Summer 2015

The Main Ingredient

How disciplemaking enriches our church culture

by Diane J. McDougall

Every church carries a distinctive flavor, a cultural aroma. It’s rarely one single taste or an isolated fragrance. More likely, it’s a unique combination formed by a potent mixture of people, geography, history, vision and mission, stirred slowly by the Holy Spirit.

Recently, Evangelical Free Church leaders began asking whether there’s one ingredient common to churches in the EFCA family—one heady elixir, you might say, in each cultural recipe. Would it be missions? Exegetical preaching? Word-centered, Spirit-empowered worship?

Or would it be disciplemaking?

Our EFCA history supports the idea that making disciples who turn around and continue to make disciples is indeed part of our DNA as a movement. It’s not a program; rather, it infiltrates programs. It’s not a unique calling for a specific few; it’s Jesus’ calling for us all.

If the disciplemaking momentum has slowed down in any of our churches, perhaps it will only take another slow stirring by the Holy Spirit to again release the flavor? To witness an eager spilling-over of our lives into the lives of others, again and again down the spiritual generations.

Let the articles in this issue whet your appetite for the deep flavors of disciplemaking—the depth of joy that comes from watching believers turn to their friends with words of life on their lips.