What are you hoping to accomplish in your new book [Multiply: Disciples Making Disciples ]?
I try to explain the most important things a believer needs to know. It’s an attempt to teach the basics of what I feel needs to be passed on to new believers. I know there’s other stuff out there, but I needed to be faithful to what I felt needs to be out there.
Unlike many other discipleship manuals, yours does not begin by explaining about how to pray or have personal devotions and other personal disciplines. Instead, you begin by talking about the importance of church, which often comes late in other discipleship manuals.
In our culture, people have a very low view of church, and I didn’t want readers to forget the church. For a person to be truly discipled and growing in their faith, they need more than one person discipling them. They need to see the gifts of the body; that’s how God created it and intended it. I wanted early on to explain that this is very, very important, and that it is God’s agenda, that this is how he’s going to reach the world.
Francis Chan is a good guy and committed Christian. He’s preached in our church a couple of times.