Bill Hull and Dallas Willard, Choose the Life: Exploring a Faith That Embraces Discipleship. Baker, 2004. In association with T-Net Disciple-Making Churches
Closely related: Hull, Disciple-Making Church
Referenced in:
- Strategies for Church Renewal: Diagnostic/Prescriptive – Disciple-Making
- Ministry Involvement and Gift-Based Ministry
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
This is a project of T-Net International Disciple-Making, a comprehensive process used by over 1,200 churches internationally to help churches develop and implement their own process of bringing people to maturity in Christ by utilizing Christ’s proven methods. It began out of Bill Hull’s vision to lead his church members to mature discipleship. His process was refined by Bob Gilliam, who developed a coaching/training model that allowed others to learn and tailor the process to their own churches. They claim that churches using T-Net report winning 80% more persons to Christ per year than before, having five times as many persons involved in intentional discipleship than before, having a written definition of a disciple and trained leaders to make disciples, and having an intentional strategy for using every program in their church to make disciples.
T-Net’s primary method is covenanting with 3-50 leaders of 3-30 churches to engage in a coached cohort of nine two-day meetings over a 32-month period. During the meetings, participants learn the leadership principles which can be tailored and applied uniquely to each church for more intentional disciple-making. T-Net trains leaders to first “define the disciple” and then create intentional ways to make that kind of disciple, with clear goals as to what the leaders want to see in people after 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, etc. It is one of the most intentional processes of congregational maturation. The process may not be accessible to all churches, but the concepts of discipleship and of building disciple-making churches appear in a number of resources including videos, books, software, and other partner resources.
In Choose the Life, Hull teams with best-selling author, Dallas Willard, to address the reality that many churches have accepted non-discipleship as the norm. They encourage Christians to choose the life that goes beyond the minimum, but intentionally seeks life transformation for themselves and others who can be reached.
About the Author
Bill Hull is a writer and discipleship evangelist, as well as the founder of T-Net International, a ministry devoted to transforming churches into disciple-making churches. He has spent twenty years as a pastor and is the author of ten books, including Jesus Christ: Disciplemaker, The Disciple-Making Pastor and The Disciple-Making Church. He and his wife, Jane, live in Long Beach, California.
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