Ed Stetzer and Dhati Lewis join us for our next Equipping for Multiplication podcast. In this session from Exponential 2016, the two church-planting leaders talk about what it looks like to intentionally create best practices and sending church systems that can actually set up a church to multiply.
Both Ed and Dhati have not only planted churches but also lead churches to plant churches out of their churches. In this podcast excerpt, Dhati shares the core of how Blueprint has begun to raise up church planters.
“We have to embrace this idea of disciple making at the core of everything that we’re doing. The church is not like family; it is family. So my goal as a leader is to make sure every one of my family members is being thoroughly equipped for every good work. If you come to our church, you’re put into one of three categories: guest, friend and family, and our goal is to move people from guest to friend and ultimately to family.
“For some reason, as a church we’re okay with saying 40, 60 or 80 percent of our church is being discipled. But what parent says it’s okay if I disciple four of my five kids? That’s not good enough. So we’ve made a commitment that every covenant member (family) needs to be discipled in our church—to be cared for, equipped and mobilized. We focus on those 264 covenant members and equip them to reach back to our guests and our friends so that our guests become friends and our friends become family.”
Ed Stetzer serves as executive director of the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism at Wheaton College. Previously, he was executive director of LifeWay Research. He has written or co-written numerous books, including the newly released second edition of Planting Missional Churches. He and his wife, Donna, have three daughters.
Dhati Lewis is the lead pastor at Blueprint Church in Atlanta and the founder and president of The Rebuild Network focused on planting churches in the urban context. Dhati is married to Angie Lewis, and they have six young children.
