Discipleship without mission is discipleship without Christ.

The church often lacks maturity and missional impact because discipleship is at its periphery. In order to get discipleship to the center, leaders need a locally rooted, culturally contextual discipleship pathway to tether disciples who are disciplemakers to the neighborhood or network around them.

Pastor and discipler E. K. Strawser shows that when discipleship becomes central to your leadership and community, then discipleship becomes central to congregational mission and cultural renewal. Centering Discipleship is a gutsy practice-based guidebook for leaders who are doing the hard work of re-imagining and re-structuring their churches and communities to turn spectators into missional, mature followers of Jesus.



E. K. Strawser (DO, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine) is the co-vocational lead pastor of Ma Ke Alo o (which means "presence" in Hawaiian)—non-denominational missional communities multiplying in Honolulu—and a community physician at KeOla Pono. She is the founder of `Iwa Collaborative, a consulting and content-developing firm to empower kingdom-grounded leaders to navigate change, grow adaptive capacity, and foster local flourishing. Prior to transitioning to Hawaii, she served as adjunct professor of medicine at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and of African Studies at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania (where she and her husband served with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship), after finishing her Fulbright scholarship at the University of Dar es Salaam. She is the author of Centering Discipleship, and she and Steve have three seriously amazing children.



JR Woodward (MA, Fuller Theological Seminary) is a church planter, activist, missiologist and the national director for church planting with V3, a missional church planting movement. He is the author of Creating a Missional Culture and hedesires to awaken people to join God in the renewal of all things. JR is founder of New Life Christian Fellowship (NLCF) and cofounder of Kairos LA, the Solis Foundation, Ecclesia Network and Missio Alliance. He serves locally with the District Church in Washington D.C. and is pursuing a PhD at the University of Manchester (UK). He loves to surf, travel, read, skateboard and meet new people. He enjoys photography and film and tries to attend the Sundance Film Festival whenever he can.



Foreword by JR Woodward



Prologue

Part 1: Changing Our Job Description



1. Making Discipleship Central



2. The Nature of Discipleship



3. The Marks of a Mature Disciple

Part 2: Developing a Discipleship Pathway



4. From Past Recipes to Local Cuisine



5. Essential Ingredients for Any Pathway



6. The Journey of a Discipleship Pathway

Part 3: Underlying Assumptions of Discipleship



7. Discipleship Requires Transformation



8. Unmasking Our Discipleship Assumptions



9. Transforming Our Discipleship Assumptions

Part 4: Implementing Your Discipleship Pathway



10. The Four Spaces and Discipleship



11. Hurdles to Discipleship



12. Discipleship in Culture



Epilogue



Acknowledgments



Notes



"In the contemporary life of the local church, discipleship has become paramount. Eun Strawser has taken the complex and challenging ministerial phenomenon and converted it into a wonderful array of practical applications that would be helpful forany church regardless of context. I was totally impressed by the way she handled discipleship pathways by utilizing the progression of past recipes to local cuisine. The chapter on the four spaces as they relate to discipleship in culture is definitely my favorite in terms of ease of language and ease of use. I know that many churches will be blessed by Eun's handling of this much-needed dialogue and modeling."



"I've been waiting for a book that uncovers our assumptions about discipleship and enables us to develop a holistic discipleship pathway that is truly transformative. The wait is over! For this is exactly what Centering Discipleship does, and more. . . . It will enable your church to join God in the renewal of your neighborhood and cultivate social good that gives witness to the good news. Strawser equips us to develop a local discipleship pathway in light of the place where God has sent us."



"Discipleship is often misunderstood and left undone in the American church today. But Eun Strawser, drawing from her wealth of wisdom gained from on-the-ground experience leading and discipling missional communities, serves as a wonderful guide for the rest of us in crafting our own contextualized pathways—not another cookie-cutter program or curriculum to implement uncritically—for following Jesus in mission and in transformation where God has called us. This is a rich resource, grounded in missional theology and full of practical wisdom, essential for everyone who dreams of the church as the community of the kingdom on mission and desires to join the work of seeing the dream realized."



"Centering Discipleship is a masterful book that powerfully illuminates the essentials of disciplemaking. By calling readers out of programs and into contextualized pathways that create lasting and vital transformation, Eun Strawser offers the keys to creating not only mature Jesus-followers but also movements of disciples. Read this brilliant book and put Eun's decades of learning and wisdom into practice."



"Centering Discipleship is a powerful handbook for any leader who wants to escape consumer models of Christianity and help their church pursue the Great Commission. Both erudite and practical, with years of experience, E. K. Strawser describes how to design adaptable, biblical, Jesus-shaped pathways of discipleship and evaluate their effectiveness. She reveals how to identify where church communities function in an unbiblical way and how to address these issues so discipleship can become central. Strawser shows how to implement the practices she has developed so that disciples produce disciples and a growing community begins to multiply. Highly recommended!"