My pastor first asked me to read Mike Breen's "Building a Discipling Culture" back in the summer of 2016. I read the first two or three chapters and then put the book on my nightstand, not to be picked up again for almost a year. It wasn't that I found the book uninteresting, I just had a lot of other "reading" on my plate, and this book was a lower priority for me.
At the time I was asked to read "Building a Discipling Culture", my pastor was leading a group of folks to investigate different discipling models for use in our congregation. Breen's model was one they considered.
The content of the first 3 or 4 chapters is easy enough to understand and the book appears to have promise. The book opens with a chapter titled "The Challenge", in which he talks about the challenge between the church and society. The Christian experience is sorted, categorized, and divided on items of disagreement, rather than what we have in common. He's really searching for the questions that keep us all up at night: "What does the church of the future look like?" and "How do we reach people who don't know Jesus?". As Christians, we're called to make disciples for Jesus. Yet most churches, in these post-modern times, don't know how to make disciples. Breen makes a very compact statement in the first chapter of the book: "If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples."
But what worked for Breen, and his faith community, started to come across as an inflexible model of discipleship. In other words, if you don't follow the model as described, you won't have the success that Breen experienced. This may, in fact, be true. But I think it puts limits on the power of God to work within our individual situations and communities. The investigating group at my church got bogged down with this attitude of "following the formula". That being said, though, Breen does provide some good ways of analyzing your situation and discerning God's direction for your church community.
The book wasn't a complete loss for me, though. I walked away from this reading with a new understanding of Paul's five-fold ministries: Apostle, Prophet, Pastor, Teacher, and Evangelist. Each of these positions does not operate independently of the others but works in concert together to lead and equip the body of Christ. Breen offers the reader an opportunity to explore their personal gifting in the five-fold model with an online survey on his website.
If you're part of a faith community that's struggling to learn how to "make disciples" and you don't mind following a "formula", this book may be what you've been looking for. In my opinion, it was ok and I liked it, but it wouldn't be my cornerstone book for building a discipling culture. It was just too dependent on following a model.
My GoodReads.com rating: 3 stars - ★★★☆☆ - "Liked it."
~~Ken
Title: Building a Discipling Culture
Author: Mike Breen
Genre: Christian non-fictionISBN13: 978-0982452103
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