Bill’s passion has been to help the church return to its disciple making roots and he considers himself a discipleship evangelist. This God-given desire has manifested itself in twenty years of pastoral service and the authorship of ten books. His first book, Jesus Christ Disciplemaker, is celebrating 20 years with a new edition. The Disciple Making Pastor and the Disciple Making Church are two successive books which make up his popular disciple making trilogy. These books have provided the church with a new paradigm for disciple making.
After a fruitful ministry with Athletes in Action and receiving a Master of Divinity degree from Talbot School of Theology, Bill pastored in the Evangelical Free Church 20 years, spent eight years as the U.S. Director for the Evangelical Free Church of America and creating T-NET International, a training network dedicated to local church transformation. He currently writes, teaches, and serves as adjunct professor at several seminaries. Bill and his wife, Jane make their home in Long Beach, California and are the parents of two grown sons.
Bill is currently writing and teaching discipleship through the Choose the Life effort.
By Bill Hull, M.Div.
Something is happening, there is a new movement emerging in the land. And I don’t use the word movement carelessly, I use it with precision. A movement is a series of activities by people with the same concern that converge to create energy toward a common goal. At first it may be isolated pockets of passion, but God anoints it and He starts connecting the kindred spirited people and it grows like a tsunami. It seems like a fast growing segment of church leaders are ready to take the plunge. The growing superficiality of the Church and of leaders’ lives has finally created desperation. There is a call going out, “ Dive, Dive, lets go deep with God.” The academy calls it spiritual formation, others spiritual direction, practioners refer to it as discipleship. Leaders are traveling to and fro in order to conduct summitry about it. A spate of new literature is coming onto the market; it just seems like the evangelical world is tired of religious activity without transformation. There is an ache located deep in the hearts of many; the evangelical soul is very close to rejecting success that doesn’t matter. It has finally occurred to many of us that the great commission has more to do with depth than strategy. As Dallas Willard has written, “The way to get as many people as possible into heaven is to get heaven into as many people as you can.”1 Let there be no misunderstanding, this is about the great commission, we are to make disciples of all nations2, and we are to do so with power.3 Spiritual depth for spiritual depth’s sake is as much a heresy as self-denial is when we fail to take up our cross4.
There are a number of ways to talk about this movement of God. It is a clarion call to choose the life. Definite article, not just life, but also a certain kind of life, a special order or society. It is an intentional decision to follow Jesus as a submissive disciple. We don’t drift or accidentally stumble into a life of discipleship; this choice doesn’t come automatically with the salvation package. It is a life that must be chosen, and frankly, the majority of Christians have not made that choice because it hasn’t been taught as normative. There are two segments to my presentation:
