“How am I doing in my walk with Jesus?”

The question seems harmless enough, but in this new Exponential eBook, the venerable Hull and Cook, point out the detrimental effects of having a discipleship that’s primarily based on getting closer to Jesus and the question “How am I doing?”

The authors say that because most of today’s discipleship processes or programs have pinpointed the goal of discipleship as “getting closer to Jesus,” we are not producing mature disciples focused on “others,” but rather consumerist disciples focused on “I.” This, they say, is the false promise of discipleship—that the goal or endpoint of discipleship is about us getting closer and closer to Jesus.

Throughout these pages, Hull and Cook present two paradigms: The Human Paradigm and The Jesus Paradigm, explaining that the first is focused on an ever-elusive reward of “X” (If I just do these things, everything will be okay and I’ll arrive at X). The Jesus Paradigm, however, says that loving, knowing, and serving others is both the heart—and the endpoint—of discipleship. “Rather than teaching people the gospel of God with us,” they write, “we’ve taught them the gospel of ‘do it right to get close to Jesus.’”

Ultimately, Hull and Cook challenge us to start asking new questions that lead us to true understanding of God’s unconditional love and acceptance and how we respond to that love through loving others. The False Promise of Discipleship is a wakeup call to leaders to change the way people approach discipleship and to help catalyze a new movement of disciple making in your church.

Key Takeaways

• why the understanding and practice of “laboring to rest” brings us into a completely new understanding of God’s economy of grace.
• Hull and Cook’s clear, concise and insightful definition of a “disciple”
• a thorough exploration of the problems of The Human Paradigm and why it’s so prevalent today
• the two questions discipleship movements must be built on
• why most of our discipleship programs fail today
• three practical steps/shifts to pursuing others-centered discipleship
• what it means to “abide” and why learning to do it brings us into a new understanding of Jesus-based discipleship