Discipleship was one of the central themes of Jesus' teaching, yet it is not a major emphasis today for many churches. This short study guide explores the Bible's teaching on discipleship, and covers such topics as the need for discipleship, the demands of discipleship, and the enemy of discipleship. With discussion questions at the end of each chapter, groups will work through guided discussions together as they learn about the centrality of discipleship in the Christian life. A series of ten 6–7 week studies covering the nine distinctives of a healthy church as originally laid out in Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever. This series explores the biblical foundations of key aspects of the church, helping Christians to live out those realities as members of a local body. Conveniently packaged and accessibly written, the format of this series is guided, inductive discussion of Scripture passages and is ideal for use in Sunday school, church-wide studies, or small group contexts.

If you are serious about being a disciple of Jesus Christ—really, truly serious—a discipleship group can help you achieve that goal. Jesus established this model for us by forming and leading the first discipleship group—and it worked. The men who emerged from that group took the gospel to the world and ultimately laid down their lives for Christ. Discipleship groups can create an atmosphere for fellowship, encouragement, and accountability—building an environment where God can work. In Growing Up: How to Be a Disciple Who Makes Disciples, Robby Gallaty presents a practical, easy-to-implement system for growing in one's faith. This guide offers a manual for making disciples, addressing the what, why, where, and how of discipleship. D-Groups, as Gallaty calls them, can teach you and others how to grow your relationship with God, how to defend your faith, and how to guide others in their relationships with God. Growing Up provides you with an interactive manual and resource for creating and working with discipleship groups, allowing you to gain positive information both for yourself and for others as you learn how to help others become better disciples for Christ.

Key Traits of a Healthy Church to Develop within the Local Body What is an ideal church, and how can you tell? How does it look different from other churches? More importantly, how does it act differently, especially in society? Many of us aren't sure how to answer those questions, even though we probably have some preconceived ideas. This book answers those questions and many more. Author Mark Dever seeks to help believers recognize the key characteristics of a healthy church: expositional preaching, biblical theology, and a right understanding of the gospel. Dever then calls us to develop those characteristics in our own churches. By following the example of New Testament authors and addressing all members of the church, pastors and laity alike, Dever challenges all believers to do their part in maintaining the local church. Part of the 9Marks Building Healthy Churches series, What Is a Healthy Church? offers timeless truths and practical principles to help each of us fulfill our God-given roles in the body of Christ. Offers an Ideal Church Model: Encourages pastors and members to implement healthy church qualities within their local body Written by Mark Dever: Pastor, bestselling author, and president of 9Marks From 9Marks: Other titles in the Building Healthy Churches series include Church Discipline; Deacons; and Church Membership Replaces ISBN 978-1-58134-937-5

It's no secret that the evangelism methods of yesterday are not yielding the kinds of results they did in the 1970s and 1980s. So how are new Christians hearing the Gospel today? How are they finding churches? And what makes them stay at a church? The answers to these questions have the power to dramatically alter the way we do outreach. And Dr. McIntosh has them. Based on ten years of scientific research, Growing God's Church shows pastors and church leaders how people are actually coming to faith in the 21st century. It covers factors such as our motive for ministry, the priorities churches set for themselves, the reality of churchless Christians, generational and gender-based differences in evangelism effectiveness, the name of your church, the influence of pastors, and much more. The appendix includes a copy of the survey that provides the basis for McIntosh's arguments and an overview of the study is provided in the first chapter.

From growing their children, parents grow themselves, learning the lessons their children teach. “Growing up”, then, is as much a developmental process of parenthood as it is of childhood. While countless books have been written about the challenges of parenting, nearly all of them position the parent as instructor and support-giver, the child as learner and in need of direction. But the parent-child relationship is more complicated and reciprocal; over time it transforms in remarkable, surprising ways. As our children grow up, and we grow older, what used to be a one-way flow of instruction and support, from parent to child, becomes instead an exchange. We begin to learn from them. The lessons parents learn from their offspring—voluntarily and involuntarily, with intention and serendipity, often through resistance and struggle—are embedded in their evolving relationships and shaped by the rapidly transforming world around them. With Growing Each Other Up, Macarthur Prize–winning sociologist and educator Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offers an intimately detailed, emotionally powerful account of that experience. Building her book on a series of in-depth interviews with parents around the country, she offers a counterpoint to the usual parental development literature that mostly concerns the adjustment of parents to their babies’ rhythms and the ways parents weather the storms of their teenage progeny. The focus here is on the lessons emerging adult children, ages 15 to 35, teach their parents. How are our perspectives as parents shaped by our children? What lessons do we take from them and incorporate into our worldviews? Just how much do we learn—often despite our own emotionally fraught resistance—from what they have seen of life that we, perhaps, never experienced? From these parent portraits emerges the shape of an education composed by young adult children—an education built on witness, growing, intimacy, and acceptance. Growing Each Other Up is rich in the voices of actual parents telling their own stories of raising children and their children raising them; watching that fundamental connection shift over time. Parents and children of all ages will recognize themselves in these evocative and moving accounts and look at their own growing up in a revelatory new light.

A colorful, illustrated guide to learning how to adopt a more positive mindset, even when your life may seem gray and stormy, from a wildly popular Instagram artist Beautifully illustrated and heartfelt, this little book shares big insights about how to stay positive in an increasingly negative world. Artist Dani DiPirro started her Instagram, PositivelyPresent, after she realized that positivity, like all self-care, is an essential skill that needs to be practiced daily. She began posting her bright and bubbly illustrations, sharing the ups and downs of her journey to positive thinking. In Grow Through It, Dani shares never-before-seen content to take us through the seasons, and she shows us how to pick out the positives on both sunny days and snowy ones. She also reminds you to take breaks for self-care, to stop comparing yourself to others, and to grow at your own pace. No matter what the circumstance, this book shows you how optimism is always an option!

Women in all seasons of life can feel alone, longing for encouragement, guidance, and wisdom from someone who has been there before. They would value the wealth of knowledge and wisdom from older women's experiences, but often these women don't feel equipped to offer help. This book is a starting place, meant to be a springboard for mentoring discussions between older and younger women, setting the biblical basis for mentoring from Titus 2 before outlining 11 lessons that guide their time together. Each lesson focuses on a topic such as God's word, prayer, contentment, temptation, and church, with activities for before, during, and after the mentoring session. Younger and older women will grow together as they use these lessons to walk through life together. Published in partnership with the Gospel Coalition.

A person’s final words are often their most telling. The final words of Jesus, known as the Great Commission, are no different today than when he spoke them, but what does it mean to “make disciples” in our world today?

This paradigm-shifting book helps believers understand the process of being transformed by God's grace and truth, and challenges them to be a part of the process of discipleship in the lives of their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Counseling One Another biblically presents and defends every believer's responsibility to work toward God's goal of conforming us to the image of His Son-a goal reached through the targeted form of intensive discipleship most often referred to as counseling. All Christians will find Counseling One Another useful as they make progress in the life of sanctification and as they discuss issues with their friends, children, spouses, and fellow believers, providing them with a biblical framework for life and one-another ministry in the body of Christ.