A new wave…thoughts from Advance11

I believe we are beginning to see a real recovery of gospel-centered preaching and I’m thankful for it. The conference, Advance11, I attended this week was a deluge of preaching and teaching on the gospel and its implications for the church. I remain overwhelmed and challenged from it. I get so excited because I do believe the pulpit drives the church. So it is most important in the health of a church that the gospel is rightly and fully proclaimed.

I am becoming convicted the next wave that must come is gospel-centered discipleship. And this is key. Yes the gospel is well preached, but there remains a danger that the average person in the church gets into a small group with others and their status quo religious habits continue to reign instead of the gospel. This work, the work of calling people to gospel-centered disciple making, will not be easy. Not at all. It will take humility and hard work, and will only be successful by the grace of God.

I believe in this wave we will begin to turn a couple of arenas in Church life. In church history, I think Jonathan Edwards and the Puritans will be gold mines for pastoral training in calling people to grace-based obedience.

Among our contemporaries, we should look into the work being done by those in the Biblical Counseling field. I believe men like Paul Tripp, Ed Welch, David Powlison, and women like Elyse Fitzpatrick are God’s gift to the church in this new endeavor. To recover gospel-centered disciple making, We need to become surgeons of the soul. Diagnosis spiritual disease and applying the gospel in such a way disciples are built up for the glory of God. People like those I mentioned  will help train us in this art.

I mentioned this idea in an aside this afternoon to those in the breakout session I spoke in on small groups as a catalyst for the mission of the church. It was well received and I was encouraged by my new friend Taylor Roberts to really pursue this. So there it is. my initial thoughts with more to come. what do you think?