastructure, more communications, more everything.

Growth generates giving, which generates additional capacity, which makes possible additional growth. Todd describes it as a financially non-liberated system because eventually the growth of the mission is directly constrained by the amount of money required to keep expanding the machinery. Programs, buildings, and full-time staffing become the three large costs necessary to maintain programmatic growth.

Again, none of those things are bad.

Buildings are gifts. Staff are gifts. Programs can be tremendous gifts.

But imagine for a moment a disciple-making system where every new disciple actually increases the missionary capacity of the movement.

Now growth itself produces more people capable of producing growth.

That is a fundamentally different economic engine.

This is where the conversation becomes most uncomfortable, because changing an operating system is not the same thing as switching worship styles or reorganizing the staff.

It is painful.

Todd compares it to switching from Apple to Android. He has apparently tried three times and keeps crawling back to Apple. I feel there is probably a spiritual formation lesson somewhere inside that failure.

His point is that changing operating systems is revolutionary change, and revolutionary change hurts.

Don’t Blow Everything Up

This may be one of the most important parts of our conversation.

Todd is not arguing that every existing church should blow itself up and start over.

Neither am I.

I believe deeply that the Spirit of God enlivens and empowers every form of the Church. None of these leaders are my enemies. I have too much gratitude for what Jesus has done in and through the churches I have served to tell a cheap story where the old thing was bad and the new thing is good.

My own journey out of the operating system was costly. There were beautiful things I had to learn to hold alongside things I could no longer unsee. I had to reckon with ways the churches I loved had brought tremendous life while also asking whether some of our systems were inadvertently domesticating the very people we were trying to mobilize. That kind of repentance is not theoretical. It gets down into your identity, your relationships, your livelihood, and the story you have spent years telling yourself about your life.

But there is a way forward.

For established churches, Todd suggests something Peter Drucker understood well: revolutionary innovation often needs to happen outside the normal governance and measurements of the existing system.

Create an R&D laboratory. Give some people freedom. Give them permission to experiment. Resource them without forcing them to immediately justify themselves according to the old scoreboard.

Let them remain relationally connected without insisting that every new expression ultimately feed the mothership.

Some experiments will fail. Of course they will! That is what experiments do. I actually think churches should learn to celebrate a few holy failures. If every experiment works, you are probably not experimenting.

What Might the Next Era Be?

Near the end of our conversation I asked Todd to imagine himself twenty years from now, writing another chapter of this history.

What would he hope happened next?

His answer gives me hope because it is not simply about making everything smaller. He hopes we learn to hold together three things.

First, disciple-making becomes the primary growth engine of the church. Not merely a value printed on the wall, but how we actually add.

Second, ordinary missionaries become the primary way the church extends. Instead of mobilization meaning primarily volunteerism inside church programs, ordinary followers of Jesus are equipped and released into neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, third spaces, and networks of relationships.

Third, we learn how to build capacity around that kind of movement without killing it.

That third one matters.

The attractional system has become incredibly good at capacity building, not in the ordinary person as a disicple-maker, but in the institution’s capacity. We know how to build organizations, campuses, systems, leadership pipelines, volunteer structures, budgets, communications platforms, and programs.

Movemental expressions in the States often have the opposite problem. We can be strong on first and second generation disciple-making and missionary impulse but weak at creating the organic structures that allow those things to reproduce for generations on multiple strands without collapsing under their own weight.

We do not need to figure out the next twenty years today, but we can become quiet enough to ask the Holy Spirit one question: What is the one next step?

Do not worry about the ten thousand steps behind it. They will overwhelm you anyway. Just take the one Jesus puts in front of you.

There is a way beyond an operating system that can no longer carry everything God is asking of his Church, and increasingly, all over the place, I am meeting people who are finding it.

That makes me deeply hopeful.

Listen to Part Two of my conversation with Todd Wilson above.

And if you want to go deeper, Todd is making How Did We Get Here? unusually accessible. You can get the full book, a condensed version, and the audiobook free at church-growth.org.

The history matters.

But perhaps the more important question now is what we do next.

How Did We Get Here?

Todd Wilson and I actually recorded this conversation twice. The first time, we had what we both agreed was probably the most profound, historically significant podcast conversation ever recorded.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to hit record. :)

That someone was me. So that version now belongs exclusively to Todd, me, and Jesus. Fortunately, Todd was gracious enough to come back and try again, and I am really glad he did because I think this is an important conversation for this particular moment in the life of the church.

If you don’t know Todd, he is one of those people who has quietly been standing somewhere near the center of a surprising amount of what has happened in church planting, church growth, leadership, and multiplication over the last twenty-five years. He founded Exponential, worked closely with Bob Buford and Leadership Network, and has spent decades around many of the leaders and ideas that shaped the North American church. I called him the Forrest Gump of church planting and multiplication because somehow Todd just keeps showing up in the room where the next thing is happening. We have also shared quite a bit of that journey together, particularly through the Future Travelers learning community, so this conversation is not an outsider throwing rocks at a movement from a safe distance. Both of us find our selves in so many of the chapters of the Church Growth story. Yes, I once repelled down from the ceiling into a service, with a cue from a guy with a headset on and a countdown clock.

I was megachurch teaching pastor! :)

Todd has now written a fascinating book called How Did We Get Here?, tracing seventy years of what we have come to call the Church Growth Movement. I’ll admit that if you had asked me a ten years ago to summarize that movement, I probably would have started somewhere around Willow Creek seeker-sensitive services, Purpose Driven churches, John Maxwell leadership conferences, multisite campuses, and the familiar scoreboard of bodies, buildings, and budgets. Todd assumed something similar when he started researching the book. But then he went back to Donald McGavran, generally considered the father of the Church Growth Movement, and discovered something that reframes the whole story. McGavran was not sitting in suburban America trying to figure out how to get 10,000 people into a really excellent auditorium. He was a missionary in India asking how the gospel moves through whole peoples and relational networks. His imagination was about gospel saturation, people movements, ordinary believers becoming missionaries, disciples making disciples, and churches multiplying through a region.

At one point in our conversation Todd says McGavran could almost be the figurehead for the kinds of decentralized disciple-making and microchurch movements many of us are pursuing today.

That creates the question underneath this entire podcast and Todd’s book: How in the world did we get from that to this? How did a missionary imagination centered on people movements slowly become an attractional operating system centered on growing an organization?

That journey takes us through suburbia and consumerism, Robert Schuller and Bill Hybels, Peter Drucker and Bob Buford, Rick Warren and Purpose Driven, the rise of the megachurch, the modern leadership industry, marketing, management, and a series of decisions that probably felt like they made enormous sense at the time.

That last part matters.

This is not the story of a bunch of people who stopped loving Jesus and secretly decided to turn the church into a shopping mall. These were often deeply evangelistic, innovative, courageous leaders trying to reach people the existing church was not reaching. God worked through them. I was shaped by many of them. I participated enthusiastically in much of this story and experienced the Spirit moving in remarkable ways in people’s lives—right up until I couldn’t stay anymore.

Interestingly, my exit happened because I was following the breadcrumbs, though I should mention that I had to get seriously lost in the woods before I ended up in the oven inside the candy cabin. The journey was not an easy one. Strangely, many of those crumbs were hidden inside the very assumptions of church growth thinking. When I followed the trail all the way back to its source, it led me outside the operating system I had spent years helping to run.

Which is why Todd’s central question is more unsettling than simply identifying what went wrong. What if good missionary instincts were gradually absorbed into another operating system? What if people groups slowly became target markets, incarnation became cultural relevance, disciple-making became assimilation, missionaries became volunteers, and the growth of the church organization became increasingly difficult to distinguish from the advance of the Kingdom? Systems have a way of doing that. Eventually the assumptions become so normal that we stop realizing they are assumptions at all. We simply inherit them, reproduce them, and wonder why adding more missional programs to the machinery does not seem to produce a movement.

There is one line Todd returns to in this conversation that I have not been able to shake: How you add makes all the difference. A church can become exceptionally good at adding people without necessarily becoming good at producing people who can reproduce the life of Jesus in others. Those are not the same thing. If the fruit you produce is eventually the fruit that multiplies, then the question of what our operating system is actually producing becomes enormously important.

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That is where Part One of this conversation goes.

We look backward, not because either of us is particularly interested in nostalgia or another round of evangelical self-flagellation, but because I increasingly believe we cannot faithfully move into a different future without understanding the forces that created the present. Todd describes the last decade almost like a forest fire that has burned through much of the evangelical landscape. There is real loss in that image, but there is also hope.

Forest fires clear space.

New things begin growing in soil that looked dead. I have this strange and growing conviction that some of what God is doing right now is not merely repairing the old operating system. Something older, smaller, more relational, more distributed, more missionary, and perhaps much more like what McGavran originally imagined is beginning to emerge again.

If you have found yourself wondering, How did we get here? Why does so much of church life feel harder and more expensive while producing less of what we actually long for? And what might God be growing next? I think you’ll enjoy this conversation.

Listen to Part One above, also available on Spotify.

I would strongly encourage you to spend some time with Todd’s book itself. He is making How Did We Get Here? remarkably accessible: you can get the full book and the audiobook for free at church-growth.org. The podcast gives you a flyover of the story, but the book lets you wander through all seventy years and begin noticing where your own story intersects with it.

Coming into this summer, I still feel tired.

Not just “I need a nap” tired. More like the deeper weariness that accumulates quietly in the soul. You’ve probably heard of the Holmes-Rahe stress scale, the one that names how major life events pile up in the body and spirit. When I look back over the last year, I realize we have not just navigated one or two of those stressors. We have lived several of them at the same time. I think there is a cumulative wear and tear to that, so I am trying not to rush past it.

I am trying to let the tiredness speak. To push through the surface layer of productivity, responsibility, and spiritual language and get down to the bottom of my soul’s deepest longings. I am trying to let what is actually there come up and out in an unedited way before God.

Which has led me, again, to Jesus and his prayer life.

I keep noticing how multidimensional it was. There is Jesus on the mountain of transfiguration, radiant in glory, caught up in communion. There is Jesus slipping away while it is still dark to be alone with the Father. There is Jesus giving thanks before feeding the crowds, blessing children, weeping at the tomb of his friend, praying all night before choosing the Twelve, crying out from the cross, and sweating blood in the garden. Underneath all of that variety, underneath the forms and rhythms and places and postures, there seems to be one great desire: to be with the Father.

To be with the Father was more than a spiritual discipline or a way of receiving guidance for the mission. It was the living center of Jesus’ life. Prayer was the place of communion, dependence, honesty, surrender, grief, joy, and love. Everything flowed from that relationship.

I think I can honestly say I have been a student of prayer since my teenage years. It has been one of the places of my deepest personal exploration. I have gone down the rabbit hole, not only in the Protestant tradition, but also into the riches of apophatic and cataphatic prayer, the gifts of Catholic mystics, the wisdom of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the many streams of prayer that have emerged across the centuries of the Church.

I will confess it plainly: Ignatius, the scholar, soldier, and saint, is still my homeboy.

But lately I have been struck again by Jesus’ words and warnings about prayer. His warning against meaningless repetition. His caution against babbling as though many words could somehow manufacture intimacy with God. That has unsettled me a little.

I have cultivated certain forms and rhythms of prayer that have been deeply meaningful to me. They have carried me, formed me, and opened space for God to meet me. But right now, the practice of them can sometimes feel like I am leaning too much on the practice and too much on the past, remembering communion more than entering it, operating from muscle memory when what I really long for is a fresh encounter.

I do not think the forms are the problem. The Church has handed us treasures. The saints are not wrong to give us words when we have none. But even the best forms of prayer can become thin when desire grows sleepy.

So this is what I am asking of the Holy Spirit right now: Wake me again.

Remind me that I have only had a teaspoon of the ocean. Remind me that I am still standing at the door of the wardrobe. Remind me that whatever I have learned about prayer should not make me feel like I have mastered something. It should make me tremble with wonder at how much more there is.

The more we know of God, the more we realize how little we know. The deeper we go, the more we discover that we are still near the beginning. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Further up and further in.”

That is what I want. I want to become again like the disciples standing near Jesus, watching him pray and realizing they were in the presence of someone who knew the Father in a way they did not yet know him. From that ache, that hunger, and that holy inadequacy, they asked the only honest thing they could ask:

“Lord, teach us to pray.”

Maybe that prayer is also teaching me to recognize my limits and honor the invitation to rest.

Michelle and I are heading into a break, and I have decided that Substack is going on vacation too. We will be back sometime around the middle of August. There are several essays already brewing that I am genuinely excited to share with you. I can feel them beginning to take shape, but they are not ready yet. They need to remain in the crockpot a little longer. They need prayer, reflection, long walks, silence, conversation, and the sort of unhurried attention that cannot be manufactured between flights, meetings, responsibilities, and deadlines.

Today was my final Exponential staff meeting before our family heads out on vacation. Every Friday, the staff gathers to pray, and it has become my favorite weekly meeting with the Exponential team. Larry Walkemeyer usually begins our time with a guided meditation that helps set the theme for our prayer. Larry is a shepherd’s shepherd, and today his meditation hit my soul like a benediction over the work and a commission into the season of rest we are entering.

It also felt like a response to what has been stirring in me. I had been writing this about weariness, desire, prayer, the wardrobe, and the longing to recover wonder. Then Larry offered these words:

Matthew 18:1 At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. 3 And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven

The Path to greatness in the kingdom is child-likeness. The path to our 16% mission is child-likeness.

C.S. Lewis wrote one of the most influential tales of all time when he wrote “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. A friend challenged me this week to read the dedication at the front of the book. Lewis dedicates the book to his young goddaughter, Lucy Barfield with these words:

“My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. You are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

In the dedication, Lewis teaches Lucy that as we follow Jesus, there is another level of maturity…becoming a child again. Those filled with Kingdom life rediscover the simplicity, the wonder, adventure and hope found in childhood.

The disciples asked a question of status…Who’s the greatest in the kingdom? They wanted to know the path and the pecking order. Jesus does something startling…he takes someone with no status whatsoever - a child, probably of 3 or 4 in age - and says - Child-likeness is the path to kingdom greatness.

You must turn from self-importance to humble dependence. Young Children in the first century had no social status and lived dependent on their parents.

Matthew 18:3 says that Spiritual leadership is disqualified at the heart level when it becomes driven by comparison, platform, recognition, self-dependence, or “Who is greatest?”
Kingdom leadership begins with repentance from status ambition.

Multiplication depends on leaders who aren’t seeking to be seen, but are seeking to serve God’s call on others. We must help the church relinquish their obsession with spiritual ranking.

But there is something else here in childlikeness - The element of wonder, awe, faith, simplicity.
The freshness of the revelation of Jesus becomes commonplace. We get hurt enough times, disappointed with God, we stack up unanswered prayers, we get educated past our faith, work our business plans to build the church…and our wonder and faith in the magic of God decline. We must repent and return to that posture because the greatest in the kingdom is the one most dependent upon His love and power.

C.S. Lewis was calling Lucy and us, past the pseudo-maturity of doubt, to the kingdom-maturity of child-like faith.

Our 16% mission depends on us being leaders who have child-like faith in the power of God and faith in the simple ministry strategy of multiplication that Jesus modeled for us.

The older I get in the world, the younger I want to be in the kingdom of God.

That last sentence has stayed with me.

“The older I get in the world, the younger I want to be in the kingdom of God.”

Perhaps that is what I am asking for in this season of rest. I want the Spirit to lead me back into humble dependence, uncomplicated delight, and the capacity to be surprised by God. I want to recover the wonder that can slowly erode beneath responsibility, disappointment, unanswered prayer, accumulated knowledge, and the endless pressure to produce something useful. I want to become old enough to read fairy tales again.

The recent themes we have been exploring together have been rooted in the hidden life beneath visible fruit: prayer and work, roots and rhizomes, the underground systems that quietly nourish flourishing, and the strange possibility that disruption can become renewal. Rest belongs within that same world. Soil cannot be endlessly harvested. A field needs seasons in which very little appears to be happening above the surface. The crockpot does its best work when someone stops lifting the lid every five minutes to see whether dinner is ready.

So I am going to try to leave the lid on for a while.

Thank you for reading, thinking, praying, wrestling, and wandering with me through these essays. Thank you for sharing them and for making this community more thoughtful, generous, and alive than I could have imagined when I began. I do not take it for granted.

We will be back in the middle of August. I am excited about what is brewing, but I need to let it cook, and I need to let myself rest.

Until then, may the Spirit wake us again. May we remember that we have tasted only a teaspoon of the ocean. May we stand once more at the door of the wardrobe with wide eyes and open hearts.

May we become old enough to read fairy tales again.

In Part One, we asked the question beneath so much of our work in KC Underground: What does the soil need?

Before we talk about Hub Teams, Hub Support, rhizomes, or movement structure, we have to begin there. Multiplying movements need more than visible fruit. They need restored soil, living ecosystems, and hidden health that can sustain what begins to grow.

So if you have not read Part One yet, I would start there. This essay builds on that foundation and asks the next question:

Once the soil begins to come alive, what kind of support does the movement need beneath the surface?

That is where a new organic image of milkweed, rhizomes, Hub Teams, Hub Support, and Timmy’s backyard begin to help us see more deeply.

A More Living Picture

Quick chart key before anyone starts overthinking the tiny letters: M = Microchurch and DM = Disciple-dMaker. Not “milkweed” and “district manager,” though honestly don’t we all want to be assistant to the district manager, Dwight?

When you look at milkweed above the surface, you see individual plants.

Each one has its own stem, its own leaves, its own flowers, its own fruit.

But milkweed does not really exist in isolation.

It hosts an ecosystem.

Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on it. Caterpillars feed on it. Pollinators gather around it. Seeds are carried outward from it.

Milkweed does not just grow.

It creates habitat.

That is flourishing.

Above Ground: Hubs That Host Flourishing

Above the surface, you see life.

You see plants.

You see stems, leaves, flowers, pods, caterpillars, butterflies, and pollinators.

In our language, those visible signs of life are disciple-makers and microchurches. Every DM is a disciple-maker, someone discerning their masterpiece mission, paying attention to where Jesus is at work, and joining Him in ordinary places. Every M is a microchurch, an extended spiritual family under the Lordship of Jesus on mission in a network of relationships.

This is visible fruit.

This is where we can say, “The Gospel is flourishing here.”

A spiritual family has emerged.

A neighborhood table has become holy ground.

A workplace has become a mission field.

A prison pod has become a place of baptism and belonging.

A relational network has become a habitat for transformation.

Each Hub in KC Underground is a little like a milkweed plant.

Each Hub is rooted in a specific geography or affinity. Each has its own leadership, culture, stories, tensions, and gifts. Each bears fruit in its own way. Each hosts networks of disciple-makers and microchurches.

But flourishing is not simply a Hub doing well.

That would be too small.

Flourishing is when disciple-makers are formed and sent. Microchurches emerge in new relational networks. The beauty, justice, and Good News of Jesus become visible in neighborhoods and networks. New Hub leaders rise. The spiritually curious find refuge. The hurting find healing. The city begins to bloom.

Above ground, flourishing is visible.

It looks like fruit, new shoots, and spiritual families multiplying.

It looks like ecosystems forming around Hubs and everywhere we do not yet see fruit, we learn to pray differently.

Lord, what are You doing in this part of the city?

How do we join you in praying for and activating more workers into this harvest field?

How do we cultivate the soil here?

How do we help a disciple-maker enter this relationship, this neighborhood, this network, this pocket of pain, with humility and courage?

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Below Ground: The Rhizome That Makes Ecosystem Flourishing Possible

But none of that happens without the unseen root system.

Milkweed spreads and strengthens through rhizomes, an underground network that connects plant to plant. The rhizome shares nutrients, reinforces stability, transfers life across the system, strengthens weaker growth, and enables new shoots to emerge at the edges.

That is a beautiful picture of the Hub Support Team.

The Hub Support Team is not a headquarters.

It is not the tallest stalk.

It is not centralized control with better branding and a nicer spreadsheet, although, let’s be honest, we do need a few spreadsheets or civilization collapses by Thursday.

The Hub Support Team is more like the underground life system that allows ecosystem flourishing above ground.

At the base of the plants are elders. These are the spiritual grandparents, the men and women who have been present long enough to help sustain life. They are there when disciple-making leaders hit conflict. They are there when someone needs wisdom, prayer, encouragement, correction, or a steady presence in the valley of the shadow of death.

Then, just below the surface, are local Hub Teams. A Hub Team is asking, “What does this soil need in our part of the city? What does this geography need? What does this affinity network need? What do these disciple-makers and microchurch leaders need to be healthy, fruitful, and faithful?”

The Hub Team exists to equip, coach, and convene a network of disciple-makers and microchurches so that the plant can grow, mature, bear fruit, and scatter new seeds in that part of the city.

But as multiplication continues, another question emerges.

Who equips the equippers?

Who coaches the coaches? Who convenes the conveners? Who asks the Hub leaders, “How is it with your soul?” Who helps them celebrate breakthrough? Who helps them notice strain? Who helps move learning, wisdom, and unique gifts from one part of the network to another?

That is where the regional hub, or Hub Support Team, comes in. It is not headquarters, the top of the pyramid, or the place where all living things go to become less interesting. It is more like the deep root system, the rhizome beneath the field.

The part of the ecosystem that shares nutrients, carries wisdom, strengthens weak places, and helps the whole system stay alive.

Through soul care, equipping, coaching, convening, and operational clarity, the team tends to the health of leaders and Hubs so that disciple-makers can flourish, microchurches can multiply, new contexts can be reached, and Gospel ecosystems can take root across the city.

Most of that work is not flashy.

That is probably a good sign.

Roots rarely get invited to keynote conferences. But without them, nothing stays alive for very long.

Equipping, Coaching, and Convening

The primary work of a Hub Team is to equip, coach, and convene.

Equipping is handing someone a tool. If someone is going to cultivate a garden, they need a shovel. Or a rake. Or a trellis. Or maybe just someone to lovingly explain that throwing seed into concrete is not technically a strategy.

But a tool is not enough. If you hand someone a shovel and they hold it upside down while swinging it around like a medieval weapon, they do technically have a shovel. They are just using it in a way that may alarm the neighbors.

That is why coaching matters. Coaching helps someone learn how to use the tool in real soil, with real resistance, in real life. It says, “Turn the shovel this way. Put your foot here. Push down. And if the soil is really hard, you may need to jump on it.”

Convening is the rhythm of bringing people together for encouragement, equipping, shared learning, storytelling, and fresh imagination.

But each of these has to be held in balance.

If convening gets too big, we may pull people out of their missional contexts too often.

If equipping gets too big, we may fill people with tools they never practice.

If coaching is absent, people may feel inspired but unsupported.

Every Hub Team has to keep asking: What is the right rhythm for this season?

Do we need to gather more?

Do we need to pull back?

Do we need to equip around a specific area of weakness?

Do we need to coach more deeply?

Do we need to convene the network to celebrate what God is doing?

The answer is not the same for every Hub.

Some Hubs may need a regular Sunday gathering for equipping and community. Others may only need a monthly rhythm because disciple-makers are already deeply engaged in their mission contexts and do not need one more thing on the calendar.

And yes, that means some of this will always feel a little gray.

Welcome to gardening.

A plant does not send you a quarterly report with color-coded indicators. It shows you what it needs if you are paying attention: too much water, and it weakens; too little water, and it dries out; too much shade, and it stretches in the wrong direction; too little support, and the fruit falls to the ground.

So we listen, pay attention, and ask what Jesus is saying. We notice where leaders are strong and where they are weak. We ask where God is at work, how people are joining Him in obedience, who is emerging, where there is strain, what needs to be celebrated, and what needs to be strengthened. That is the work. Not controlling the garden, but cultivating the soil.

Organized and Organic

This is why the language of “organic” can be both beautiful and misleading.

Sometimes when we say something is organic, people assume it means structureless. Spontaneous. Effortless. A guy walking around scattering seed with a casual vibe and a loose interpretation of gardening.

But good organic farming is not less intentional than industrial farming.

It is more intentional.

It requires paying attention to the whole ecosystem.

The bees.

The worms.

The predators.

The prey.

The water.

The cover crops.

The roots.

The trellis.

The timing.

The soil.

A biodiverse farm is not a machine, but it is deeply designed. The design simply serves life rather than replacing it.

That is how we want to think about Hubs.

We think about Hubs as servant-equipping teams that cultivate the conditions for Gospel flourishing in particular places and networks. The question beneath every Hub is simple: What does the soil need to be fruitful? And once something begins to grow, the next question is just as important: What does the plant need to become healthy enough to bear fruit?

Those questions shape the rhythms of equipping, coaching, and convening. They shape how we care for disciple-makers, strengthen microchurch leaders, respond when something is thriving, and respond when something is withering. They shape how we help the Gospel take root across the whole city.

Flourishing as Ecosystem, Not Individual Success

Flourishing in KC Underground is not one strong Hub, one visible leader, or one impressive initiative.

Flourishing is when the whole field begins to bloom.

When Hubs are connected beneath the surface, they do not have to compete for nutrients. They can share them. When one Hub experiences breakthrough, others can celebrate and learn. When one Hub feels strain, the larger ecosystem can strengthen it. When one leader is tired, they do not have to pretend they are a self-sustaining spiritual appliance with unlimited battery life.

That is the gift of being part of an ecosystem rather than standing alone.

That is ecosystem flourishing.

Each Hub in KC Underground is like a milkweed plant, rooted in a particular neighborhood or network and bearing fruit in its own way. But milkweed does not just grow. It hosts an ecosystem. Monarchs, pollinators, and new life gather around it.

Beneath the surface is a shared rhizome, an underground life system that connects and strengthens every plant. The Hub Support Team exists like that rhizome. It nurtures health beneath the surface so that disciple-makers, microchurches, and whole neighborhoods can flourish above it.

When the roots are healthy, the city begins to bloom and that brings us to Timmy’s backyard.

Timmy’s Backyard and the Soil Beneath the City

Timmy Veith, one of our hub leaders, recently shared a story about his backyard that has stayed with me.

For years, his family had been slowly learning how to cultivate their land. Not just mow it, manage it, and keep it looking respectable from the street, but actually tend it. They were trying to learn what the soil needed, what belonged there, what had to be removed, what could be repurposed, and what kind of life the land itself was capable of sustaining.

At one point, he showed us an old video from several years ago. In the background was a little mushroom patch where his daughter had been playing. At first glance, the yard looked like a normal suburban lawn. Green grass. Managed edges. The kind of surface that says, “Everything is fine here.”

But underneath the surface was a different story.

The mushrooms were a sign of decay. And beneath that part of the yard was an old sewer line. What looked manicured and healthy above ground was carrying something broken and rotten beneath it.

That is not a bad metaphor for a lot of our lives, our neighborhoods and networks, and our systems.

Sometimes what looks tidy from a distance is not actually healthy underneath. Sometimes the greenest lawns are hiding the shallowest roots. Sometimes the visible surface tells one story, while the soil is telling another.

Timmy did not stop with what was broken.

Over time, that same part of the yard became the place where their primary garden beds now grow. An invasive Bradford pear was cut down, which, as all decent people know, is one of the Lord’s more confusing botanical decisions. Its limbs were repurposed to frame new garden beds. What had been removed became part of the structure for new life.

Death and decay were not wasted.

They were folded back into the soil.

That is when Timmy began to see his yard as a picture of Kansas City.

Some places in the city already feel lush and alive. New life is visible. People are finding belonging. Disciple-makers are creating places of safety and nourishment. Microchurches are becoming habitats where spiritually curious people can attach, feed, heal, and eventually undergo the slow miracle of transformation.

But other places feel dense, compacted, overgrown, and hard. The soil is not ready. The clay is thick. The weeds are aggressive. You can throw good seed there, but if the soil has not been prepared, it may not be able to receive it.

And this is where Timmy pushed the metaphor deeper.

He talked about mycelium, the underground fungal network that receives what is decaying and breaks it down into nutrients that can be shared. Mycelium does not deny death. It transforms it. It takes what is no longer producing life and redistributes it to the places that need nourishment most.

In that sense, KC Underground is not simply trying to grow more plants above the surface.

We are trying to participate in the slow renewal of the soil beneath the city.

That is why Hub Support matters.

That is why soul care matters.

That is why coaching, convening, and operational clarity matter.

Not because we are trying to build a larger machine, but because we are trying to create the conditions where life can actually take root.

Timmy talked about plants like borage and sunflowers, plants with deep taproots that can push down into hard clay, break open the soil, create channels for water, and make room for future life. Sometimes those plants give themselves away in the process. But even in their dying, they prepare the ground for what comes next.

That is a picture of faithful presence.

A disciple-maker enters a place that may feel overgrown, hard, or forgotten, and lets their roots go deep. They stay. They bless. They listen. They serve. They help crowd out what chokes life. They become a sheltering presence for fragile new growth. And eventually, the soil begins to change.

This is how a neighborhood becomes more than a place where people happen to live. It becomes a garden bed, a place where beauty, justice, and Good News can take root, where spiritual families can emerge, and where the city begins to bloom.

And maybe that is the deeper invitation beneath all our hub language, rhizome language, and ecosystem language. We are not trying to maintain a manicured lawn with shallow roots and hidden rot underneath. We are asking God to make Kansas City into a living ecosystem of Gospel flourishing, one garden bed at a time, one Hub at a time, one disciple-maker at a time, one faithful taproot at a time. Because when the roots are healthy, the city begins to bloom.

There is a question that keeps coming back to me as we think about multiplication, structure, and the future shape of KC Underground, not simply, “How do we get bigger?”

That question is easy enough to ask, and usually expensive enough to answer.

The deeper question is: What does the soil need?

This essay is the first of two reflections on that question.

In this first part, we want to explore the imagination underneath our structure. Before we talk about Hub Teams, Hub Support, rhizomes, and the ways a multiplying movement is held together, we have to begin with the deeper question of ecosystem.

If you have been following the earlier Hubology series, you know we have been trying to name what a Hub actually is inside KC Underground. In short, a Hub Team is a servant-equipping team that exists to equip, coach, convene, and reproduce a decentralized network of disciple-makers and microchurches in a specific geography or affinity. A Hub Team is not the center of mission. It is not the place where everything has to be approved, branded, calendared, and then slowly made less fun.

A Hub Team is more like a lightweight trellis beneath the vine. It supports ordinary disciple-makers and microchurch leaders as they follow Jesus into neighborhoods, networks, workplaces, schools, recovery communities, apartment complexes, prisons, and tables. It helps create the conditions where spiritual families can form, leaders can be strengthened, and mission can keep moving outward.

[If you are newer to this language, you can catch up on the Hubology series here.]

But before we can understand the trellis, we have to understand the soil.

What Kind of Soil?

What kind of soil can actually sustain Gospel flourishing? What kind of life are we trying to cultivate? And what happens when the visible fruit outpaces the hidden health beneath it?

That is what this first essay is about. The next essay will move more directly into Hub Teams, Hub Support, and the living root system beneath a multiplying movement. But here, we begin where every gardener has to begin.

With the soil.

Because once multiplication begins to happen, once early fruit starts showing up, once disciple-makers and microchurches begin emerging in different parts of the city, you eventually have to ask how the whole thing is held together.

Not controlled or managed into compliance.

Not flattened into a system where every living thing starts looking suspiciously like the same tomato plant.

Held together.

There is a difference.

One of the best pictures I (Brian) have found for this is the documentary The Biggest Little Farm. It is worth the four dollars to rent it on Amazon. You will fall in love with a rooster. I cannot explain this in advance. You will simply have to trust me.

The film tells the story of John and Molly Chester, a couple who bought a worn-out farm in Moorpark, California and set out to restore it through biodiverse farming practices. Early in the film, Molly holds up a hard clump of clay and drops it on the ground. It does not break apart. It just lands there like a prophetic object lesson with worse drainage.

That was what they were up against.

Dry, cracked, compacted soil.

The land had been depleted by monoculture farming, the kind of farming that tries to maximize yield by growing one thing at scale, with manufactured inputs, chemical interventions, and industrial efficiency.

You can probably already feel the spiritual implications warming up in the bullpen: monoculture can produce fruit for a while, it can look successful, it can even look impressive, but over time, it drains the soil.

The Chesters began asking a different question. Not, “How do we force the greatest possible yield out of this land?” but, “How do we restore the soil so that life can flourish here again?”

So they began cultivating an ecosystem.

They planted fruit trees, but they also planted cover grasses to help the soil retain water. The grasses created habitat for snails, which then started eating the fruit trees. Since they refused to use pesticides, they started removing snails by hand, which is exactly as inspiring and hopeless as it sounds.

Then one day John saw a duck eat a snail.

This was the moment of revelation.

The farm already had ducks. The ducks loved snails. So they released the ducks into the orchard. The ducks ate the snails, the trees were protected, and the ducks contributed their own little fertilizer ministry to the soil.

Which is a very dignified way of saying the ducks became part of the discipleship pathway.

The whole documentary is full of moments like this. One problem reveals another possibility. Groundhogs tear up the soil, coyotes come for the chickens, barn owls reduce the groundhog population, chickens survive, and the farm keeps learning how to become an ecosystem.

By the end of eight years, this once-depleted farm had produced over 500,000 pounds of food, including pigs, ducks, sheep, cows, and more than 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables.

One of the final scenes returns to the image of that hard clay from the beginning. Only now, instead of dry clumps, we see hands turning over rich, dark soil.

John says that to bring the soil back to life, you have to infuse it with beneficial microorganisms, and in one handful of restored soil, he says there were billions of “purpose-driven organisms,” which feels like something Rick Warren would have appreciated, if only for the branding opportunity, but the point is profound.

Restoration did not happen because they forced the land to produce more.

It happened because they restored the conditions for life.

Restoring the Spiritual Soil of a City

In 2018, around the time that documentary was released, a small group of leaders in Kansas City were asking a similar question.

What would it take to restore the spiritual soil of our city?

What would it take to see the Gospel flourish in every corner of our culture?

As we explored our own stories, many of us recognized that our inherited church experiences often looked a lot like monoculture farming. Much of the visible fruit looked the same, thought the same, came from the same kinds of places, and required the same kinds of inputs.

Churches around us often seemed to be competing for resources rather than co-laboring for the Kingdom, and we could not answer the question, “How do we see the Gospel flourish?” until we asked a deeper one: What does Jesus want for our city?

That is the question underneath everything.

From the beginning, God’s desire has always been blessing that multiplies outward. In Genesis 12, God tells Abram, “I will bless you,” and through him, all the families of the earth will be blessed. God’s plan was to form a family whose life with Him would become blessing for the world.

Later, in Jeremiah 29, God speaks to His people in exile and tells them to build houses, plant gardens, eat what they produce, marry, have children, and seek the welfare, the flourishing, of the city where He has sent them. When it flourishes, they flourish.

Then, in Jesus, we finally see the heart of the Father embodied.

Jesus comes announcing the Kingdom of God.

He speaks of God’s reign as something real and present, breaking into everyday life and reshaping it from the inside out.

The Kingdom comes as good news to the poor, freedom for captives, sight for the blind, release for the oppressed, and the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus shows us what it looks like when God begins restoring what is broken and making things as they should be.

Hungry people are fed.

Sick people are healed.

Lonely people are befriended.

Prisoners are visited.

The addicted find freedom.

The houseless are welcomed.

The overlooked are seen.

This is the Kingdom of God becoming visible.

And Jesus’ plan for the continuation of that Kingdom reality is the Church.

Ephesians says that Christ rules the Church, and the Church is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way. Eugene Peterson puts it this way in The Message: “The church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church.”

That is a staggering sentence.

The Church is not a religious vendor on the edge of the real world. The Church is the body of Christ through which Jesus speaks and acts and fills everything with His presence.

So when we talk about Gospel flourishing in Kansas City, we are not talking about church growth as institutional expansion.

We are talking about the life of Jesus saturating the soil of the city.

Beauty.

Justice.

Good News.

Taking root in actual neighborhoods, networks, and relationships.

The First Picture Asked for More

From the beginning, we have used an umbrella image to describe the structure of KC Underground.

That image came to us through the Tampa Underground, and it has been an incredible gift. It gave us language and clarity when we needed it. It helped break open our imagination for a different way of thinking about governance, one that could hold both a decentralized network of disciple-makers and microchurches, and the more formal organizational realities required to steward that network faithfully.

On one side of the umbrella, we talked about the decentralized life of the movement across the city. This is where the Underground really exists: ordinary people following Jesus in neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, recovery communities, prisons, apartment complexes, and relational networks. On the other side, we acknowledged the part of KC Underground that the government sees: the 501(c)(3), the organization, the board, the operational structure.

There is still truth in that image, and we remain grateful for it. It gave us a foundational picture that helped us see beyond conventional church governance. But as the movement has grown and become more complex, we have needed another image alongside it. Not because the umbrella was wrong, but because it could not communicate everything we were beginning to experience.

The umbrella helped us see the distinction between the formal organization and the decentralized movement. What emerged next was an image that could show their living connection. The umbrella gave us clarity, but it can feel more static than organic. It can unintentionally make it look as if the organization exists over here and the disciple-makers and microchurches exist over there, which is true from one angle, while at the same time the structure is under, fed and sustained by the living network it exists to serve.

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Everyone serving in the more structured parts of KC Underground is also part of the living network. Hub leaders are disciple-makers. Coaches are practitioners. Conveners are part of communities. The structure is not meant to hover above the life. It is meant to serve the life beneath and within it.

That is why we have started reaching for more organic metaphors, not because structure does not matter, but because it does.

Behind every good garden, there is structure, but the structure must serve life. A trellis is not the point of a tomato plant, yet without it the fruit can end up trampled on the ground.

That is the tension: Organized and organic are not enemies.

In fact, truly organic farming often requires more intentionality, not less. Monoculture is simple. Dig a row. Plant the seed. Spray the chemical. Harvest the crop. Repeat until the soil gives up and files a complaint with the prophets.

But biodiverse farming requires attentiveness. You have to understand the relationships. The predators. The prey. The pollinators. The cover crops. The water. The shade. The nutrients. The soil. The season.

You are cultivating an ecosystem and that is where Part Two will take us.

Next: The Roots Beneath the Movement

If the question is, “What does the soil need?” then the next question is, “What kind of structure actually serves that life?”

That is where milkweed, rhizomes, Hub Teams, Hub Support, and Timmy’s backyard begin to help us see the movement more clearly. In Part Two, we’ll introduce the more organic image we are now using in place of the umbrella framework. I’m grateful for that earlier image. It gave us needed clarity for a season, and sometimes you need a simple frame before you can see the living system more fully.

But the longer we have lived into this movement, the more we have needed an image that shows both what is visible and what is hidden.

Above the surface, you can see plants, flowers, fruit, caterpillars, butterflies, disciple-makers, microchurches, and visible signs of Gospel flourishing. But beneath the surface, something else has to be happening.

Roots have to connect. Nutrients have to be shared. Weak places have to be strengthened. New shoots have to be supported at the edges.

In other words, the movement needs more than visible fruit. It needs a living root system.

So in Part Two, we will move from the question of soil to the question of support: how do Hub Teams and Hub Support function less like headquarters and more like the underground life system that helps the whole field begin to bloom?

If Part One is about restoring the soil of the city, Part Two is about tending the roots beneath the movement.

In this Bonus Conversation, I sit down with my friend Rodrigo Cano, who is helping lead and catalyze a growing disciple-making and microchurch ecosystem in Chicagoland.

Rodrigo is one of those leaders who carries a rare combination of humility, clarity, hunger, and holy stubbornness. The good kind. The kind that looks at Chicago—my hometown, where I grew up in the south suburbs (go Sox!)—sees a city of millions, refuses to accept business as usual, and starts asking better questions. A city with deep roots, endless neighborhoods, strong opinions about pizza (for the record, I’m a Gino’s East guy), and enough complexity to keep church leaders humble for several lifetimes.

Not simply, “How do we get more people to come to our church?”

But: What is God already doing in this city? Who else is carrying the same ache? How do we help ordinary people live as disciple-makers where they already live, work, learn, and play?

Maybe most importantly: What would it look like for the Church in a city to stop acting like a collection of religious franchises and start acting like the Body of Christ?

You know, small questions like that.

The shift from attraction to presence

Rodrigo’s journey into microchurches began in a way that will sound familiar to many leaders. He was pastoring in a strong multisite church. Good things were happening. People were gathering. Ministries were active.

Then he began to look more honestly at the city.

In Aurora alone, he realized there were tens of thousands of people with no meaningful connection to a church community. Even if his location grew dramatically, even if they added services, even if the machine got bigger and better and foggier, it still would not come close to reaching the city.

Apparently, business as usual was not going to reach the city after all, and that realization led to a deeper one: the primary question could no longer be, “How do we invite more people into our thing?” but rather, “How do we equip everyday people to become the presence of Jesus in every pocket of the city?”

That is the move from church growth to gospel saturation. From attraction to presence. From religious programming to ordinary disciple-making.

Microchurch is not the goal

One of the things Rodrigo and I circle back to in the conversation is this simple but essential conviction:

Microchurch is not the goal. Disciple-making is the goal.

When disciples are formed in the way of Jesus, spiritual families begin to emerge. And when those spiritual families begin living on mission in a particular context, we often call that a microchurch.

But the form serves the life. The trellis serves the vine. The structure exists to support the movement of the Spirit, not replace it.

That distinction matters because we can turn almost anything into a program. Even microchurch. Even decentralization. Even “movement.” Give us a good idea and enough time, and we’ll probably turn it into a six-week curriculum with a logo.

We are impressively gifted at domesticating things Jesus meant to set loose.

Collaboration is not optional anymore

One of the most compelling parts of Rodrigo’s story is that the work in Chicago did not stay inside one congregation or one network. Almost immediately, Rodrigo and others began asking, “Who else is doing this?”

They found out something beautiful. They were not alone.

Across Chicagoland, there were already leaders, churches, networks, and ordinary disciples experimenting with new forms of church, new pathways of disciple-making, and new ways of joining God’s mission in the city.

So they began to gather. They began to listen. They began to build a table.

This is the work of the Chicagoland Collective: multiplying networks of disciple-making churches until the love of Jesus reaches every community in Chicagoland.

One of the pieces Rodrigo gets into during our conversation is how their Hub Team serves the broader collective—not as a headquarters or command center, but as a servant-equipping team helping leaders connect, collaborate, and flourish across the ecosystem. As I listened, I kept thinking about the language of church as an ecosystem rather than an institution. In fact, we have another article coming later this week exploring healthy Hub Teams and why movements need strong root systems beneath the surface if disciple-makers and microchurches are going to flourish across a city.

That includes large churches, microchurch networks, Spanish-speaking networks, African American churches, women in ministry, South Asian leaders, immigrant communities, and leaders who do not always get centered in traditional church multiplication conversations.

In other words, an ecosystem where different models, traditions, and networks can learn from one another, contribute their unique strengths, and work together for the sake of the city—an ecosystem of the whole Church, with many expressions, many gifts, many leaders, and one Lord. Which, depending on how closely you’ve read the New Testament, is either a radical innovation or simply what the Church has always been supposed to be.

The Church, house to house

Near the end of the conversation, Rodrigo tells a story that is worth the whole episode.

A woman in her sixties sensed God calling her to serve young men returning from prison. She owned a modest townhome with a few extra rooms, and over time she became convinced that the invitation was not merely to volunteer, mentor, or donate—it was to open her door and make space in her life. So she did. She welcomed these young men into her home and walked beside them through the fragile, difficult work of beginning again. Together they navigated job applications, identification cards, driver’s licenses, court dates, shared meals, late-night conversations, prayers whispered in moments of fear, and the patient rebuilding of trust. What she offered was more than shelter; she offered belonging. Room by room, meal by meal, prayer by prayer, her home became a place where broken stories were gathered up and restoration quietly took root.

At one point, a DEA agent told her they had been watching one of the men for a year and had seen the transformation happening in his life.

Her response was, “That is Jesus.”

Of course, she was right because she was also his hands and feet.

That is what makes the story so powerful. It is not impressive because it is flashy. It is impressive because it is deeply ordinary and deeply impossible without the Spirit of God.

A home became a place of healing.

A table became a doorway into a new future.

A disciple became a spiritual mother.

That is Acts 2 with carpet and a mortgage.

A few highlights from the conversation

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why ordinary disciple-making is mission critical in a post-Christian context

• How microchurches emerge from disciple-making rather than replacing it

• Why collaboration may be one of the most important technologies for the future Church

• What it means to build an ecosystem instead of a platform

• How large churches and microchurches can bless and strengthen one another

• Why minority-led churches often carry wisdom the wider Church desperately needs

• What it looks like when Jesus’ prayer in John 17 becomes strategy, not just sentiment

At the heart of it all is one simple conviction:

God is already at work in our cities.

The invitation is to see it, join it, and help ordinary people step into it.

🎧 Catch the full Bonus Conversation above.

And as you listen, ask the Spirit one question:

What is my next faithful step?

Grace and peace,
Rob

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Greetings, friends on mission,

Over the last week, three different church groups have released resolutions or statements related to the current state of immigration enforcement in our nation. They are each well-crafted, and they each reflect different streams within the American Church.

I want to commend them to you as your movement, network, church, or ministry discerns how to lead faithfully in this season.

Earlier this week, I wrote about The Shift We Missed (and the One We’re Resisting). The basic idea was this: the future Church is already multi-ethnic, decentralized, and on the move. The question is whether the American Church will join it, or keep trying to manage yesterday’s map.

This conversation around immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable neighbors is one of the places where that question becomes very concrete.

Because if the future Church is already multi-ethnic, then we cannot treat the nations among us as a problem to manage before we see them as neighbors to love. If the Gospel is already moving across borders, languages, cultures, and households, then the Church has to be careful not to let fear train our imagination faster than Jesus does.

This is not a simple moment. Christians can and do hold different views on immigration enforcement, border policy, and legislation. That is real. But whatever our policy instincts may be, followers of Jesus do not have the option of surrendering the dignity of image-bearers, the call to welcome the stranger, or the responsibility to resist language that turns people into abstractions.

Here are three statements that have been issued in the last week or so, all worth reading and reflecting on.

Southern Baptist Convention: On Immigration, Human Dignity, and the Rule of Law

This resolution affirms that every person, including immigrants and refugees, bears the image of God and deserves dignity. It also supports the enforcement of immigration laws in ways that are just, humane, and consistent with due process. It rejects nativism, ethnic hostility, and discrimination, while calling for secure borders, public order, ministry to immigrants and refugees, and immigration policies that uphold both compassion and the rule of law.

Missional Church Leaders: A Collective Response to Refugee Awareness Month (see below)

Released in advance of World Refugee Day by a coalition of missional church leaders, this statement calls churches to uphold the dignity of refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable people as image-bearers of God. It also expresses concern about recent immigration rhetoric, especially language that portrays immigrants as less than fully human. The concern here is not simply political disagreement, but the deeper discipleship issue of how public language can train us to see people as categories instead of neighbors.

Reformed Church in America: General Synod Statement on Immigration Enforcement

This statement affirms that all people are made in the image of God and condemns immigration practices the Synod believes dehumanize people, including racial profiling, detention without proper warrants, deportation without due process, family separation, mass detention, and third-country deportations.

Taken together, these statements remind us that the Church has a responsibility to speak and act in ways that are biblical, humane, and deeply rooted in the way of Jesus.

Below is the full statement from the missional church leader coalition which KCU is apart of.

A Pastoral Response in Time for Refugee Awareness Month

Scripture consistently reminds God’s people to remember the foreigner, protect the vulnerable, and practice hospitality. We celebrate that we live in a nation where Christians can hold differing views on immigration enforcement, border policy, and legislation and still be unified in our belief of the Bible and our commitment to the values of the Kingdom of God. Moreover, as people who uphold the Imago Dei, that every human is created in the image of God, and the Missio Dei, that God and His Church have a mission, we must not lose sight of the humanity and dignity of immigrants present in our nation, including refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable populations. They are mothers and fathers, children and neighbors, image-bearers with stories, gifts, fears, and hopes regardless of the factors that led to their migration.

In recent days, the White House has launched a website, aliens.gov. Many Christians have found its usage of unhuman and inhumane rhetoric deeply troubling, especially as it views certain immigrants in America as part of an “alien” class in the extraterrestrial sense, “invading” our country with malice. Regardless of political affiliation or one’s views on immigration policy, we are deeply concerned that the highest institution in our nation has used this kind of language to portray some as abstractions and less than or other than human. We are deeply concerned it will give credence for Americans to disregard the well-being and dignity of immigrants regardless of their status.

As followers of Jesus, we believe every person is made in the image of God, regardless of their migration journey and whether they can remain in the country or not. As a coalition of national ministries and networks, we affirm that every person is worthy of dignity, compassion, and love. And as Americans, we believe in the constitutional responsibility to protect the rights and due process of all residents, including noncitizens. A pathway toward achieving a nation that is both strong in security and welcoming to the world must be void of language that objectifies.

At a moment when public rhetoric can subtly shape people into categories instead of neighbors, we believe the Church is called to embody a different imagination: the way of Jesus.

This is an opportune time to be reminded as Christian “friends on mission” that we must never demonize the very ones we purport to want to reach with the gospel. And we must also remember that numbered among those vulnerable to immigration detention and deportation are some we would consider sisters and brothers in Christ. This is not so much a matter of policy for us as much as it is a discipleship and gospel issue.

We are grateful for organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals and World Relief that continue equipping churches to respond with biblical wisdom, compassion, and faithful presence during this critical moment. Their recent report, Joined Together, Torn Apart, offers a research-based analysis of how current immigration policies and proposed mass deportation efforts could separate more than 1.3 million U.S. citizens from spouses, children, or parents in the coming years.

Moreover, this comes on the cusp of June, the month globally dedicated to raising awareness regarding the plight of hundreds of millions of forcibly displaced people. June 20 is globally accepted as World Refugee Day, and we invite churches, disciple-makers, microchurches, and spiritual families to pray for displaced peoples around the world, to listen to their stories, and to consider practical ways to embody the welcome of Christ in their communities.

We encourage churches and leaders to engage the following resources throughout June:

World Refugee Day Church Toolkit

Refugee Advocacy Training

“A Christian Statement on Refugee Resettlement”

Faithfulwitness.us resources for churches seeking to engage immigration issues biblically and compassionately.

May the Church be known not for fear, outrage, or indifference, but for love, truth, hospitality, and courageous compassion in the way of Jesus.

Rob Wegner

The center of gravity of the Church has shifted, though you would be forgiven for missing it. There was no announcement, no formal handoff, no moment when someone stood up and said, “It’s happening now.” It has come through the kind of movement that rarely makes headlines. The sort of thing that grows while most of us are still looking somewhere else.

Today, the majority of Christians no longer live in the West. Depending on which study you read, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the global Church now resides in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.¹ The growth in sub-Saharan Africa alone over the last century is enough to make even the most skeptical observer pause and reconsider what God might be up to. It turns out the story we assumed was central has become, at best, one chapter among many.

This changes more than geography. It reshapes imagination. The Church is now thoroughly multi-ethnic. It is often materially poor in ways that do not fit comfortably into Western categories of success. And in more places than we tend to notice, it is sustained by women whose names will never appear on a conference lineup but whose faithfulness holds entire communities together.²

If you were to picture the “average” Christian today, you might need to do a little internal recalibration. It is probably not the person most of us instinctively imagine. A more accurate picture might be an African woman rising before the sun, praying in a way that is less about discipline and more about dependence, carrying the weight of family and community, leading in spaces where no one handed her a title, living a Gospel that is not theoretical but daily, embodied, and necessary. She is not thinking about church trends. She is trusting Jesus for today.

This is not a talking point or a statistic to be deployed when it is convenient, but a wake up call. A reminder that the future of the Church has already arrived, and it may not resemble the version we have spent so much time trying to maintain.

The Future of America Is Already Here

Here is the part many in the American Church still have not fully faced: The same shift happening globally is happening here.

According to U.S. Census projections, America is on track to become a “majority-minority” nation sometime in the 2040s, with white Americans dropping below 50% of the population.³ In fact, among younger generations, that future has already arrived—children and young adults are already more diverse than the older population.³

This is not a distant horizon. It is a present reality moving through our schools, our neighborhoods, our cities.

Growth in the United States is now being driven largely by Hispanic, Asian, multiracial, and immigrant communities.⁴ The future of the nation will be younger, more diverse, more urban, and more interconnected than anything the Church in America has previously navigated.

Which means this is not just a sociological shift, it is a missional moment.

A Distortion in Plain Sight

This is where the dissonance becomes impossible to ignore.

At the very moment when both the global Church and the future of America are becoming more diverse, more humble, and more reflective of the nations gathered in Revelation 7, a loud stream of Western Christianity is moving in the opposite direction—toward ethnic nostalgia, cultural protectionism, and political domination.

What is often described as white Christian nationalism tends to get treated like a political overreach, as if the problem is simply a bit too much enthusiasm in the wrong direction. That framing lets us off easy. What we are dealing with is more than tone or strategy. It is a quiet rewriting of the Gospel itself. It takes the name of Jesus and begins to tether it to the preservation of a cultural moment that is, if we are honest, already slipping through our fingers. Somewhere along the way, the mission shifts. The Kingdom of God starts to sound a lot like maintaining influence, holding ground, keeping what used to work from fading too quickly.

There is a certain kind of humor in this, though it is the kind that makes you pause before you laugh and then weep.

The early Church had no access to power, no cultural majority, and no realistic path to controlling anything. They seemed oddly unbothered by that. Fast forward a couple thousand years and we have managed to convince ourselves that things might fall apart if we do not stay in charge. It is a strange burden to carry on behalf of a risen King.

What makes this more than a passing concern is how subtly it reshapes our imagination. The cross is still there, of course. It shows up in the songs, the statements, and as jewelry. It just does not set the pace or point to a way of living and leading. I guess control and coercion is easier to organize, and boy has it taken on such a head of steam.

Meanwhile, the actual movement of the Gospel keeps going about its business. It drifts toward the margins, crosses cultural lines without asking for permission, and gathers people who would not normally choose each other and then teaches them to live as family. It seems remarkably unconcerned with holding majority status. Ha! It has done this before, and always will.

When you hold all of that next to the reality of the global Church, and next to what is already unfolding across the United States, the contrast sharpens. Christian Nationalism is not just a slightly off course expression of faith. It is a distortion that narrows what God is clearly expanding. Calling it an aberration may sound strong, but sometimes plain language is the most honest thing we have, especially when the alternative is already visible in communities that are quietly living a wider, deeper, and more faithful version of the story.

What This Means for Microchurch and Disciple-Makers

If the “average” Christian globally is already outside the West… and if the future of America is increasingly multi-ethnic, decentralized, and relational, then the implications for how we form the Church are enormous.

The last 50 years of the predominant model church was shaped around attraction, stability, marketing, relevance, and systems that depend on buildings, budgets, and paid staff, therefore it often finds itself out of step and less agile in a world that requires something more relational, more adaptive, more prophetic, and more incarnational in its mission

The microchurch form of the church is built for this.

They are small enough to embed inside diverse relational networks.
They are flexible enough to cross cultures, languages, and socioeconomic lines.
They are simple enough to multiply among ordinary people, not just trained professionals.

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Maybe most importantly, they are relational enough to hold the complexity of a changing world without needing to control it, while embodying an alternative Kingdom community in a small, rooted way that can both remain present and be readily multiplied and sent.

Disciple-makers in the United States are not preparing for a future shift, we are already living inside it. Which means the question is no longer: “How do we get people back to church?” The question is: How do we become the kind of people—and the kind of communities—through whom the Gospel can take root in every network of relationships in a radically diverse, post-majority culture?

The future Church in America will not be built around a “Saddleback Sam” prototype-thinking of the attractional church model, where one imagined person quietly shapes the agenda for everyone else.

“Saddleback Sam” was helpful for a moment, (if you don’t know who that is google it and yes, this picture is the one used in training hundreds of thousands church leaders). It gave leaders a way to think about who they were trying to reach. But over time, what I think began as a missionary instinct often drifted into a marketing strategy. Instead of helping people—all of God’s people— wake up to the actual neighbors, networks, and places they had uniquely been sent to, it subtly trained us to build worship and program environments for an idealized audience. Sure, maybe our context is becoming more diverse, but we got to keep our church focused on Saddleback Sam, Granger Gus, Chicago Chet, and whoever else we came up with.

Ugh.

The shift we are living in does not move in that direction. It moves outward, into real relationships, real complexity, real people with names and stories. It calls all of us, not just a centralized organization, to live as sent people. Not toward a demographic, but toward the actual lives already around us. It will be woven together across difference, across neighborhoods, across languages, and across increasingly diverse stories.

If we are paying attention, we will begin to see this for what it is. Not a threat to the Church, but a return to its beginnings in Acts 2, where the Spirit gathered a people from many languages and made them one, and a glimpse of where it is all headed, toward that great Wedding Feast where every tribe and tongue is welcomed in.

What This Looks Like on the Ground

Michelle and I have moved from the suburbs into a more diverse part of Kansas City. Not to make a point, and definitely not because we suddenly became more enlightened than our past selves. It just started to feel like if this is where the story is going, we should probably get a little deeper into it. We wanted to be more present to the kind of life that is already shaping the future of our city, where cultures overlap, where languages mix, where you hear three different worldviews before lunch without trying very hard. It has been less of a grand strategy and more of a quiet nudge we kept saying yes to.

We realized we did not just want to talk about diversity as a concept. We wanted to live inside it a bit more, to experience more of the whole story of Kansas City, and to join in with what God is already doing there. So we packed up, moved, and are learning, slowly and sometimes awkwardly, what it means to pay better attention.

Here’s another story of what that looks like.

During an KC Underground art retreat in our home last weekend, one of the artists began to share his story. Before Jesus, he described his life in three words: mugging, thugging, and drugging. A life shaped by survival, addiction, and cycles of incarceration.

Fresh out of jail, after meeting Jesus, he knew himself well enough to know what would happen if he went back out onto the streets. The pull would be too strong. The old patterns too familiar. He was standing on the edge of relapse.

And in that moment, he sensed Jesus speak to him in a simple, quiet prompting:

“Look in your closet.”

He did.

There, sitting forgotten in the corner of the closet, was a single piece of abandoned wood.

Again, the whisper:

“Make something.”

That moment became a turning point. Since then, he has been creating, prolifically. Woodworking pieces, typography, and more…expressions he calls Imago Dei Expressions. Art that carries the weight of his story and the beauty of redemption. Art that proclaims we are co-creators and beauty is an essential dimension of the Mission Dei.

Alongside it, his evangelistic gift have come alive. He is now making disciples among men in recovery, among those coming out of incarceration, among people who would never step foot inside a church building but recognize truth and beauty when they see it embodied. This is what mission looks like: A person, restored, sent back into the very networks where grace first found him.

Back to the retreat.

Two Muslim women came as guests of one of our disciple-makers who is deeply embedded in that community. They arrived with a kind of quiet curiosity, a bit of caution, settling in more as observers than participants at first. Both were from India, which opened an unexpected door for Michelle and me. We have spent significant time there over the years, learning from a disciple-making movement we were able to witness and participate in from their earliest days. As the conversation unfolded, we found ourselves swapping stories about places, food, and people we love, until we realized we had even been to the same hill country retreat center in Southern India. At that point it felt like something more than coincidence.

We had been prepared for this moment through immersive, pilgrim-like engagement in another culture. They obviously felt seen, known, welcomed, and honored.

As the aforementioned artist shared his art, his process, and his redemption story, something in the room began to shift. As the stories unfolded, as the pieces were passed around, and as the presence of Jesus quietly filled the space without any need for announcement or agenda, they leaned forward. Literally on the edge of their seats.

At the end of the retreat, they approached me, thanking Michelle and I for hosting the retreat in our home. Honoring the space. Expressing what they had experienced and then one of them said something I will not forget: “I would be honored if we could host the next retreat in my home.”

A person of peace revealed in the middle of beauty, story, and presence.

Pay Attention

This is the future of the Church in America. Our future will not be sustained by cultural dominance, but through ordinary people, in unexpected places, across lines we once thought were barriers, living incarnationally, planting the Gospel in highly contextualized ways, and making disciples relationally, and letting the Gospel travel along those diverse relational networks.

The Gospel is still moving and it always will until every tribe, tongue and nation has be included.

The Gospel travels through artists with a past, through women of another faith leaning in, and through homes becoming places of radical hospitality.

That is also why, this week, KC Underground is joining with approximately eleven other national organizations to release a shared statement during Refugee Awareness Month and leading into World Refugee Day on June 20.

Christians can and do hold different views on immigration enforcement, border policy, and legislation. The deeper concern is the dehumanizing language and imagery (i.e. https://www.whitehouse.gov/aliens) that can quietly train us to see immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable neighbors as abstractions instead of image-bearers.

This is a discipleship issue before it is a political one.

If we believe every person bears the image of God, and if we believe the Church exists for the mission of God, then we must resist any language that makes it easier to fear, dismiss, or demonize the very people Jesus calls us to love. Especially when some of those vulnerable to detention or deportation are not strangers to the family of God, but sisters and brothers in Christ.

The statement will be released this week as a pastoral, Jesus-centered call to dignity, hospitality, truth, compassion, and faithful presence. Not because the Church needs one more thing to argue about online. Heaven knows we have achieved proficiency there. But because, in moments like this, the Church has an opportunity to sound and look like Jesus.

If we are paying attention, we will see it. If we let go of the center and move to the margins, we can join in.

Footnotes / Sources

1. Pew Research Center; Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom

2. Pew Research Center, The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World

3. U.S. Census projections summarized via Brookings Institution — U.S. becomes “minority white” around 2045 ; see also youth diversity trends

4. U.S. Census Bureau population estimates showing minority groups driving growth

One of the patterns we see throughout church history is that when God’s people find themselves in a moment of dislocation, they are forced to recover what is most essential.

When Israel was carried into exile in Babylon, they could no longer organize their life around the Temple, the land, the monarchy, or the familiar rhythms of national religious life. Everything that had seemed permanent was suddenly unavailable. So they had to ask deeper questions: Who are we when we are not in control? How do we remain faithful when we are not at the center? What does covenant life look like when we are scattered among the nations?

In exile, God’s people had to rediscover faithfulness in the ordinary. They had to learn how to pray, remember, bless, resist idolatry, practice holiness, and seek the welfare of the city while living as a minority people. Exile stripped away the illusion that the structures themselves were the source of life. It forced them back to dependence on God.

On a much smaller scale, I spent years trying to lead my mom out of her own technological exile. There was the email-only computer I bought her that was essentially a typewriter with a send button. Then came an iPad, which faithfully served its purpose by remaining unopened in a closet. There were multiple rounds of pleading to trade dial-up-era habits for actual Wi‑Fi so she could at least use a smartphone. Despite my best missionary efforts, Mom would not break free.

Letting go of familiar ways of living is harder than it looks. We get used to the posture we’ve carried for years, even when it no longer serves us, and eventually the past can start to feel more comfortable than the possibility of change. Some exiles, it turns out, become quite attached to being in charge of life in Israel and will not be open to accepting an exile posture.

When the Church Went to the Desert

A similar thing happened in the early centuries of the church. As Christianity moved from the margins toward the center of empire, something profound was gained, but something was also at risk. When the church became increasingly entangled with imperial power, cultural respectability, and institutional privilege, some followers of Jesus began to ask, “Where is the meat? Where is the fire? Where is the costly apprenticeship to Jesus?” (If the “Where’s the beef?” comment is confusing or strange, ask your parents or consult the ancient archives of 1980s television commercials.)

That question gave birth, in part, to the desert fathers and mothers.

They were not simply anti-institutional rebels. They were witnesses. They stepped into the wilderness because they sensed that the church’s new comfort with empire could easily dull the radical edge of the gospel. The desert became a place of recovery: prayer, fasting, simplicity, spiritual warfare, humility, obedience, and union with God. They were not trying to escape the church. They were trying to preserve the deep life of the church.

And I think we are living in a similar kind of moment now.

A lot of people are looking at the predominant model of church and quietly asking the same question: “Where is the meat?” Not the branding, production value, platform, or even the Sunday experience. But where is the deep formation into the likeness of Jesus? Where is the kind of community that can carry suffering, confession, reconciliation, and joy? Where is the everyday apprenticeship that teaches ordinary people how to pray, bless, discern, forgive, serve, make disciples, and live under the Lordship of Jesus in real life?

This does not mean the inherited church is bad or that every existing structure should be discarded. That would be too simplistic. But it does mean that cultural dislocation often exposes what our systems have been unable to produce.

Exile revealed that Israel could not depend on land, temple, and monarchy alone.

The rise of imperial Christianity revealed that proximity to power could not produce holiness—and, in a twist history repeats with remarkable consistency, usually found a way to compromise it rather quickly.

And our current moment is revealing that attractional religious activity, by itself, cannot produce deep discipleship.

So the question is not simply, “How do we get people back to church?”

The better question may be: “What kind of people is the Spirit forming in this wilderness?”

What the Wilderness Is For?

In Scripture and church history, the wilderness is rarely just a place of loss. It is often the place where God strips away illusion, reorders desire, and prepares his people for a new kind of faithfulness. In the wilderness, we learn to love God for God’s sake rather than treating him like a cosmic prize machine, hoping he will dispense whatever toy our hearts happen to be set on at the moment. As our expectations are purified, we begin to seek not merely God’s gifts, but God himself.

That is why this moment matters. Many people are not merely deconstructing because they are cynical. Some are searching because they are hungry. They are asking for bread. They are asking for substance. They are asking whether the way of Jesus can actually form a life, a family, a neighborhood, a people.

This is where the recovery of simple, embodied rhythms becomes so important.

Prayer and work.

Ora et labora.

Breathe and BLESS.

A life of communion with God that becomes a life of mission in the world.

The missionary pathway is not just another program layered on top of an exhausted religious system. At its best, it is a way of helping people recover the deep grammar of life with Jesus: abiding, listening, blessing, eating, serving, story, community, and obedience.

In Babylon, God’s people had to learn how to be faithful without the old center. In the desert, the fathers and mothers had to learn how to be holy when the church was tempted by empire. And today, perhaps we are being invited to learn again how to become a people formed by the presence, practices, and Lordship of Jesus, not merely consumers of religious experience.

The Spirit has often done some of his deepest work when God’s people are no longer impressed with the machinery.

That may be where we are, and that may not be bad news.

When the Pathway Shapes the People

This has profound implications for how we think about our developmental pathway, including both the content we teach and the programs we offer.

The pathway itself.

Every church or network has one, whether we have named it or not. There is always some assumed way people learn what it means to follow Jesus in a particular community. There is always a set of next steps. A pattern of belonging. A definition of maturity. A kind of gravity pulling people toward something. It may be carefully documented in a strategic plan, or it may exist only in a handful of assumptions and a few well-worn phrases. Either way, people tend to find it eventually.

Over time, that pathway often does more formation than anything we say from a stage. It shapes the definition of maturity, influences what faithfulness is meant to be, and quietly defines what normal Christianity looks like.

This is where many leaders begin to feel the tension. They look around and realize they are surrounded by people who are sincere, committed, generous, and deeply faithful in the life of the church. These are not apathetic people. They are not rebellious people. They have often done exactly what the church asked them to do.

They showed up.

They joined groups.

They served on teams.

They gave faithfully.

They participated in the rhythms and programs available to them.

Yet when we begin talking about everyday disciple-making, neighborhood mission, persons of peace, spiritual family, or reproduction, many of them feel like they are being asked to step into a foreign country without a map, a passport, or any snacks for the journey.

That should make us pause.

There may be a gap between participation in the life of the church and participation in the mission of God, and that leads to a question I can’t quite shake. Although we have to admit this will always be an issue—idolatry is constantly pressing in—mainstream culture seems almost designed to keep us distracted and disconnected from our real hearts. Excuse me for a second... I just need to check my phone.

But seriously, there is another deep issue at play. Here’s the question: What if the issue is not people’s willingness to make disciples, but the pathway we have given them? What if we have discipled people perfectly for the pathway we actually built? If that is true, then the outcomes we are seeing may not be accidental at all—they may be the natural result of the systems and expectations we have created. That is what this framework is trying to name. Here’s the framework I was talking about.

This is one of those simple contrasts that, for many leaders, turns on the lightbulb almost instantly. You can almost see the moment it lands:

“Oh... we don’t have a disciple-maker pathway. We have an assimilation pathway.”

Now, assimilation is not the enemy. It can serve a real purpose. It can help people find community, take initial steps, and feel a sense of belonging. But only if it leads somewhere.

Assimilation is good... as long as it leads into a disciple-maker pathway.

It becomes a problem when it replaces it.

Our capacity to mobilize God’s people, in God’s way, rises and falls on something deeper than attendance, programs, or engagement metrics. It rises and falls on whether we are actually forming people into disciples who live the way of Jesus.

People who are with Jesus, becoming like Jesus, and joining Him on mission, right where they live, work, learn, and play.

That kind of formation doesn’t happen by accident. It requires an environment. A culture. And yes, a pathway.

So let’s look at the difference.

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Two Pathways, Two Outcomes

Rather than explaining the graphic in detail, take a moment to simply sit with it.

As you look at the two pathways, ask Jesus to help you see clearly. Resist the urge to defend, justify, or evaluate your church, ministry, or leadership. And just as importantly, ignore any voice of condemnation. Conviction from Jesus brings clarity and invitation; condemnation brings shame and paralysis.

As you reflect on the graphic, consider:

• Which pathway most closely reflects my current ministry reality?

• Where do I see signs of a disciple-maker pathway? Where do I see signs of an assimilation pathway?

• What assumptions about discipleship, leadership, or church life are being challenged?

• If Jesus were speaking to me through this graphic, what might He be highlighting?

• What excites me? What concerns me?

• Where do I sense an invitation from Jesus to take a next step?

• What would need to change for disciple-making to become the center of gravity rather than assimilation?

Take your time. Listen for the voice of Jesus. Let Him show you what is true, and remember: there is no condemnation here—only an invitation to follow Him more fully. If your curious, we have a series on cultivating disciple-making ecosystems, which include a pathway, but expands beyond that. That series starts with the following article.

The Hidden Curriculum

This is why we have to pay attention not only to what we say we value, but to what our pathway actually rewards.

Every pathway has a hidden curriculum.

We may say we value disciple-making, but if the only celebrated stories are platform stories, attendance stories, giving stories, or program growth stories, then people quickly learn what really counts.

We may say every believer is called and sent, but if all meaningful ministry requires permission from staff, access to a building, or inclusion in an official program, then people learn to wait.

We may say the Spirit is already at work in every neighborhood, but if our calendar leaves no room for neighbors, then people learn that mission is something we talk about in church, not something we practice in life.

We may say multiplication matters, but if everything depends on a gifted few, then we have built a system that can only grow by addition.

And addition is not wrong, but addition alone will not mobilize the whole people of God.

At some point, the pathway has to change—not because we are angry at the old one, not because everything we inherited was bad, and not because we need to blow everything up and start a support group for former committee members, though I would not rule that out entirely.

The pathway has to change because Jesus is worthy of more than our religious attendance. He is Lord of our homes, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our calendars, our tables, our imaginations, our wounds, our callings, and our ordinary Tuesday afternoons.

In many ways, this brings us back to where we began.

The people of God have always learned discipleship in moments of dislocation. Israel learned it in Babylon. The early church learned it under the shadow of empire. And we are learning it again in a cultural moment where old assumptions no longer hold and familiar structures no longer carry the weight they once did.

Yet this is not a reason for fear. It is an invitation.

Whenever God’s people find themselves on the margins, they are given the opportunity to rediscover what mattered most all along—not bigger crowds, stronger institutions, or better programs, but a people who know Jesus, follow Jesus, and help others do the same.

A disciple-maker pathway is not ultimately a strategy for church growth. It is a way of helping ordinary people become the kind of disciples who can faithfully inhabit their moment in history.

That is one of the gifts hidden inside this season.

What feels like disruption may actually become renewal. What feels like loss may become clarity. What feels like exile may become the place where God forms a people whose lives once again make the kingdom visible. History suggests God has a habit of doing some of his best work in situations that look, at first glance, like they should have been avoided entirely—the kind of situations we tend to dodge with remarkable creativity, somewhere between filing taxes, having difficult conversations, and finally reading the terms and conditions.

The future will belong to churches that help people follow Jesus beyond the walls of a building and into the realities of everyday life.

If we can do that—if we can become communities that intentionally form disciples who make disciples—then this moment of dislocation may become the beginning of something beautiful. Not because the culture changed or because the church regained influence, but because, in every generation, Jesus is still building His Church. He is still calling ordinary people to follow Him, wherever they find themselves.

In this Bonus Conversation on the Starfish and the Church podcast, I sat down with Shane Boyd from Gathering of Nomads.

At first glance, the conversation sounds almost novelty-level niche. RVs. Campgrounds. Nomadic families. Full-time travelers drifting across America with Starlink internet, diesel generators, and coffee mugs rattling in the cabinets while they chase decent weather across state lines.

But somewhere underneath the stories about campfires, fuel prices, and life on the road, another conversation kept surfacing. A much deeper one. What does it mean to be the Church when people no longer stay still? And maybe even more unsettling: What happens when the Gospel begins moving faster than our structures can comfortably contain?

For most of us, church has become deeply tied to stable geography. A neighborhood. A parish. A campus. A building. A zip code.

Even the language reveals it.

We “attend” somewhere.
We “go” to church.
We “invite” people to a place and program called “church.”.

But what do you do when the mission field itself refuses to stay put? What happens when the people you are trying to pastor are only in one place for two weeks before they disappear into Arizona, Montana, Missouri, or Maine?

How do you plant a church in a community without a zip code?

That question sat underneath almost everything Shane and I discussed, but what stayed with me is the way this nomadic missionary life has quietly cultivated a rediscovery of the Church beneath many of our assumptions about church.

I know that rediscovery is happening in a lot of places right now. Not only among RVers, but among artists, recovery communities, gamers, young adults, immigrants, neighborhood tables, tattoo artists, travel baseball parents, entrepreneurs, and ordinary disciples beginning to wake up to the realization that they are already standing inside a mission field.

They just never realized that’s what it was.

The People We Forgot Were There

Shane shared that there are now more than 11 million people living in RVs across America. Some are retired. Some are chasing freedom. Some are escaping economic pressure. Some are simply tired. Tired of the pace. Tired of the noise. Tired of trying to sustain a life that no longer feels sustainable. Most churches barely notice they exist.

That struck me deeply because the modern church in America has largely been organized around stationary assumptions. We have become exceptionally good at ministering to settled people who live predictable lives inside stable geography.

But increasingly, that is not the world we inhabit anymore.

In the book of Acts, the Gospel spread through roads, ports, marketplaces, households, relational networks, traveling workers, displaced refugees, merchants, wandering apostles, and ordinary believers carrying the story of Jesus from city to city. Christianity was decentralized long before it was institutionalized. It moved relationally before it moved organizationally.

Somewhere along the way, we became so accustomed to centralization that we began assuming the structure itself was the mission.

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“You’re Not Going to Plant a Church”

To be clear, Shane is not “anti” organized church, and neither am I.. Quite the opposite. One of the things I appreciated most in our conversation was the deep honor he still carries for the traditional church. He openly acknowledged that he came to Jesus through a local predominant model church.

But Shane’s own journey eventually led him into a profound theological disorientation. Not because he stopped loving the Church, but because he began wrestling with what the Church actually is.

Originally, the RV life was supposed to be temporary. A practical solution. A season. He still imagined eventually returning to a garage full of tools and projects and a more settled version of life. But while living among full-time RVers, he slowly realized something unsettling: there was almost no meaningful spiritual infrastructure among this massive and rapidly growing people group.

People watched church online when they could. Some had disconnected entirely. Others carried spiritual curiosity but no community. Most were moving too frequently for traditional systems to meaningfully engage them.

As Shane wrestled with how you could possibly “plant a church” among constantly moving people, he sensed the Spirit whisper something profoundly simple:

“You’re not going to plant a church. You’re going to plant people.”

That sentence contains an entire missiology and downstream, an ecclesiology.

Once the focus shifts from planting centralized gatherings to planting people deeply formed in the way of Jesus, almost every metric changes. The primary question is no longer: “How do we gather people consistently?” It becomes: “How do we form people who can carry the life of Jesus wherever they go?”

That is an entirely different imagination.

I think this is one of the places where many of us are quietly being re-converted right now. Not away from the Church. But deeper into the missionary nature of the Church.

At one point, Shane reflected on reading Matthew 6 again, particularly Jesus’ words about seeking first the Kingdom. He described feeling like the Spirit gave him a gut punch because he realized how subtly his energy had drifted toward building ministry structures rather than participating in the Kingdom itself.

I felt that in my bones.

Most current ministry models have a gravity that constantly pulls us toward maintenance. Toward preserving systems, protecting platforms, sustaining budgets, growing attendance, refining branding, managing complexity.

None of those things are inherently bad, but they can quietly become central, especially in a culture where centralized success is easier to measure than transformed lives.

Maybe that is part of why these decentralized expressions can feel both inspiring and threatening at the same time. They expose how often we unconsciously equate the survival of our structures with the advancement of the Kingdom.

The Church has always been far more durable than our structures.Rome could not stop it.
Persecution could not stop it. Scattered believers carried it across the known world without podcasts, buildings, budgets, livestreams, or strategic planning retreats.

Which honestly is both deeply comforting and slightly offensive to our organizational instincts.

Witnesses, Not Experts

There was another moment in the conversation that has stayed with me as well. Shane described a man named Adam, an ex-military RVer struggling to adapt to civilian life. At first, Adam was mostly just the rough-around-the-edges neighbor yelling across the campsite:

“Come over. Fire’s at five.”

Over time, through ordinary proximity, friendship, prayer, and conversation, something began happening. Questions surfaced. Curiosity emerged. Slowly, painfully, the Spirit began drawing him toward Jesus.

Eventually Adam surrendered his life to Christ. Then came the long, beautiful process Scripture calls sanctification. Old coping mechanisms started dying. New desires emerged. Freedom slowly began taking root.

What struck me most was not merely that Adam came to faith. It was how quickly he began sharing what Jesus was doing in his life simple because he had become a witness, not because he felt fully prepared or that he had mastered anything.

That distinction matters more than we often realize.

Somewhere along the way, many Christians absorbed the subtle idea that meaningful participation in the mission of God requires expertise first. Seminary first. Readiness first. Confidence first.

But in the New Testament, people often began witnessing almost immediately after encountering Jesus.

That surfaced beautifully when Shane reflected on Acts 1:8 and the connection between witness and martyrdom. A witness is not merely someone who possesses information. A witness is someone whose old life is slowly dying while Christ becomes more visible.

That is why authentic discipleship always carries both beauty and surrender together.

I think that is part of what makes these decentralized movements so compelling right now. They are imperfect. Sometimes messy. Occasionally disorganized. But they often carry a kind of lived authenticity that many people are starving for.

Not polished religion or carefully curated experiences…just ordinary people trying to follow Jesus together in real life.

Toward the end of our conversation, Shane said something that I have not stopped thinking about. He talked about how much ministry training focuses on understanding “culture,” but the Spirit began showing him the importance of subcultures.

That observation feels incredibly important right now. Increasingly, people no longer primarily organize their lives around geography alone. They organize around affinity, identity, vocation, passion, trauma, interest, and shared experience.

Car communities.
Fitness groups.
Artists.
Outdoor adventurers.
Recovery circles.
Digital creators.
Travel communities.
Third spaces.

And maybe one of the great failures of the modern church has been assuming people would continue coming to us instead of recognizing that Jesus has already embedded His people among them.

That changes everything. ‘The question isn’t, “How do we attract people to centralized church, so we can ‘reach’ them?” The question is, “How do we recognize, equip, and release the disciples already living inside these subcultures?”

That is a very different posture.

Maybe that is what I found most beautiful about Shane’s story. He was not trying to create a trendy alternative church model. He was trying to say yes to Jesus inside a people group most churches had forgotten existed.

This conversation is ultimately about RVs, it is about recovering missionary imagination. It is about rediscovering that the Church is ultimately a people, not a place. It is about loosening our grip on the assumption that centralized structures are the primary way the Kingdom moves. It is about ordinary disciples waking up to the possibility that where they already live, work, gather, travel, create, struggle, and belong may actually be holy ground.

And maybe most of all, it is about trusting the Spirit again.

Let’s go.

I hope you enjoy this Bonus Conversation. I sure did!

My friend Todd Wilson’s new book releases this week. He sent me an advance copy a couple months ago, and I think this is going to hit thousands of church leaders hard.

Some books critique from a distance. This one does something far rarer: it reflects from within. As I read it, I found myself repeatedly thinking, “Yes… I was there. I remember that.”

At times with gratitude. At times with a quiet sense of unease, even embarrassment.

For many of us shaped by the church growth movement, this book functions as both historical reckoning and pastoral therapy. Todd gives language to tensions and anxieties many leaders carried but rarely articulated out loud. He writes not as an outsider throwing stones, but as someone who helped build the systems he is now thoughtfully and courageously examining.

And that matters.

Because the strongest critiques are often the ones born from love, grief, repentance, and hope.

With clarity and humility, Todd surfaces the unintended consequences of our obsession with scale, platform, branding, efficiency, and centralized growth. But this is not a cynical takedown piece. It is an invitation back to something deeper and more enduring: relational, disciple-making faithfulness rooted in the way of Jesus and the life of His Kingdom.

I was especially struck by the reflection questions at the end of each chapter. They are not filler. They are invitations. For leaders and communities willing to engage honestly, they could open entirely new pathways forward.

And the timing of this book feels deeply significant.

We are living through the fallout of leadership failures, systems that unintentionally cultivate unhealthy cultures, growing disillusionment among younger generations, political captivity within parts of the church, widespread deconstruction, and what sometimes feels like the “Walmartization” of Christianity itself.

In that environment, this book arrives as a mirror, a warning, a window, and a hopeful invitation.

My prayer is that it becomes more than a conversation piece. I hope it becomes a kairos moment. One the Spirit uses to call many of us back to Jesus again. Back to His presence. Back to His mission. Back to a church less shaped by corporate metrics and management systems, and more deeply aligned with the beauty, humility, and multiplying life of the Kingdom of God.

I’m grateful Todd had the courage to write it.

You can download the book for free at https://church-growth.org/#thebook, even the audio version of the book.

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I’ll be dropping a couple articles because as I read it brought so much in me that I wanted to process. I think it will create that kind of conversation for those “who grew up” in the church growth movement.

There are moments when you can feel it in your bones.

Not because something is failing.
But because something deeper is stirring.

Across North America, there are thousands of faithful leaders, disciple-makers, intercessors, and everyday saints showing up, loving well, and laboring for the Kingdom. And yet… if we’re honest, there’s a quiet awareness underneath it all:

Strategy alone is not enough.

We’ve built frameworks. We’ve clarified pathways. We’ve refined our language around multiplication, movements, and mission. And still… there are thresholds we cannot cross on strategy alone. Because every movement of God in history has been preceded by something far less controllable.

Extraordinary prayer.

The Pattern We Keep Rediscovering

If you trace the story of the early church, or the Moravians, or the Wesleyan revival, or modern disciple-making movements across the Majority World, you start to notice a pattern.

Breakthrough doesn’t begin with better systems. It begins with a people who become desperate enough to seek God together. Not as casual inquirers, but as passionate seekers who come intentionally, together, with a quiet, holy persistence.

Prayer not as a prelude, but as the work itself.

A Simple Invitation

This is why I want to personally invite you into something that feels both very small and very significant at the same time.

The North America Prayer Summit
September 18–19 | Kansas City

This isn’t a conference in the typical sense. There won’t be a parade of platform voices trying to impress you. This is a gathering to seek God. To listen together. To contend together. To align ourselves again with what the Spirit is already doing across our cities and networks.

Together, we will:

• Pursue God’s presence through worship and prayer

• Engage in Spirit-led, strategic intercession for breakthrough

• Strengthen relationships that fuel real collaboration across cities

• Learn how to cultivate and multiply movement-focused prayer in everyday life

Why This Matters Right Now

If you’ve been around the Underground or any movement conversation for a while, you’ve heard us say: We don’t plant microchurches. We plant the gospel and make disciples… and microchurches emerge.

But here’s the deeper truth underneath even that: We don’t start or sustain movements.
God does and prayer is how we stay rooted in that reality.

We won’t seek prayer as a movement technique or a lever to “make something happen, but simply as a relational posture that keeps us dependent, aligned, and awake.

A Gift to the Room

One of the unique gifts of this gathering is the presence of leaders who have walked in this reality for decades.

Shodankeh Johnson will be with us, helping guide both training and extended times of prayer. His life has been part of movements impacting thousands of churches and hundreds of thousands of new believers. More than what he’s done, it’s how he carries it. There’s a kind of authority that only comes from years on your knees.

And we get to sit in that.

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Our Hope (and It’s a Simple One)

Our hope is this: That God would meet us in a way that strengthens what He is already doing… and that He would release something fresh that accelerates disciple-making across North America.

You don’t need to be a “prayer person” to come. You just need to be someone who knows, deep down, that there’s more—and that you don’t want to try to get there on your own strength.

If that’s you, I’d love for you to join us. This is a shared effort: Prayer KC, New Generations, Movement Prayer, the Underground Network (including Kansas City Underground) and Phoenix Underground)—distinct streams coming together in unity to seek God for breakthrough across our cities and beyond.

You can find details and register here:
https://movementprayer.org/north-america-prayer-summit/

Here’s your simple invitation to come and seek God together.

Grace and peace,

Rob

There’s a strange ache running just beneath the surface of our moment. It feels, at times, like we are living on the back end of the modern age, after the great project of explaining everything has mostly run its course. We’ve become very good at it. In modernism, every mystery can be mapped, measured, and optimized into submission. We can diagnose it, diagram it, and, if needed, turn it into a podcast. And yet, for all our clarity, something feels…thinner.

At the very same time, there’s a quiet resurgence of wonder…though “quiet” might not be the right word anymore. It’s everywhere. Ancient carvings and buildings resurface in our feeds, “designed by aliens or giants.” Medieval stories of wild men and fae are retold, not as relics, but as clues. Entire podcasts are devoted to Bigfoot, cryptids, and the possibility that reality might be more layered than we thought. Shows about ufos and government disclosure pull millions of viewers. Conversations that once lived on the fringe are now mainstream. And alongside it all, there’s a renewed interest in pagan spirituality, enchantment, and practices that promise access to something beyond the visible world.

You can feel it on the ground too. On our last getaway to Chattanooga, walking the main strip downtown, right there in the heart of the Bible Belt, just a few steps from the world-famous Clumpys ice cream shop, there was a storefront where you could buy houseplants…and spells. Not hidden. Not ironic. Just there, as another perfectly normal option on a Saturday afternoon.

And somewhere in all of this, something in us leans forward just a bit. Not because we’re convinced, but because we’re curious. Because for all our explanations, something still feels unresolved. It raises a quiet question we don’t always know how to articulate: Did we just gain knowledge or did we lose something too? Did we solve the mystery or flatten it? And was the world, at some point, more alive than it now appears?

And if this feels like a strange place to begin a piece on disciple-making… it is. But stay with me. It will make sense by the end.

Mystery use to be normal.

In the choir stalls of Carlisle Cathedral, carved into dark oak beneath the seats of praying monks, there is a figure that looks uncannily familiar to modern eyes. Hair-covered, muscular, locked in a struggle with a beast, this medieval carving depicts what was called a woodwose, the “wild man of the woods.” Today, people glance at it and call it Bigfoot, but the question lingers beneath the humor, “Were they seeing something we no longer see, or were they naming something we no longer know how to name?” And if I’m being honest, there’s still a small part of me that wonders if there might actually be some kind of undiscovered creature out there on the edges of the map. Not because I’m convinced, but because the world has a way of surprising us, and I’ve learned not to close the door quite as tightly as modernity sometimes wants to.

To answer that, we have to recognize how different the old world - the premodern world - was from ours. Charles Taylor describes it as a shift from a “porous” world to a “buffered” one in A Secular Age. In the medieval imagination, the world was open, alive, and charged with meaning. The unseen pressed in. Spiritual forces, divine presence, and cosmic significance were not distant ideas but ambient realities. Today, we inhabit a buffered world where nothing gets in unless we allow it and nothing exists unless it can be measured. The world did not necessarily become less enchanted, but we became less able to experience it that way.

And yet, we must tread carefully, because not everything that was experienced was accurately understood. C. S. Lewis loved the medieval cosmos and rejected the cold reductionism of modernity, but he refused to collapse myth into literalism (i.e. the woodwose were real). For Lewis, the wild man, the faun, the fairy, and all their kin were not zoological categories waiting to be rediscovered. They were what he called “good dreams,” echoes of something real but not the thing itself.

I find myself returning often to That Hideous Strength - one of my favorite Lewis works, and one I’ve reread more times than I can count - because it captures this tension so vividly. In it, Lewis imagines a world where modern, technocratic power tries to strip reality of meaning, only to find itself confronted by deeper spiritual forces it cannot control or even properly name. It’s a story that reminds you both how real the unseen world is, and how easily it can be misunderstood or misused when we lose our bearings.

But Lewis goes further than that.

He believed that the pagan myths, the dying and rising gods, the heroic rescues, the longings for immortality, were not merely human inventions or collective wishful thinking. They were signposts. They were shadows cast ahead of a greater reality. They were, in his language, “myths that became fact,” in the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ, the story all those myths were reaching for actually entered history. The longing for rescue, the intuition that death should not have the last word, the recurring pattern of sacrifice and renewal—all of it finds its fulfillment not in a symbol, but in a person. Christianity does not abolish myth. It completes it. It is the true myth, the story that is both deeply imaginative and stubbornly real, where the God behind all stories steps into the story Himself.

J. R. R. Tolkien takes this even further, and thankfully refuses to let us settle for either flat explanations or sentimental fantasy. For Tolkien, fairy stories are not an escape from reality. They are a way back into it. Not because elves are quietly waiting just beyond the tree line - though, for the record, the Wegner children did search for them with remarkable sincerity in the woods behind our house in Indiana - but because the human imagination itself was designed to perceive meaning, generate beauty, and echo truth.

We are not creating out of nothing. We are, as Tolkien would say, sub-creating, working within a world that has already been spoken into being by God. Which means our stories, at their best, are not inventions so much as reflections. They are attempts, sometimes clumsy and sometimes breathtaking, to name what is already there.

And at the center of Tolkien’s vision is what he called eucatastrophe: the sudden, unexpected turn toward joy. The moment when everything appears lost, and then, almost impossibly, grace breaks in. It is the kind of turn that feels too good to be true, and yet somehow truer than everything that came before it. Tolkien believed this pattern was not just a literary device, but a glimpse into the deepest structure of reality itself. All those stories of last-minute rescue, of light breaking into darkness, of death giving way to life…they are not wishful thinking. They are echoes. Fragments of a greater Story in which the ultimate catastrophe is overturned, and the world is remade from the inside out.

But, we have to receive and then develop “eyes that see” and “ears that hear” to enter that Story.

This is where I find myself thinking about a deep cut, short-lived TV show from the early ’90s called Eerie, Indiana. It was a show about a perfectly normal suburban town…if your definition of normal includes Tupperware that keeps people forever young, neighbors running X-Files-style conspiracies in their basements, and Elvis quietly living there in hiding.

Back in college, a few of my closest buddies and I would gather each week to watch it, smiling at the quirkiness and wonder of a town where the strange was simply part of the fabric of everyday life. Years later, when my kids were old enough, we watched it again as a family, and one line from the show became something of a motto in our house: “better weird than dead.” It was playful, but Michelle and I hoped it carried a quiet wisdom. The show pushed back against the assumption that normal is always good, that the absence of mystery is a sign of health. It invited you to see differently, to question what everyone else accepted as “just the way things are,” and to remain open to the possibility that reality might be more layered than it appears.

And in a similar way, I think about my all time favorite show, The Twilight Zone, which I watched almost every night as a kid. Thank you, WGN (my Chicago peeps will understand). Most nights, Michelle and I still watch an episode together. There’s something about it that never gets old for me. Episode after episode, it invites you into stories that disrupt the ordinary, that bend reality just enough to help you see it again. It was never really about aliens or strange phenomena. It was about perspective. It was about waking up.

And what made it so compelling is that Rod Serling wrote from a deep moral center. His stories weren’t just strange for the sake of being strange. They were anchored. They exposed pride, injustice, fear, and self-deception. They held up a mirror. The mystery always served meaning. They reminded us we live in a world at war.

Here is where we need to add another layer of clarity. The world is not only mysterious. It is contested. Michael S. Heiser helped recover a biblical vision that many modern Christians have forgotten, that Scripture presents a cosmos filled not only with God and humanity, but with real spiritual beings, some aligned with God and others in rebellion.

Heiser often pointed to what is sometimes called the “divine council” worldview—a consistent thread throughout the Old Testament where God is depicted as the supreme ruler among a host of spiritual beings. Passages like Psalm 82, Deuteronomy 32, and 1 Kings 22 portray a reality in which God presides over a council, delegating authority to lesser spiritual beings who, like humanity, were meant to participate in His rule. But many of these beings rebelled, corrupting their authority and influencing the nations in ways that distorted truth, justice, and worship.

This doesn’t mean the world is filled with random mythological creatures operating independently. It means that behind the idolatry, the confusion, and even some of the strange and persistent patterns in human cultures, there may be real spiritual intelligences at work that can and do deceive, mimic, and distort. The New Testament picks up this thread clearly, speaking of principalities and powers, of rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, and of a cosmic struggle that is both unseen and deeply consequential. We dove into both the deep end and the practical realities of that struggle for disciple-makers and microchurches in a previous article, asking how the Powers are at work, and how we actually contend with them.

This is where discernment becomes essential. Because if there are real spiritual forces that oppose God, then not every experience of wonder or mystery is benign. Some may, in fact, be misdirection and can even lead to possession. Some are literally hell-bent on drawing attention away from Christ rather than toward Him. As Heiser himself was careful to emphasize, the point of recovering this worldview is not to fixate on the unseen realm, but to rightly locate it under the authority of Jesus.

So we must hold this tension carefully.

The medieval world was right to sense that reality is more than material. The modern world is right to caution against uncritical and unexamined belief. But neither fully resolves the tension on its own. The danger of our moment is not simply that we have lost enchantment. It is that in trying to recover it, we may become fascinated with the edges and lose sight of the center.

The Gospel does not flatten the world. It makes it truer. The New Testament does not deny the existence of spiritual powers or unseen realities. It affirms them. But it refuses to center them. Instead, it proclaims that Jesus Christ is Lord over every realm, visible and invisible, named and unnamed. The question is not how many beings occupy the unseen world, but who reigns over it. And this is where Tolkien’s vision quietly returns, because the deepest reality is not the presence of strange beings but the promise that, in the end, there is a eucatastrophe coming—a final, cosmic turning where everything sad comes untrue and the world is made right.

And this is where a better re-enchantment begins to emerge. Not a return to a world haunted by unnamed forces, and not a retreat into a world stripped of wonder, but a recovery of a world where every inch of reality is charged with the presence of God. Where every person bears His image. Where every place can become a thin space. Where every moment is alive with possibility because Christ is actively filling all things in every way.

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The woodwose still speaks, but not as evidence of a hidden species waiting to be discovered. It speaks as a reminder that there is something wild in creation, something not yet fully ordered, something that resists our attempts to categorize and control. It also speaks as a mirror, reflecting the wildness within us, the parts of our own humanity that are not yet fully formed into the likeness of Christ. And the question that haunted the medieval imagination, often clumsily but sincerely, is still the question we must answer today. Can even this be brought under the reign of Christ?

We did not lose fairies. We lost the ability to see a world alive with God. And now we find ourselves trying, in fragments and fascination, to recover what we sense is missing. But the answer is not found in chasing creatures or decoding folklore. It is found in recovering a vision of reality where Christ stands at the center, holding all things together.

Yesterday inside a prison in Lansing, I caught a glimpse of that vision again. As we gathered with our hub team, men behind bars, yet deeply free in Christ, we entered a time of singing and prayer. We led them through a simple Ignatian prayer journey of sacred imagination. We began in that small, cinderblock room. Then, slowly, we lifted our gaze. We saw ourselves rising above the prison, then above the city, then above the earth itself. We moved beyond the Milky Way, past the edges of all we can comprehend, out into the farthest reaches of the created order. And there, in that holy imagination, we remembered what is most true: that Jesus holds it all like a speck of dust in His hands, and that He is, even now, effortlessly filling everything in every way.

Ephesians 1 is not poetry detached from reality. It is reality, rightly seen.

The world was never empty.
We just forgot how to see it.

And this is where I find myself returning, again and again, to what Michelle has been helping me see for years. Her work around mission aesthetics and the role of beauty in the missio Dei is not extra credit for the Church. It is essential. Beauty is not ornamental. It is formative. It is one of the primary ways God awakens us, softens us, and draws us back into a living, enchanted vision of reality. She has taught me how to see differently, how to notice, how to slow down long enough for wonder to rise again.

In a Christ-centered cosmos, beauty is never random. It doesn’t just happen. It points. Every true moment of beauty is a signpost, a foretaste, a kind of eucatastrophe breaking in ahead of schedule. It is new creation, already beginning to shimmer through the cracks of the old…quietly, persistently, refusing to stay hidden.

Michelle’s recent webinar with 100 Movements (and yes, you should absolutely watch it) offered incredible equipping for those who want to help everyday disciple-makers and artists (we are all creators) recover this way of seeing. And even this weekend, as part of the Beauty Initiative in the Underground, we’re hosting a retreat for artists in our home for this very purpose.

Because if the world was never empty, then part of our calling now is to help people see it again: to awaken imagination, to restore wonder, and to join God in revealing the beauty that has been there all along. This is not a side project. It is formation. And my hope is that it multiplies - not just as an idea, but as a lived reality - as beauty becomes both a demonstration and a proclamation of the Gospel through every disciple-maker, in every context, across the Kansas City Underground.

May we learn to see it, and help others see it too.

I am incredibly proud of Michelle—Dr. Wegner.

For years, I’ve watched her quietly and faithfully explore something many of us sense but struggle to name: that beauty is not peripheral to God’s mission, it is often one of His primary invitations. What she has developed through her work in Missional Aesthetics is not just thoughtful theology, it’s lived, embodied wisdom shaped in real places, with real people, across our city.

This piece comes out of that journey. And I genuinely believe it will open something up for you.

In a world that often reduces mission to strategy, productivity, or outcomes, Michelle is helping us recover something deeply biblical and profoundly human: that God uses beauty to draw, awaken, and send.

If you lean in, this won’t just inform you. It will re-enchant your imagination and expand your sense of what it means to join God in His work.

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Since the dawn of creation, God has used beauty—in Scripture, nature, art, and lived experience—to draw people toward Himself. Beauty is not a distraction from mission. It is often one of God’s most faithful invitations.

In this webinar, Michelle Wegner introduces a framework she calls Missional Aesthetics: the practice of receiving beauty as a gift from God and offering it back as worship and proclamation of the gospel. What God awakens in us through beauty becomes something we steward, embody, and share with others.

Drawing from the work of the Beauty Initiative within the KC Underground, Michelle will explore how these principles are being learned and practiced within microchurch contexts across the Kansas City metro area—with a theological foundation and practical examples for integrating beauty into everyday missional life.

What You’ll Receive

A solid understanding of the theological framework and practical application of Missional Aesthetics within your ministry networks.

Join this free 100Movements webinar to hear movement stories from across the country.

In a recent Bonus Conversation, I had the joy of sitting down with my friend Peyton Jones. If you’ve spent time around the edges of church planting, disciple-making, or movement conversations, you’ve likely encountered his work. Peyton is one of those practitioners who refuses to separate theology from practice. He works things out in the field, tests them in community, and only then begins to articulate what he’s seeing.

Our conversation moved in that familiar rhythm - story, laughter, reflection, a bit of provocation - but underneath it all was a thread that has continued to stay with me. I hope you listen to the whole thing, as I think you’ll find it meaningful and challenging.

At one point in the conversation, Peyton described a scene that is instantly recognizable. A group gathers in a home. There’s food, something warm to drink, open Bibles, honest conversation. People care for one another. There is something real happening.

He captured it with a bit of humor:

“We meet at Jan’s house on Tuesday, we have coffee cake and drink Christian crack, and we have a great time for an hour.”

We laughed, not because it was exaggerated, but because it wasn’t.

We laughed because we’ve both lived that reality.

But as the conversation went on, the laughter gave way to something quieter. A shared recognition. Not a critique from a distance, but an ache that has been forming over years. The kind of ache that comes when you’ve poured your life into something, only to realize it may not be producing what you hoped it would.

It is the growing sense that much of what we have come to call discipleship is not actually forming people in the way of Jesus.

And that realization is not rooted in cynicism. It is born out of experience. Out of trying, building, refining, and sometimes dismantling what we once trusted. Out of watching the long-term outcomes of the dominant discipleship models many of us have inherited and faithfully implemented.

At some point, you stop asking, “Is this working?” in the short term, and you start asking, “What is this actually producing?”

Of course, that’s the reason Peyton has written this book. It’s probably why you read this substack.

The Question Beneath the Practice

When we use the word discipleship, we tend to use it pretty broadly. And in one sense, that’s right. You do not get to opt out of being formed. We are all being shaped all the time by our habits, our relationships, the stories we believe, and the cultural air we breathe. No one is neutral. No one is standing still.

Every one of us is giving our attention, our trust, and ultimately our allegiance to someone or something. And whatever we hand that authority to is quietly forming us into its way of seeing and its way of being. Which means, whether we realize it or not, we are all disciples. The only real question is… of whom?

So yes, in that sense, discipleship is an expansive word. Bigger than our programs. Bigger than our gatherings. It reaches into the everyday moments we usually overlook. And it is already happening, long before we ever schedule a meeting or open a curriculum.

But within the church, the word has taken on a more specific meaning. It has become associated with a particular kind of environment: yes, intentional, structured, often inward-facing, programmatic, and primarily composed of other believers.

Over time, what is usually being asked is:

• Are people connected?

• Are they in a group?

• Are they serving by volunteering?

• Are they attending on the weekend and inviting people?

• Are they giving to our budget?

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, faithfulness begins to be defined in terms of participation within the system. This is where I found myself pressing into the conversation with Peyton a bit more directly. Because I’m not entirely convinced that what we often describe as discipleship is discipleship but a form of assimilation that has taken on the language of discipleship.

Assimilation Wearing Discipleship’s Clothing

Assimilation is not a bad word. Every community needs ways of welcoming, connecting, and integrating people. There is a real pastoral need there. But assimilation answers a different set of questions. It asks:

• How do we bring people into the life of the church?

• How do we help them feel at home here?

• How do we move them toward deeper involvement?

Those are good questions. They are just not the same as:

How do we form people into the way of Jesus so that they can participate in His mission in the world?

And when those two sets of questions get blurred, something subtle but significant begins to happen. We start forming people who are:

• deeply connected to the church

• increasingly comfortable in Christian environments

• committed to internal rhythms

…but less practiced in engaging the world beyond those environments.

Not because they don’t care. But because they have not been formed in that direction.

The Distinction That Reorients Everything

One of the most helpful contributions Peyton offers is not a rejection of discipleship, but a reframing. He distinguishes between discipleship and disciple-making.

Discipleship, as he describes it, often happens among believers. It focuses on growth, formation, and maturity. It can center on a wide range of topics and is often expressed in predictable rhythms.

Disciple-making, however, is oriented outward. It takes place in relationship with those who are not yet following Jesus. It is less structured, more relational, and inherently tied to mission.

And perhaps most importantly:

It is not something that begins after conversion.
It is often the very pathway that leads to conversion.

That insight alone begins to shift how we think about formation.

Because it suggests that if our primary environments never meaningfully engage with those outside the faith, then we are forming people in a way that is disconnected from the very movement Jesus initiated.

Seeing Jesus Again—Chronologically

One of the more compelling parts of our conversation was Peyton’s reflection on the life of Jesus, both thematically and chronologically.

Because when you begin to look at Jesus’ ministry in sequence, rather than in isolated passages, a pattern begins to emerge that is both simple and deeply challenging.

Peyton describes it through three movements:

Time. Teaching. Tactics.

In the early phase of Jesus’ ministry, the emphasis is overwhelmingly on time.

Jesus gathers a few, John and Andrew, who then bring Peter and James. Philip brings Nathanael. Before long, there is a small group forming, not around a curriculum, but around a person.

They share life. They travel together. They observe.

There is teaching, yes—but it is secondary to proximity.

In the second phase, teaching becomes more prominent. Jesus begins to proclaim the Kingdom more openly. Crowds gather. Parables are told. The nature of God’s reign is revealed in word and in deed, through healing, deliverance, and restoration.

But even here, teaching is not abstract. It is embodied. It is tied to what the disciples are seeing unfold in real time.

Then, in the third phase, we begin to see what Peyton calls tactics: intentional sending, full activation and full participation. The disciples are no longer just observing. They are being entrusted. Sent out. Invited to do the very things they have seen Jesus do.

And what becomes clear in this progression is that:

Jesus did not separate formation from mission.
He wove them together from the beginning.

There is no stage in which the disciples are fully formed before they are sent. They are formed as they go.

The Missing Dynamic in Our Formation

This is where the tension sharpens for me.

Because if our primary environments of discipleship are built around time and teaching, but largely disconnected from participation in the mission, then we are, in effect, removing one of the essential dynamics of formation.

And when that happens, the result is not neutral. It shapes people. It shapes expectations. It shapes what we believe is normal.

We begin to assume that following Jesus primarily looks like:

• attending

• learning

• gathering

And before long, engaging the lost, the broken, the not yet believing quietly gets pushed to the margins. Something we will get to later. Something for the especially gifted. Something for the “out there” people.

But Jesus never treated it that way.

If we strip away the time dimension, the slow, relational “being-with” life of Jesus where transformation happens as people walk, eat, and live together, and reduce it to a once-a-week gathering, we should not be surprised when disciple-making loses its depth and durability. You can cover content in an hour. You cannot reproduce a way of life that way.

And then there is the teaching piece. I have heard more than a few pastors say, “Our teaching is our discipleship.” I get what they mean. Teaching matters. Jesus taught constantly. I’m just anti-teaching and discussing in small group is the whole thing. Because if teaching becomes the whole of discipleship, we end up with a lot of well-informed people who can diagram the Greek, debate the end times, and crush a Bible trivia night… and still have a lot of empty space where the lived, embodied obedience of Jesus’ teachings is meant to be.

At some point, discipleship has to move from “That was a great sermon” to “I actually forgave my enemy, shared a meal with my neighbor, and stepped into the awkwardness of loving someone who doesn’t believe what I believe.”

Otherwise, we are not making disciples. We are just making really smart fans of Jesus. I’ve got further thoughts, but I’ll save them for the next article which will be on the differences between Assimilation Pathways and Disciple-Making Pathways.

The Great Commission as a Distributed Blueprint

When Peyton turned to the Great Commission, something else came into focus.

Rather than treating it as a single command to be implemented, he began to describe it as a kind of compressed blueprint for how the life of Jesus would continue through His people. What stood out to me was how naturally Peyton connected this to the language of APEST in Ephesians 4.

When Jesus says, “Go,” there is an apostolic impulse. It is a sending word that moves people beyond what is familiar and into new spaces.

“Make disciples” carries an evangelistic edge. It assumes proximity to those who are not yet following Jesus. It assumes conversation, relationship, and invitation.

“Baptizing them” reflects the shepherding dimension. It speaks to belonging, to identity, to being brought into a new kind of family.

“Teaching them to obey” brings in the teacher. Not simply transferring information, but forming a way of life aligned with Jesus.

And when Jesus speaks of all authority, there is a prophetic weight to His words. It is a declaration of reality and a call to reorient allegiance.

What begins to emerge is not a narrow task, but a multi dimensional way of life that requires the whole Body to participate. This is not entrusted to a few specialists. It is given to all of them.

From Formation to Movement in Acts

This is where another important distinction emerges.

Peyton and I had a little friendly back and forth on DMMs.

His concern, especially in the American context, is how quickly the conversation can drift toward, “What generation are you in?” and “How fast is this multiplying?” as if those are the primary indicators of faithfulness. You can almost feel the subtle pressure to produce numbers, to report movement, to prove that something is scaling.

And to his point, Jesus does not seem preoccupied with multiplication in the way we often talk about it today. He is not chasing scale. He is forming a people. Patiently. Relationally. Intentionally. He is shaping a kind of life that, over time, becomes a family.

And when that family is healthy, it does reproduce across generations. From thirty thousand feet, it can even look fast. It can look like a movement. But on the ground, it is made up of more and more ordinary people doing the slow, faithful work of missionary presence and real formation. Conversations that take time. Relationships that require patience. Obedience that costs something.

It is not mechanical. It is organic.

Not because anyone is chasing multiplication as an outcome, but because people have been formed in the life of the Kingdom. And that kind of life, when it takes root, cannot help but multiply.

Wait to hear the story in the podcast of the disciple-maker in Sedona, formation and multiplication happening.

In most DMM contexts I’ve experienced, especially in places like India, Africa, and across the global south, multiplication is not ego-driven or metrics-driven.

It is lostness-driven, urgency-driven and Luke 10, obedience-driven

That distinction really matters.

These leaders are not chasing multiplication as an outcome to report. They are so close to Jesus that their hearts are breaking. They are responding to the scale of lostness around them, the weight of injustice, the reality of marginalized communities who have little access to the Gospel, and the deep longing that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Movement language and multiplication focus can quietly become just another growth strategy. Another way to measure success. Another way, if we are not careful, to build something that still revolves around us. Just faster. But, it doesn’t have to become that.

The Gospels are a story of formation that makes multiplication possible. You can never pull two apart. It is in Acts that something shifts. Not because the strategy changes, but because the Spirit is poured out and what has been formed begins to multiply through ordinary people.

The movement begins to spread beyond the Twelve. It moves into homes, marketplaces, and networks of relationships. The center does not hold in the same way. It begins to distribute. People speak about Jesus where they already are. Households come to faith. Communities form organically. Leaders emerge from within the harvest.

Multiplication takes on a different character. It is no longer dependent on proximity to Jesus in the flesh. It is carried by the Spirit through the lives of everyday believers. And this raises a question for us, “Are we forming people in a way that leads naturally to that kind of multiplication?”

Or are we forming people in ways that require ongoing centralization to sustain themselves?

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When Formation Loses Its Direction

This is where the question of assimilation becomes more than a side observation.

If the environments we are calling discipleship are primarily structured around gathering, teaching, and internal connection without meaningful participation in the mission, then over time they will form people toward containment rather than movement.

This is not the result of bad intentions. It is the natural outcome of repeated rhythms. We tend to become what we practice.

Assimilation, in that sense, is not something we consciously choose over disciple making. It is something that emerges when disciple making is no longer embedded in the process of formation itself.

I want to hold this tension carefully. Many of us have been shaped by these environments. God has used them in meaningful ways. This is not about dismissal or critique from a distance.

It is about paying attention. It is about noticing where our practices may be forming people in ways that do not fully align with the mission we say we care about.

A Quiet Reorientation

What I appreciate about Peyton’s approach is that he is not offering a new program. He is inviting a reorientation. A return to something deeply familiar. Start with people. Walk with them. Share life. Engage the world together. Trust the Spirit.

Allow formation and mission to unfold together.

As I have sat with this conversation, I find myself returning to a simple question.

Where in my own life have I embraced rhythms that are good, but quietly disconnected from the people Jesus is sending me toward?

Where has discipleship become something contained, rather than something lived?

And what might it look like to take one small step back into alignment?

If you have the time, I would encourage you to listen to the full Bonus Conversation with Peyton. There is a richness there that is hard to capture here.

But for now, perhaps this is enough.

To notice.

To reflect.

And to remain open to the possibility that Jesus is inviting us deeper into the way He has always been forming His people and sending them into the world.

A Next Step

If this conversation is stirring something in you, don’t leave it at reflection.

Peyton Jones has put language and practice to this journey in Disciplogy. It’s not a program as much as a pathway back into the way of Jesus.

There’s also an app that helps guide the disciple-maker’s journey in real time, moving from ideas into everyday practice.

If you’re sensing the nudge, those are simple places to begin.

Start small. Stay faithful. Trust the Spirit is already at work.

Rob Wegner

The day where the story feels……suspended. The tomb is closed, the disciples are scattered, and the movement that once felt unstoppable now sits in a kind of empty stillness. Nothing appears to be happening. And yet this is the day that invites us to tell the truth about what is happening inside of us because left to ourselves, we do not drift toward openness.

We drift toward building little walls and rooms. Not evidently evil lairs at first. Often, these are well-decorated, carefully managed, externally respectable spaces where we can keep certain things untouched by God and others. We become surprisingly skilled at this. We can follow Jesus and still quietly rope off a few areas and hang a sign that says, “Renovations in progress. Please do not enter.”

Over time, those places do not stay neutral. They age and sour.

I left a cup of coffee with creamer in my office during a vacation. Came back and it had this thick fuzzy green film on top with little white spots. I am exaggerating little, but not much, when I say it looked like it was breathing, growing a mullet, and was…making…eye…contact…WITH ME. At that point, I was not cleaning it. I was considering moving offices. I do not need to get on the wrong side of a mutant mold latte.

That is how this works.

What we try to manage does not stay small and polite. It grows. It takes on a life of its own. And before long, what we thought we were controlling starts running the house like an uninvited guest who somehow has access to the fridge and the thermostat, “Who exactly put the mutant mulleted mold latte in charge around here?”

This is why Jesus spoke so often about hell. Not as an abstract future threat, but as a reality that can take root even now. Gehenna was not a metaphor floating somewhere out there. It was a place people knew. A burned-out valley of waste, violence, and ruin. When Jesus spoke of it, he was not trying to scare people into compliance. He was naming where a life apart from God actually goes. The most gentle and welcoming person in history is also the most honest about where this path leads. Jesus talked about Hell more than anyone else in the Bible.

Why is that?

I think this is a profoundly important question to consider on Holy Saturday, the day where the Creeds tell us Jesus descended into Hell.

That is why understanding the nature of hell has become so important to me personally. Not as a topic to argue about, but as a way of seeing clearly. It has forced me to come to terms with something I would rather not admit. Apart from grace, I do not just occasionally sin. I have a bit of a habit. A gravitational pull toward self destruction.

If we are being honest, addict is probably closer to the truth than we would like to admit. And not just in the safe, churchy sense. Sometimes it is substances. Sometimes it is screens. Sometimes it is approval, control, comfort, distraction, or just the quiet need to be the center of our own story.

Apart from the grace of God, we are all addicts to self. Which means what is going on in us is more serious than we tend to acknowledge. This is not just about tweaking a few behaviors and getting our act together. Left to ourselves, we do not just make mistakes. We sin and pretend we don’t. We keep going back to the same empty wells with a fresh sense of optimism, like maybe this time it will work. We call it life, freedom, “just taking the edge off,” and “following my heart,” and even self care.

Meanwhile, instead of “on earth as it is in heaven,” what we are actually doing is cultivating “on earth as it is in hell.” Not all at once. Just one small, mutant mold latte at a time.

Hell in my heart. Hell in my marriage. Hell in my ministry. Hell in my parenting. Hell in my finances. You get the idea. I’ve had a hand in all of it. Hell is a real place and an ultimate reality. But it is also a present reality. On earth as in Gehenna, with an ultimate end if left unchecked.

(Depiction of Hell by Hieronymus Bosch)

C.S. Lewis puts it better than I can: “The Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”

Which is a sobering thought. Because it means we are not just heading somewhere. We are becoming something.

Of course, Jesus talks about hell most often with the religious leaders…which is a little uncomfortable, because that’s us. That’s who tends to read something like this. Welcome, fellow weirdos. Why talk to religious leaders about hell?

Jesus is seeking to be deeply disruptive. He will not let us keep morality on the surface where it is easier to manage. He keeps moving it inward. Past the behavior, past the optics, past the carefully curated version of ourselves, and into the motives of the heart. Which is clarifying… and more than a little inconvenient.

Because now we are not just asking, “Did I do the right thing?” We are asking, “Why did I do it?”

And that gets personal. It takes real narrative work and reflection, along with honest feedback from the Spirit and a few trusted people who actually know the whole story. Often, it also means a therapist, a spiritual director, a recovery or process group, and more silence than we ever imagined we’d need.

I come from a line of heart disease. My grandpa died from it. My dad died from it. So I have a choice. I can ignore that and hope for the best, or I can take it seriously and deal with it before it deals with me.

Jesus is saying something similar, but on a deeper level. The issue is not just what shows up on the outside. The issue is the heart. We have a heart problem.

Scripture says, “Who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.” That prayer lands differently on a day like this.

Holy Saturday does not rush us past that realization. It lets it sit with us. It gives us space to notice not just what we have done, but what we have become. There is no activity to hide behind. No momentum to distract us. Just a deep silence and an invitation to take a disarmingly honest look at the interior life we have been building… a kind of tomb, with something lifeless inside.

Yet this day is not empty.

The early church held onto a strange and steady conviction that while the world waited in silence, Christ was not inactive. While everything on the surface looks quiet, the early church held onto this steady conviction that Jesus was not taking a nap in the tomb. Peter pulls back the curtain just enough to make you go, “Wait…what?”

This story we are in is wild. Part rabbit hole, part Twilight Zone, part “you read that twice just to make sure it’s actually there,” and somehow it is.

Peter, in 1 Peter 3:14–22, reaches back into the stranger parts of the story. Noah. The flood. The rebellion in Genesis 6 involving the sons of God, what the Hebrew text calls the “little e” elohim, and the Nephilim. Later Jewish writings like 1 Enoch expand on that whole episode.

Then Peter brings in the “spirits in prison” line, which most of us tend to read a little faster in our Bible reading plan because we are not trying to launch a podcast on fallen angels, the Nephilim, and Bigfoot. Plus didn’t the Police have a song about that?

But Peter does not skip it.

He lingers there. He sees those moments as more than strange footnotes. They are echoes. Shadows. Types pointing to something larger. In the same way Adam points forward to Christ, Peter sees that ancient rebellion and its judgment as foreshadowing what Jesus would ultimately confront and overturn.

Enoch was sent to the Watchers in the underworld to announce that their appeal had been denied. Just as Jesus is the new Adam, Peter presents him as a new and greater Enoch.

Then Peter says something remarkable.

Jesus went there. To that place. To those powers.

Not to negotiate. Not to broker a deal. Not to offer a second chance. More like a king stepping into a defeated stronghold to make an announcement, “ARE YOU READY TO RUMBLE?!?!?”

Not quite that actually. More like, “It is finished.”

Which means that even the places we have made apart from God are not off-limits to him. Which means even in the place where everything looks finished, Jesus is still doing what Jesus does.

So the question that surfaces on this quiet day is not complicated. It is the same question that has been echoing since the beginning.

“Is there any place you’ve gone that you assume Jesus will not enter?”

Because if He harrowed hell, then there is no place he is unwilling to go. So let’s let Him harrow whatever we have turned into a kind of hell in our lives. The rooms we have closed off. The patterns we have learned to live with. The places we quietly “manage” and rarely name.

Maybe that is the invitation of Holy Saturday. To stop assuming there are places he will not enter… and to realize Jesus is proclaiming victory there!

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I’ve noticed something over the years working with churches.

Almost every church says they care about discipleship and many are doing a lot.

They’ll point to their small groups, bible studies, and sermons as evidence. And all of those things are good. But despite all that activity, very few churches are actually producing disciple-makers.

The reason is simple: Most churches are doing discipleship. But Jesus commanded us to make disciples. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Discipleship usually means helping someone grow spiritually. It often involves Bible study, prayer, community, and accountability. Disciple-making, however, is about training someone to follow Jesus and help other people follow Jesus.

Discipleship produces mature believers. Disciple-making produces disciple-makers.Most churches are structured for discipleship. Very few are structured for disciple-making.

When you look at how Jesus trained his disciples, his method wasn’t complicated. But it was intentional. He built their lives around three rhythms:

● Time

● Teaching

● Tactics

Time meant proximity, relationship, life together. Teaching meant instruction, Scripture, and explaining the kingdom. Tactics meant actually going on mission.

Many churches today have the first two. They have time together and they have teaching. But without tactics, something important is missing.

You can spend time together, you can study the Bible together, but if no one is actually practicing the mission of Jesus, you don’t end up with disciple-makers. You end up with well-taught Christians who never learn how to make disciples.

Think of disciple-making like a door with three locks.

1. Time unlocks the relationship.

2. Teaching unlocks understanding.

3. Tactics unlocks mobilization.

You can unlock two of the locks and the door still won’t open.

This is where many churches are stuck. Without tactics, the door never opens and people are never mobilized.

The Great Commission was not just, “Go and teach people everything I commanded.”

It was “Go and make disciples,” with teaching as one of the essential components.

If we want to see disciple-making movements, we can’t just build better teaching environments. We have to build training environments where people spend time together, learn together, and go on mission together.

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We don’t need more discipleship programs. We need more disciple-making systems.

The goal is people who follow Jesus and help other people follow Jesus.

That’s when disciple-making begins.

I’ve been thinking and writing about this idea for several years now and this eventually became the framework behind my book Discipology. This isn’t about abandoning discipleship. It’s about completing it. When time, teaching, and tactics come together, people don’t just grow—they go. And as they go, they begin to help others follow Jesus in the same way they’ve been shown. That’s how disciple-making starts to take shape, not as a program, but as a way of life. It multiplies into families, networks, and communities where the gospel can move freely.

This is the shift at the heart of Discipology. Moving from environments that inform to environments that train. From gathering people around content to sending people into mission. When time, teaching, and tactics come together, disciple-making stops being an idea—and starts becoming a reality.

Editor’s Note from Rob:

Peyton and I will be sitting down for a Bonus Conversation later this week to go deeper into the ideas behind this article. We’ll explore the tension between discipleship and disciple-making, why so many of our current models unintentionally stall multiplication, and what it actually looks like to build environments shaped by time, teaching, and tactics.

If this piece stirred something in you, the conversation will help put more language, stories, and handles to it.

Keep an eye out. It’s dropping soon.

We have come a long way.

What began as a deliberate turning now feels more like a quiet unfolding. The noise has thinned. The pace has slowed. And somewhere along the way, the work of Lent has moved beneath the surface of our lives and into the deeper soil of our hearts.

This is the threshold week. The road now bends toward Jerusalem. Toward the table, the cross, the silence of the tomb—and, just beyond it, resurrection.

So once again, we offer a single post for the week. Not as something to consume quickly, but as a space to return to. A place to linger.

Think of it less like a set of readings and more like a fire kept burning. You come back to it each day to sit, to warm your hands, to watch what flickers into view.

These final days of Lent do not demand more effort. They ask for deeper attention. For courage to see clearly. For willingness to remain when you might prefer to move on. Lent rarely changes us through dramatic moments. More often, it works through quiet revelation. A truth you can no longer avoid. A grace you did not expect. A surrender that finally feels possible.

So pay attention this week.

What has been uncovered in you over these past weeks?
What is God bringing into the light?
What are you being invited to release, to trust, to receive?

Stay with it. The story is not ending. It is about to break open.

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Week Five - Day 32: Beauty in Gratitude

Thursday, March 26th

On the night He was betrayed, Jesus took the bread and gave thanks. Even in the shadow of the cross, His heart turned toward gratitude. This is the heart of Christian thanksgiving; an inward feeling turned into an outward action. We give thanks in all things, especially the hard things, just like Jesus did. We can trust our heavenly Father has the very best of intentions for us.

Gratitude is the lens that brings God’s goodness into focus, the rhythm of death, resurrection, and life.

When we practice gratitude, we begin to see what is hidden beneath the surface. Blessing that comes through brokenness, joy that comes through pain, and strength that can only come from enduring hardship.

Gratitude chooses praise in the midst of pain and hardship, abundance and blessing. When we choose gratitude, beauty becomes a tangible thing that nothing can steal.

Practice:. Write down three things you’re grateful for today, especially what might feel small or unexpected. Say “Thank You” to God out loud for each one. If you’re in a difficult season, try thanking Him within the tension:

“God, I don’t understand this, but thank You for being near.”

Week Five - Day 33: Beauty as an Invitation

Friday March 27th

From the beginning, beauty has been God’s invitation

The sunset, the whisper of wind, and the artistry in creation, of it sings His name. Before Jesus even spoke a parable, the world was already revealing Him. Beauty is one of God’s languages of love, awakening a longing within us for something beyond ourselves. Lent is a time of awakening, of learning to see again. What if beauty has been calling your name all along, inviting you into deeper communion with the Creator?

Practice: Take five minutes today to simply notice. Where do you see beauty calling you closer to God? Pause and thank Him for those moments.

Week Five - Day 34: Beauty as an Open Door

Saturday, March 28th

Beauty is Love’s open door that whispers, sometimes shouts, “Come closer. Look deeper. I am here.” From the beginning, beauty has been God’s invitation to deeper communion with him. Before He spoke words to Adam and Eve, He gave them a garden. Jesus preached to the crowds. He showed them lilies of the field and birds of the air. The created world was, and still is, His language of love for us who might not see or hear him in any other way.

But beauty is an open door into God’s presence. Will we slow down long enough to enter it?

During Lent, we’re invited to wake up our senses, soften our hearts, and begin seeing again, our ears begin to hear the rhythm and sound of the God behind its vast creation. Each moment of awe can become a threshold to encountering the one who made it all.

Practice:
Take five minutes to truly notice the beauty around you. Pause, observe, and thank God for his manifest presence through creation. Enjoy the arms of the Creator around you as you sit in his presence.

Week Six - Day 35: The Beautiful Character of our God

The Sixth Sunday of Lent, March 29th

As we enter holy week together, use your imagination to place yourself in the crowds around Jesus. Ask yourself what you see, hear, taste, what does it feel like? Allow God’s spirit to guide you as you lean in this final week and truly commune with God, the one who made you.

Toward the celebration of the Passover, Jesus reminded the disciples about many things. He said, “I am going to my Father now.” “It is time for me to be lifted up,” “It is time for me to die, then to rise again.” His words confused and stirred up feelings of deep dread and fear and confusion.

Along with Jesus, the disciples waited and sat, sat and waited. They ate, slept, breathed the same air, and took up the same space. Notice Judas was coming and going. Feel what Jesus might as Judas’ betrayal had begun.

Pray:

Place yourself at the end of this incredible day with Jesus. What would you say to him? What would you want him to know?

Write out these answers as your prayer or speak it directly to Jesus. Be with Him. Sit with Him. Wait with Him, watch with Him. Love Him. Listen as He says to you, “I am yours and you are mine.”

Week Six - Monday of Holy Week

Monday, March 30th

In a complete reversal of expectations, Monday of Holy Week reveals a fierce and heartbroken Jesus. He enters the temple and drives out the money changers, overturning tables and clearing the courts with a whip (Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–18). What was meant to be a house of prayer had become overrun by greed and exploitation.

Jesus knew this was the week of his death. He had already told his disciples that he would be betrayed and crucified (Matthew 26:2). And yet he did not retreat. He continued to teach. He continued to confront. He continued to love.

The intensity of this moment can feel startling. We are not used to seeing Jesus display such visible anger. But his anger was not reckless. It was righteous grief over what had been done in God’s name. Considering who he is, the Son of God, the Creator of the universe, this physical expression was restrained. He could have done far more. Instead, he exposed what was broken and invited people back to what was true.

The religious leaders’ hostility only intensified. Still, Jesus pressed on. He spent this day naming what was wrong, preparing hearts for what was coming next: his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension.

What angers you about what the Church has become?

Do not stay there long. Bring it to Jesus. The One who overturned tables is also the One who promises to make all things new.

Week Five - Tuesday of Holy Week

Tuesday, March 31st

On Holy Tuesday, Jesus tells a story that leaves no one comfortable. Jesus refuses to be trapped, refuses to flatter power, and refuses to let religion hide from the truth.

He speaks of a vineyard entrusted to caretakers who forget it was never theirs. When the owner sends messengers to gather fruit, they are beaten and killed. When the son is sent, they kill him too, believing they can claim the vineyard for themselves.

Everyone listening knows what Jesus is saying. This is not a story about strangers. It is a warning to those who confuse stewardship with ownership, authority with entitlement, and religion with control. Jesus ends with a quiet but devastating truth: the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.

On Holy Tuesday, Jesus exposes what happens when faith clings to power instead of God. And he reminds us that God’s purposes will move forward, even if the ones entrusted with the vineyard refuse to bear fruit. On Holy Tuesday, Jesus has said everything that needs to be said. What remains will be lived.

Week Five - Wednesday of Holy Week

Wednesday, April 1st

Holy Wednesday is known by two names: Silent Wednesday and Spy Wednesday. The Gospels record no public teaching from Jesus on this day. After the intensity of Holy Tuesday, he grows quiet. No parables. No confrontations. No crowds. The silence itself becomes the space where Holy Week turns inward. And yet, beneath that silence, betrayal is forming. Judas meets in secret with the religious leaders and agrees to hand Jesus over. While Jesus does not speak publicly, plans are being made quietly. Holy Wednesday holds both realities at once. God is not absent in the silence. And silence does not mean nothing is happening.

This day invites us to pay attention to what is forming beneath the surface of our own lives, especially when God seems quiet and the world feels unsettled.

Week Five - Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday, April 2nd

On the last night before he was crucified, Jesus shared a meal with his disciples, washed their feet, and commanded them to love each other. Maundy Thursday is the day during Holy Week that commemorates these events. Maundy is derived from the Latin Mandatum, which literally means “commandment” and points to Jesus’ commandment to “love one another.” How interesting it is that before he died, before he met the anguish of the cross, in the final hours he had with his disciples, while knowing one was actively, currently betraying him, he said, “Love one another.”

He said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” SO, not only did he instruct his disciples to love one another, he said that their love for one another would be a dead giveaway, that people would remember the love of Jesus when they saw how they loved each other.

How are you doing with this command? Pray to God to cleanse your heart and draw near to him and those around you as you prepare for Good Friday.

Week Six - Good Friday

Good Friday, April 3rd

Reflection: At first glance, the cross is an instrument of suffering and shame. Yet in the paradox of God’s plan, this symbol of death became the deepest expression of love and the doorway to life. The beauty of the cross is that it holds together sorrow and hope, justice and mercy. In Jesus’ sacrifice, we see how far God would go to bring us back to Himself. What looks ugly to the world—bleeding wounds, a cry of agony—becomes for us the most beautiful act of grace. And the beauty doesn’t end at the cross; it leads to an empty tomb and a risen Lord. How does the cross shape your understanding of beauty and sacrifice? Perhaps it calls you to see that real love is costly, or that true beauty often involves laying down one’s life for others.

Practice: Spend time in prayer at the foot of the cross. You might sit quietly with a cross in hand or draw one on paper. Meditate on Christ’s love for you displayed there. Thank Him for the sacrifice, and if you feel led, write a response (a prayer, a poem, a few words of gratitude.

Holy Saturday, Day 40

On this side of Heaven, we will face numerous hardships. We will experience the ravages of sin, the aftershocks of Eden. We will hurt with gaping wounds, inflicted by those we love, betrayed by the ones that know us best.

We will worry the world onto our wobbling shoulders, convinced that we can save it by taking it upon ourselves, us, the image and likeness of God.

We sow seeds of insolence and reap harvests of regret.

We obsess, malign, and worry God-sized fears, obnoxious in our own false grandeur.

All the while, Jesus, on the cross, is looking at us in our own foolishness and taking the weight of the world back upon Himself, where it belongs, so our way is easy, and our burden is made light. Even with all of our inconsistencies and intolerance, He looks to us and calls us Beloved.

Jesus knows our hearts. He knows we long for what is wrong in the world to be made right. He has made a way for us. His way. He is a ‘Man of Sorrows’, acquainted with grief. Don’t push the sadness of the death of Jesus on the cross away. Don’t push your own sadness or sorrow away. Grief is never wasted.

Grief knows grief, and standing at the foot of the cross, robed in sadness, we are equal, united in our desperation for wholeness and healing, for an upside-down world to be made right. We seek the Messiah’s face and hear Him say the words since Eden we have been waiting to hear, “It is Finished.” And it is.

And He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new!’” Revelation 21:5

Holy Saturday is a time to wait. As we do, we think about Jesus’ death on the cross and what it means for us in the in-between.

God’s Kingdom is both a present reality and a future hope. Jesus often said, “The kingdom of God is at hand,” and yet we also pray, “Your kingdom come.” We live in this holy tension of already and not yet. In God’s Kingdom, justice, peace, and love reign—this is the beautiful tomorrow we anticipate. But even now, we catch sneak peeks of that future: every act of kindness, every healing, every moment of true worship is like a beam of heaven’s light breaking into the present. It’s as if God’s future New Creation is reaching back to touch us here and now. When you see a community restored, a prodigal return, or even hear a breathtaking worship song, remember this is a foretaste of what’s coming. How does knowing the end of the story—that beauty wins and God will make all things new—shape your life today? We don’t hope as people who doubt; we hope as those who know the best is yet to come. That confidence frees us to live boldly and beautifully for Christ now, joining Him in His mission.

Practice: Do one thing today that embodies God’s future Kingdom. As you do, imagine how this act is a part of God’s grand story of renewal. In prayer, say, “Lord, use my life to give the world a glimpse of Your Kingdom.”

Rob Wegner

A couple of years ago, I checked into a two-day silent prayer retreat at the Christ Peace House of Prayer in Easton, Kansas. As I unpacked my bag and set my books on the small wooden desk, I felt that familiar ache. I wanted to dip myself into the red letters again. To immerse myself in the life and teachings of Jesus until the pages blurred and my heart burned. So I made a plan. I would read all four Gospels straight through. No interruptions or distractions.

Just Jesus.

And as I began, it did what it always does. It lit something in me. The wonder of this Man. The authority. The tenderness. The strangeness. The way he moves toward lepers and away from applause. The way he tells stories that explode categories.

There is no one like our Jesus.

I started reading like a man on assignment. Hour after hour. Turning pages like I was racing a clock only I could hear ticking. And then: Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!

I froze.

I was alone in a cabin in the woods. Who knocks on a window in the middle of the forest? Again: Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock! Knock!

I turned. A red cardinal was at the window and he looked furious. Like I had parked my truck in his living room. I remember thinking, ”Brother, this is not your cabin”.

But he kept knocking. So I stood up and walked toward the window. He flew away.

Weird. That has never happened to me before.

An aggressive bird knocking on a window in the middle of a silent retreat feels like a minor prophet with feathers. I have since learned that cardinals are famously territorial. Apparently this one believed the cabin, the trees, the light, and possibly the theological atmosphere were all part of his sovereign domain. This was not only his airspace, this was his airbnb.

I sat back down. Returned to Matthew, where I was rounding the bend to the finish line. Back to the mission. Back to my spiritual marathon.

A few minutes later: Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.

He was back like the Terminator, “I’ll be back.”

Dude.

I waved him off. He flew away again.

I resumed reading. I was in Mark now, moving with urgency, because Luke was still waiting and I had a goal to accomplish.

Then: Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.

Now I was irritated. I walked to the window and knocked back. Get out of here, red bird! Which, in retrospect, is an interesting posture to take toward a messenger.

At that point, something inside me felt unsettled. Not just annoyed. Anxious. So I did what any spiritually mature person does when disturbed in prayer, I took off…and went for a walk. The woods were quiet. The Kansas sunlight filtered through bare branches. The silence began to work on me. And instead of outrunning the anxiety, I stayed with it.

And slowly, it dawned on me. In my pursuit to read the Word of God, I was running from God. There were insights, illumination, and that familiar buzz, deep unto deep, left brain fireworks, connections lighting up like constellations.

It felt profound. But it was mostly adrenaline.

I was reading about the risen Christ. I was not communing with Him. And if you know anything about me, you know I am a three on the Enneagram, which means I can turn almost anything into a performance.

Even silence.

Even Scripture.

Even Jesus.

I could already imagine returning home, sitting around a fire with the guys,”Yeah, I read all four Gospels in a day. Straight through.”

Epic. Impressive. Utterly hollow. Ugh.

The Spirit, with unsettling kindness, brought an image to mind: The cabin.

All the windows shut tight. No wind. No fresh air. No movement. And there I was inside, sitting on the bed, clutching my Bible like a trophy, and that red cardinal came knocking again on the glass.

Then Jesus asked me a question, “Will you open the windows?”

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It was not accusatory. It was not thunder. It was more like Genesis 3, “Where are you?” And I realized, like Adam, the question was not for His information. It was for mine. He began to surface the places where I was hiding. Not from ministry or productivity, but from Him. The places where I was wounded. The places where pride had built small fortifications. The places where I preferred insight over intimacy.

Will you open the windows and the doors?

In my imagination, I stood up and unlatched them. One by one.

At this point, I was back at the cabin, filled with what I can only call reverence, and I could hear that first question again, “Will you open the windows?”

In the real cabin, there were no screens. And if I am honest, I was still slightly concerned that the angry cardinal would come flying in and peck my eyes out in forest rage. But I opened them anyway.

All of them.

And I said, “Lord, my heart is an open space.”

Not a study.
Not a bunker.
Not a performance stage.

An open space.

And when the Cardinal came this time, he was no longer a nuisance. He was Wind. The Breath of God moving through the room inside of me. The same Spirit who hovered over chaos in Genesis. The same Spirit who filled the lungs of dry bones in Ezekiel. The same Spirit who rushed like wind in Acts.

And we began to talk about where I was hurt, about where I was proud and about the subtle ways I prefer the false self - the competent one, the articulate one, the impressive one - over the hidden self who simply says, “Abba. I belong to you.” (Thanks, Brennan).

We talked about metanoia. Not behavior management or simply rearranging the theological furniture in my head. But a re-seeing, a re-feeling, and a re-thinking: To see the world and myself through the eyes of Jesus.

Wisdom literature tells us that the beginning of knowledge is the fear of the Lord. But somewhere along the way, I had replaced fear with familiarity and familiarity with productivity.

The cardinal would not let me.

Sometimes the Spirit knocks loudly. Sometimes He interrupts your reading plan. Sometimes He refuses to let you turn devotion into accomplishment and sometimes He asks the oldest question in Scripture, “Where are you?”

Not, “What have you achieved?”
Not, “How much have you read?”
Not, “How impressive was your retreat?”

Where are you?

That day in Easton, Kansas, in a small cabin in the woods, I realized that you can read the red letters without surrendering to the Red One. You can master the text while keeping the windows shut. You can finish the Gospels and never open the door.

Unless you let the wind in.

And so I did what I should have done at the beginning. I stopped striving. I opened the windows and I let the Spirit rearrange the room. Then, I sang this song.

My heart is an open space for you to come and have your way

I’m open, I’m open

My heart is an open space for you to come and have your way

I’m open, I’m open

You’re faithful to find me

Right where I am

Though even in my wondering you call me friend

And mercy receives me and lifts me to my feet

And I’m caught up in the wonder and mystery

of knowing Jesus

My heart is an open space for you to come and have your way

I’m open, I’m open

My heart is an open space for you to come and have your way

I’m open, I’m open

Do whatever you wanna do

And say whatever you wanna say

And move whatever you wanna move

And change whatever you wanna change

What are you saying? Where are you going?

My heart is open wide and my eyes are open wide

What are you saying? Where are you going?

My heart is open wide and my eyes are open wide

Come! Housefires, Housefires V

If the earlier weeks of Lent felt like setting out on a journey, this is the part where you realize you’ve gone far enough that turning back would feel just as costly as moving forward.

The road has changed.

What began as something intentional and structured has likely become something more interior, more searching. The practices may feel less crisp now. The clarity you had at the beginning might feel softer, even a bit blurred. And that’s not failure. That’s formation. Hopefully, somewhere along the way, Lent stops being something we are doing and starts becoming something that is happening in us.

So once again, we’re offering a single post with seven daily reflections. Not as content to consume, but as a rhythm to return to. You might open it in the morning before the day begins. Or revisit it in a quiet moment between meetings. Or sit with it at night, when everything slows and your soul has a chance to catch up with your body.

This stage of Lent is less about adding new insights and more about staying present long enough for what is already stirring to come into view. A question that lingers.
A resistance you can no longer ignore. A quiet invitation you’re beginning to recognize as the voice of God.

Pay attention not just to what inspires you, but to what interrupts you.

Where do you feel a nudge?
Where do you feel resistance?
Where is God inviting you—not to try harder—but to trust more deeply?

And as always, if someone you love might benefit from walking this road alongside you, consider inviting them in. Sometimes the simplest invitation becomes the moment someone else realizes they’re not alone on the road.

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Week Five - Day 28: Beauty in Restoration

Thursday, March 19th

God is in the business of restoring what is broken.

Like a master artist restoring a faded painting, He carefully brings out the original colors and intention in our lives. Whether it’s a relationship that’s been strained, a dream that’s died, or a heart that’s grown cold, His love breathes new life and fresh hope. The Bible overflows with stories of restoration: exiles brought home, lost sons welcomed back, sight given to the blind. And we live under the promise that one day everything will be made new. What in your life is God restoring, even if slowly? The process might be gradual, but each little renewal is a glimpse of the wholeness to come in God’s Kingdom. Take heart that the same Jesus who made the lame walk and the dead rise is at work in you, gently restoring your soul.

Practice:. Pray for restoration in an area of your life or in someone you care about. It could be as simple as, “Shepherd of my soul, restore __________ as only You can.”

Week Five - Day 29: Beauty in Redemption

Friday March 20th

Jesus’ mission centers on the restoration of all things.

Jesus sees the brokenness in the world and is actively working to restore it; He longs for restoration in our relationship with him and for the restoration of all he created. Jesus possesses the power to break through the deepest darkness with his light and love. Redemption is an ongoing and unfolding narrative in every moment of our lives. There is profound beauty in God transforming the very things that once brought shame or pain into works of art through his great, great love.

Practice: Reflect on an area of your life where God has been working to restore and redeem.

Week Five - Day 30: Beauty in Transformation

Saturday, March 21st

God’s beauty doesn’t leave us as we are. When we encounter Jesus, we begin to be transformed—sometimes in dramatic ways, sometimes through a steady process of growth. We start to see differently, love differently, and live differently. Imagine a caterpillar becoming a butterfly or a seed becoming a towering tree; that’s the kind of transformation God works in us.

There are stories of people who, after encountering God’s grace, say it felt like the world went from black and white to color. The streets they walked every day suddenly seemed brighter; the people around them more precious. That’s what happens when God gives us new eyes and a new heart. Have you noticed God changing your perspective or heart? Perhaps you’re more patient than you used to be, or you’ve lost a taste for destructive habits. These changes, however small, are beautifully supernatural. They are evidence that Christ lives in you, making you a new creation day by day.

Practice:
Think of one area where you’ve experienced transformation since walking with Jesus (or where you long to see transformation). Journal for a few minutes about it, noting the “old” and the “new.” Thank God for the growth He’s given. If you feel led, share your testimony of change with a friend – our stories of transformation can inspire hope in others.

Week Five - Day 31: The Beautiful of His Passion

Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 22nd

The Fifth Sunday of Lent, also known as Passion Sunday, kicks off Passiontide, which is the last two weeks of Lent. This time, we really dive into the story of Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection. The readings often talk about new life, God’s mercy (like when the woman caught in adultery is shown mercy), and Jesus’s glory.

On this Sunday, we might see statues and crucifixes covered with veils to make the Passion seem even more intense. This helps us think more deeply about Christ’s sacrifice and how God can change us. These traditions remind us to leave behind the old and start fresh.

The main ideas and readings can change each year, but they usually focus on these things:

New Life and Forgiveness: We often hear about God’s power to bring new life and how we should let go of the past to receive His grace. Isaiah’s prophecy and Jesus’s meeting with the woman caught in adultery are great examples of this.

Jesus’s Imminent Sacrifice: The readings hint at Jesus’s Passion, highlighting His glory that will come from His death. The image of Jesus being “lifted up” is a big part of this.

Mercy and Repentance: The Gospel often talks about Jesus’s mercy and the need to repent, which leads to a new life instead of being judged.

• What does this passage show us about God?
  What do you notice about the actions and attitudes of the religious leaders, the crowd, and Jesus?

• What does this passage show us about people?
  What do you notice about the way Jesus holds both mercy and truth together for us?

• Where do you see beauty or joy in this story?
  What part of the father’s response surprises or moves you?

• If this story is true, what might God be inviting you to trust or receive today?

• What is one small step you could take this week in response to what you discovered?

Week Five - Day 32: Beauty in Suffering

Monday, March 23rd

Suffering is a reality we all face, but in God’s hands, it is never wasted. God brings beauty and purpose. This isn’t to glorify pain itself, but to recognize the astonishing truth that our darkest moments can become canvases for God’s grace. Think of Jesus’ wounds after the resurrection; they were still present, yet transformed and radiant with hope. In the same way, our scars tell a story. Some of the most inspiring lives are those where joy and sorrow have mingled to produce deep compassion and faith. Amy Charmichael, missionary to India in the late 1800’s, facing great loss and hardship, said, “The overwhelming thing did not overwhelm.” She encountered God right in the storm and found that beauty is not an escape from suffering, but a testimony of redemption within it. How has God met you in suffering? Where might He be planting seeds of compassion, wisdom, or empathy through the trials you’ve endured?

Practice: Don’t rush past your pain today. Instead, sit with God in one area of hurt or hardship. You might light a candle to symbolize Jesus’ presence. Talk to Him about it or simply cry in His arms. Allow His comfort to wash over you. If you’re in a place to do so, consider writing a short prayer or poem that expresses what beauty or hope you have found (or hope to find) in this suffering.

Week Five - Day 33: Beauty in the Unexpected

Tuesday, March 24th

Practice: Intentionally look for beauty in an unexpected place today. It could be in a conversation with a stranger, a task you usually find tedious, or a part of your day that you normally rush through. Ask God to open your eyes and surprise you.

Week Five - Day 34: Beauty of God’s Creation

Wednesday, March 25th

The world around us testifies to the goodness and creativity of God. Creation sings His praise in a language without words. When we take time to notice, we are drawn deeper into His presence and character. In fact, creation itself can be a sacrament of divine revelation, a means through which we experience God’s nearness.. All of it is meant to point us back to the Artist behind the art.

Practice: Take a walk outside (even if just for a few minutes) and intentionally notice the beauty of creation. Breathe deeply. Let each thing you see—a leaf, a cloud, a bird—become a prompt for praise. Offer a prayer of gratitude for God’s creativity.

We will return next Wednesday with the next week of reflections as our Lenten journey continues toward the cross and the hope of resurrection.